II. HOW TO IMPROVE THE PRELIMINARY STAGES Ir must, I fear, be admitted that there exists, especially on the northern side of the Tweed, a growing indifference to the study of the ancient languages of Greece and Rome. The public mind is less disposed than it used to be, to regard that study as the indispensable preliminary to a course of liberal education. Nor is this to be wondered at. We live in an age which is eminently scientific in its tendencies, an age when clear demonstration, minutely accurate knowledge, and full possession of the question at issue, are becoming more and more the passports to promotion in every branch of the public service. Now, it is a notorious fact, that of the British youth who have gone through the long and compulsory drill of our grammar schools, a vast majority carry with them from school a very superficial acquaintance with the languages they were sent thither to learn, and no desire to increase or even to retain the slender stock they may have acquired. And yet there is no want either of weighty argument or the authority of great names in support of a proposition which is as certain as reason and philosophy can make it, that no instrument has hitherto been contrived so well adapted for developing the youthful mind, and training its faculties to their appropriate exercise, as a well-devised course of classical. instruction.* My business at present, however, is not to defend classical training as the best, but, taking for granted the proposition I have just stated, to show how the practice of teaching may be improved. There must, it is natural to think, be something radically wrong in a system of training which so egregiously fails in accomplishing the object proposed, that, of those trained upon it, a small percentage only go forth into life with a mastery of the subject, to the study of which the best years of their boyhood have been devoted. A large proportion of the rest get a sort of top-dressing, and acquire, perhaps, a habit of dogged hard working, which is not without its use, though far from yielding full compensation for the precious time it has cost them. Such may be able to quote occasionally a line of Horace or Virgil, still found rari nantes in the gurgite vasto of their ignorance, and may thus gain consideration among their unlearned compeers; but these are worthless and dearbought advantages. How, then, is a remedy to be found for a great and growing evil that threatens to extinguish a literature which rescued Europe from the darkness of the Middle Ages, which, ever since the revival of letters, has been the boast and glory of modern times, and which is interwoven with the whole tissue of our own literature? How are we to * See Contributions to the Cause of Education, Lecture Third. secure its permanence? how render more generally efficient than it now is, a mode of training which even its partial successes have proved to be the best? The cure, I conceive, can only be effected by surrounding the first steps in the study of Latin (for from that language chiefly I shall draw my illustrations) with such attractions as shall prevent, or remove at the outset, a prejudice against it. Such a prejudice can hardly fail to arise in the mind of a boy, from the dry, uninviting task of learning by heart what is imperfectly or not at all understood; and it is to the means of accomplishing this object that I would call attention. To secure a boy's grappling willingly and successfully with the difficulties of grammar and syntax, we must begin with awakening curiosity and gratifying his self-esteem by leading him to think for himself. We must invest the subject with an interest that will carry him triumphantly through the difficulties that await him at a subsequent stage. By no other means can we expect to arrest the growing evil, and vindicate the claims of classical learning to take the lead in the higher education of our youth. A few preliminary observations will enable me to explain what appear to me to be the origin of the evil, and the means of cure. There are, I conceive, certain principles in the young mind, coeval almost with the first dawnings of reason, of which advantage is not taken as it ought to be, either in the composition of our Latin grammars, or in the school training of youth. Among the various operations of the thinking principle in man, which it has pleased mental philosophers to classify and describe under the name of "powers" and "faculties," there are few of which we do not find traces, more or less fully developed, in the lower animals. Not only do they possess the five senses, but in processes which are purely mental, such as memory, they may challenge a comparison with man. Even of the reasoning faculty-our boasted pride and privilege-we can scarcely doubt the existence and exercise; in the dog, for example, and the elephant, who are swayed by motives, compare the respective weight of each, and arrive at conclusions which regulate their movements with a will as free as our own. How this process is carried on without the gift of language and the use of words is to us incomprehensible, and we cover our ignorance by calling it instinct. But among the faculties peculiar to man of which we find no trace in the lower animals, such as the perception of mathematical truth, there is one which we must, I think, admit to be as exclusively the attribute of man as the gift of speech itself, I mean that act of the mind which prompts and enables him to reflect on the facts of his own present or past consciousness, and to make them the subject of thought and meditation. There is no evidence to prove, nor reason to believe, that even the animals I have mentioned-the most thinking and sagacious of the lower creation-ever turn their thoughts inwards to reflect on what is passing in their own minds, or ever recall past impressions, to subject them to consideration, reflection, or revision. The sensations that pass through their minds, be they pleasant or painful, are not forgotten they are treasured up and recur in similar circumstances, and serve to regulate their conduct in pursuing the pleasure and avoiding the pain. But this is memory, not meditation; not that retrospective and prospective faculty-that power which makes man what Shakspere calls him, "A being of large discourse, looking before and after," the power of summoning up the results of past observation and experience, of combining, comparing, abstracting, generalizing, and deducing, which more even than his bodily structure gives man his vast superiority over all other animal natures. Now, this distinctive privilege of our species is capable of being developed in the young mind much earlier than is commonly imagined. Even in the elementary stage of English education, before the child has left the infant school, there is room for appealing to the principle I speak of; as, for example, when he is called on to distinguish the form of each letter by the eye, and its power by the ear, and then to combine the two impressions into an audible sound. There are so many