for literature and knowledge founded to our certain knowledge solely on the stupidity and false methods of the teacher, who alike in what he knew or did not know was incapable of connecting one spark of pleasurable feeling with any science, by leading his pupils' minds to re-act upon the knowledge he attempted to convey. Being thus important, how shall a love of knowledge be created? According to the Experimentalist, first of all (p. 97—to the word "zest" in p. 107) by combining the sense of obvious utility with all the elementary exercises of the intellect :-secondly (from p. 108 -to the word "rock" in p. 114) by matching the difficulties of the learner exactly with his capacity:-thirdly (from p. 114-to the word "attention" in p. 117) by connecting with the learner's progress the sense of continual success:-fourthly (from p. 117-to the word "co-operation" in p. 121) by communicating clear, vivid and accurate conceptions. The first means is illustrated by a reference to the art of learning a language-to arithmetic-to surveying, and to the writing of "themes." Can any boy, for instance, reconcile himself to the loathsome effort of learning" Propria quæ maribus" by any the dimmest sense of its future utility? No, we answer with the Experimentalist: and we go farther even than the Experimentalist is disposed to do (p. 98); for we deny the existence of any future utility. We, the reviewer of this book, at eight years of age, though even then passionately fond of study and disdainful of childish sports, passed some of the most wretched and ungenial days of our life in learning by heart," as it is called, (oh! most ironical misnomer!) Propria quæ maribus, “ Quæ genus," and "As in prœsenti," a three-headed monster worse than Cerberus: we did learn them ad unguem; and to this hour their accursed barbarisms cling to our memory as ineradicably as the golden lines of Eschylus or Shakspeare. And what was our profit from all this loathsome labour, and the loathsome heap of rubbish thus deposited in the memory? Attend, if you please, good reader: the first professes to teach the irregularities of Houns as to gender (i. e. which nouns

having a masculine termination are yet feminine, &c.) the second to teach the irregularities of nouns as to number (i. e. which want the singular, which the plural), the third to teach the irregularities of verbs (i. e. their deviations from the generic forms of the preterite and the supine): this is what they profess to teach. Suppose then their professions realized, what is the result? Why that you have laboriously anticipated a case of anomaly which, if it do actually occur, could not possibly cost more trouble to explain at the time of its occurrence than you are thus premising. This is as if a man should sit down to cull all the difficult cases of action which could ever occur to him in his relations of son, father, citizen, neighbour, public functionary, &c. under the plea that he would thus have got over the labour of discussion before the case itself arrived. Supposing that this could be accomplished, what would it effect but to cancel a benevolent arrangement of providence by which the difficulties of life are distributed with tolerable equality throughout its whole course, and obstinately to accumulate them all upon a particular period. Sufficient for the day is its own evil: dispatch your business as it arises, and every day clears itself: but suffer a few months of unaudited accounts, or of unanswered letters, to accumulate; and a mountain of arrears is before you which years seem insufficient to get rid of. This sort of accumulation arises in the shape of arrears: but any accumulation of trouble out of its proper place,—i. e. of a distributed trouble into a state of convergement,-no matter whether in the shape of needless anticipation or needless procrastination, has equally the practical effect of converting a light trouble (or none at all) into a heavy and hateful one. The daily experience of books, actual intercourse with Latin authors, is sufficient to teach all the irregularities of that language: just as the daily experience of an English child leads him without trouble into all the anomalies of his own language. And, to return to the question which we put" What was our profit from all this loathsome labour?" In this way it was, viz. in the way of actual experience that we, the reviewer of

this book, did actually in the end come to the knowledge of those irre gularities which the three elegant poems in question profess to communicate. Mark this, reader: the logic of what we are saying-is first, that, if they did teach what they profess, they would attain that end by an artificial means far more laborious than the natural means: and secondly that in fact they do not attain their end. The reason of this-is partly the perplexed and barbarous texture of the verse, which for metrical purposes, i. e. to keep the promise of metre to the mere technical scansion, is obliged to abandon all those na tural beauties of metre in the fluent connexion of the words, in the rhyth mus, cadence, cæsura, &c. which alone recommend metre as a better or more rememberable form for conveying knowledge than prose: prose, if it has no music, at any rate does not compel the most inartificial writer to dislocate, and distort it into non-intelligibility. Another reason is, that "As in præsenti" and its companions, are not so much adapted to the reading as to the writing of Latin. For instance, I remember (we will suppose) this sequence of " tango tetigi" from the "As in P." Now, if I am reading Latin I meet either with the tense "tango," or the tense" tetigi." In the former case, I have no difficulty; for there is as yet no irregularity: and therefore it is impertinent to offer assistance: in the latter case I do find a difficulty, for, according to the models of verbs which I have learned in my grammar, there is no possible verb which could yield tetigi: for such a verb as tetigo even ought to yield tetixi: here therefore I should be glad of some assistance; but just here it is that I obtain none; for, because I remembertango tetigi" in the direct or der, it is quite contrary to the laws of association which govern the memory in such a case, to suppose that I remember the inverted order of tetigi tango-any more than the forward repetition of the Lord's prayer ensures its backward repetition. The practical applicability of "As in præsenti" is therefore solely to the act of writ ing Latin: for, having occasion to translate the words "I touched" I search for the Latin equivalent to the English word touch-find that it is

tango, and then am reminded (whilst forming the preterit) that tango makes not tanri but "tetigi." Such a use therefore I might by possibility derive from my long labours: meantime even here the service is in all probability doubly superfluous: for, by the time that I am called on to write Latin at all, experience will have taught me that tango makes tetigi; or, supposing that I am required to write Latin as one of the earliest means for gaining experience, even in that case the very same dictionary which teaches me what is Latin for “touch” teaches me what is the irregular preterite and supine of tango. And thus the "upshot" (to use a homely word) of the whole business

is that an effort of memory, so great as to be capable otherwise directed of mastering a science, and secondly (because directed to an unnatural composition, viz. an arrangement of metre, which is at once the rudest and the most elaborately artificial), so disgusting as that no accession of knowledge could compensate the injury thus done to the simplicity of the child's understanding, by connecting pain and a sense of unintelligible mystery with his earliest steps in knowledge, all this hyperbolical apparatus and machinery is worked for no one end or purpose that is not better answered by a question to his tutor, by consulting his dictionary, or by the insensible progress of daily experience. Even this argument derived from its utter uselessness does not however weigh so much with us as the other argument derived from the want of common sense, involved in the wilful forestalling and artificial concen trating into one long rosary of anomalies, what else the nature of the case has by good luck dispersed over the whole territory of the Latin language. To be consistent, a tutor should take the same proleptical course with regard to the prosody of the Latin language: every Latin hyper-dissyllable is manifestly accentuated according to the following law: if the penultimate be long, that syllable inevitably claims the accent; if short, inevitably it rejects it—i. e. gives it to the ante-penultimate. The determining syllable is therefore the penultimate; and for the due reading of Latin the sole question is about the quantity of the penultimate. Ac

cording to the logic therefore which could ever have introduced "As in præsenti," the tutor ought to make his pupils commit to memory every individual word in which the quantity was not predetermined by a mechanical rule (as it is e. g. in the gen. plural orum of the second declension, the erunt of the third per. plurals of the preterite, &c. or the cases where the vowel is long by position). But what man of sense would forbear to cry out in such a case-" Leave the poor child to his daily reading: practice, under correct tuition, will give him insensibly and without effort all that you would thus endeavour to communicate through a most Herculean exertion." Whom has it cost any trouble to learn the accentuation of his own language? How has he learned that? Simply by copying others and so much without effort, that the effort (and a very great effort) would have been not to copy them. In that way let him learn the quantity of Latin and Greek penultimates. That Edmund Burke could violate the quantity of the word "Vectigal" was owing to his tutor's ignorance, who had allowed him so to read it; that Lord North, and every other Etonian in the house, knew better-was owing not to any disproportionate effort of memory directed to that particular word, as though they had committed to memory a rule enjoining them to place the accent on the penultimate of the word vectigal: their knowledge no more rested on such an anticipation by express rules of their own experience, than Burke's ignorance of the quantity on the want of such anticipation; the anticipation was needless-coming from a tutor who knew the quantity, and impossible-coming from a tutor who knew it not. At this moment a little boy (three years old) is standing by our table, and repeatedly using the word mans for men his sister (five years old), at his age, made the very same mistake: but she is now correcting her brother's grammar, which just at this moment he is stoutly defending

conceiving his dignity involved in the assertion of his own impeccability. Now whence came the little girl's error and its correction? Following blindly the general analogy of the language, she formed her plural by adding an s to the singular: afterwards every body about her became a daily monitor-a living Pro pria quæ maribus, as she is in her turn to her brother, instructing her that this particular word "man' swerved, as to this one particular point, from the general analogy of the language. But the result is just as inevitable from daily intercourse with Latin books, as to the parallel anomalies in that language. In proportion as any case of anomaly could escape the practical regulation of such an intercourse, just in that proportion it must be a rare case, and less important to be known: whatsoever the future experience will be most like to demand, the past experience will be most likely to have furnished. All this we urge not against the Eton grammar in particular: on the contrary, as grammars go, we admire the Eton grammar; and love it with a filial partiality from early associations (always excepting, however, the three leadmines of the Eton « Programmar, pria quæ maribus," &c. of which it is not extravagant to say, that the author, though possibly a good sort of a man in his way, has undoubtedly caused more human suffering than Nero, Robespierre, or any other enemy of the human race). Our opposition is to the general principle, which lies at the root of such treatises as the three we have been considering: it will be observed that, making a proper allowance for the smallness of the print, these three bodies of absurd anticipations of exceptions, are collectively about equal in quantity, and virtually for the effort to the memory far more than equal, to the whole body of the rules contained in the Accidence and the Syntax: i. e. that which exists on account of many thousand cases is put on the same level of value and

burthen to the memory, as that which exists on account of itself alone. Here lies the original sin of grammars, the mortal taint on which they all demand regeneration: whosoever would show himself a great artist in the profound but as yet infant art of teaching, should regard all arbitrary taxes upon the memory with the same superstition that a wise lawgiver should regard the punishment of death: the lawgiver, who sets out with little knowledge (and therefore little veneration) of human nature, is perpetually invoking the thunders of the law to compensate the internal weakness of his own laws and the same spirit of levity disposes inefficient teachers to put in motion the weightiest machinery of the mind for the most trifling purposes: but we are convinced that this law should be engraven on the title page of all elementary books -that the memory is degraded, if it be called in to deliver any individual fact, or any number of individual facts, or for any less purpose than that of delivering a comprehensive law, by means of which the understanding is to produce the individual cases of knowledge wanted. Whereever exceptions or insulated cases are noticed, except in notes, which are not designed to be committed to me mory, this rule is violated; and the Scotch expression for particularising, viz. condescending upon, becomes applicable in a literal sense: when the Eton grammar, e. g. notices Deus as deviating in the vocative ease from the general law for that declension, the memory is summoned to an unreasonable act of condescension-viz. to load itself almost as heavily for one particular word in one particular case, as it had done by the whole type of that declension (i. e. the implicit law for all words contained under it, which are possibly some thousands). But how then would we have such exceptions learnt, if not by an act of the memory? Precisely, we answer, as the meanings of all the words in the language are learned: how are they learned? They are known, and they are remembered: but how? Not by any act. or effort of the memory: they are deposited in the memory from daily intercourse with them: just as the daily occurrences of our lives are

recorded in our memories: not through any exertion on our part, or in consequence of previous determination on our parts that we will remember them on the contrary, we take no pains about them, and often would willingly forget them: but they stay there in spite of us, and are pure depositions, settlings, or sediments, with or without our concurrence, from the stream of our daily experience.-Returning from this long excursus on arbitrary taxations of the memory suggested to us by the mention of " Propria quæ maribus," which the Experimentalist ob jects to as disgusting to children before they have had experience of the cases in which it furnishes assistance (but which we have objected to as in any case barren of all power to assist), we resume the course of our analysis. We left the Experimentalist insisting on the benefit of directing the studies of children into such channels as that the practical uses of their labours may become apprehensible to themselves

as the first mode of producing a love of knowledge. In some cases he admits that the pipil must pass through "dark defiles," confiding blindly in his tutor's "assurance that he will at last emerge into light:" but still contends that in many cases it is possible, and where possible-right, that he should "catch a glimpse of the promised land." Thus, for example, to construe the language he is learning-is an act of " some respectability in his eyes" and its uses apparent: meantime the uses of the grammar are not so apparent until experience has brought him acquainted with the real cases to which it applies. On this account, without laying aside the grammar, let him be advanced to the dignity of actual translation upon the very minimum of grammatical knowledge which will admit of it. Again, in arithmetic, it is the received practice to commence with "abstract numbers:" but, instead of risking injury to the child's intellect and to his temper by thus calling upon him to add together "long rows of figures" to which no meaning is attached, he is taught "to calculate all the various little problems which may be constructed respecting his tops and marbles, their price, and their comparative value." Here the Experimentalist turns aside