occasions for exercising the reflective faculty before he arrives at the age of seven or eight, when it is proper or at least usual to begin the study of Latin, that it is then eminently fit to be employed in prepossessing his mind in favour of the study, and investing it with an interest which, in the ordinary way of teaching, is seldom or never felt. If this reflective faculty be directed to a luminous exposition of the simpler leading truths of general grammar-truths which are nothing more than the principles which guide man in the use and application of language, they will be at once apprehended and mastered by a boy, because he recognises in them what his own consciousness, when thus appealed to, assures him must be true. And it is scarcely necessary to add that, when the experiment is successful, and it can scarcely ever fail, it invests the subject to the young mind with a delight and interest most influential in promoting his further progress. By such a process as this should the mind be stimulated into activity, before the tyro is called on to grapple with the difficulties of flexion, conjugation, and syntax. As far as my own experience goes, I do not find that, either in the practice of teaching, or in the Latin Grammars in ordinary use, advantage is taken of the reflective principle, or any credit given or appeal made to it. Memory is the faculty almost alone called into exercise, and it is a memory not of that suggestive, philosophical kind which arranges a series of facts under one principle, so that they are easily retained and readily recalled; but a dry, mechanical, disjointed memory of insulated, ill-assorted ideas, difficult to acquire and very liable to be forgotten. The boy is too often charged, under pains and penalties more or less severe, to remember and repeat a mass of formal rules without reasons, instead of being trained, by appeals to his own consciousness, to think, to reason, and to conclude. The limits of this paper will allow me to take one or two instances only in explanation and illustration of the views and principles I have endeavoured to explain: and the first shall be from the Latin VERB-the WORD Kaт foxy-the very key-stone of the arch of every sentence, without which, expressed or understood, there can be no proposition,—a part of speech indeed which requires, more than any other, the helping hand of Philosophy to prevent it from confounding the budding intellect, and producing dislike of the whole subject. Bearing in mind, then, that our main object is to carry the understanding of the boy along with us in the instruction given, I would curtail very considerably the paradigma of the Latin Verb, as it appears in our grammars and is taught in our schools. The only moods or phases of the verb which I would retain in the tabular form should be-1st, the Imperative of the second person, because in it we find the root or simplest form or element of the verb; 2d, the Indicative or Declaratory-the mood by which the communication of consecutive thought and information is effected; 3d, the Infinitive, as constituting the Noun of the verb; and, 4th, the Participle, as representing its Adjectival form. The Subjunctive, Gerunds, and Supines, having nothing corresponding in our own language, I should omit for the moment, as only tending to confuse a boy's ideas. Then, as to the Tenses there is a singular want of philosophy and consideration as to the manner in which they are presented to the young mind. Six tenses are ranged under the heading of the Indicative Mood, called Present, Imperfect, Perfect or Preterite, Pluperfect, and two Futures. Nor is there anything to inform the boy to what division of time they respectively belong, or to give prominence to one above the other; and after the whole is committed to memory, the pupil is left with very crude notions of the precise meaning of each. Now, the great divisions of time are practically known to a boy ever since he understood the terms yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow. But the abstract conception of time present, time past, and time to come, are not likely to have occurred to him till the reflective faculty is brought into action, when he at once recognises the distinction. What, then, so natural and so intelligible as to commence his acquaintance with the Tenses by putting him in possession of the words, and only the words, which mark these grand epochs in their simplest chronological succession: Scripsi, I wrote; Scribo, I write; Scribam, I shall write; or to concede so far to the universal practice of starting from the passing now, and looking back to the past and forward to the future-Scribo, scripsi, scribam; in Greek, Γράφω, ἔγραψα, γράψω. The paradigma of the indicative would thus be completed for the time by these three tenses, and a clear and distinct basis laid for adding, at a subsequent period, either in a separate Grammar, or in a smaller type and subordinate position under each head, the modifications and restrictions required in the ordinary use of speech. The present tense, though by no means limited in its use to the punctum mobile that separates the past from the future, has no variety of termination or form either in Greek or in Latin; nothing equivalent to the English duplicate, I write, or I am writing. Scripsi―eypaya-the great historical tense simply refers the event or condition intimated by the verb to time past, and therefore is or ought to be called in Latin as it is in Greek, the Aorist, i. e., indefinite. But the line of Past Time is notched, as it were, at certain VOL. I. B intervals, to which distinct forms (or subordinate tenses) are attached, according as the event or condition is spoken of, as (1.) in a state of continuance when another took place, or, (2.) as being connected with, or its influence carried on, to the present time, or, (3.) as being past in relation to another also past. The first of these cases gives the imperfect scribebam-eypapov—I was writing; the second gives the pluperfect scripseram Phir -eyeypάdei-I had written; and the third gives the present-perfect, Deco. which in English is-I have written, but which in Latin has no form to express it different from the preterite or aorist-scripsi-I wrote. That this is a deficiency in the Latin language must, I think, be admitted from the translation I have given, and yet in no grammar I have seen is this defect indicated in the paradigma of the verb, none in which scripsi is given and inflected a second time in a subordinate sense, as it ought to be, that the grand paradigma of the verb may be complete. Scripsi is universally put down under the title of "preterite" or "perfect," and translated-I wrote or have written, as if these were synonymous terms. And this is the more strange, as the deficient form exists in the Greek Téypapa. The complement of past tenses therefore in Greek isI wrote. Scribebam, I was writing. Scripseram, I had written. Scripsi, "Eypaya Ἐγεγράφειν Γέγραφα in Latin-Scripsi, I have written. Future time in Latin has two distinct forms-Scribam—гpá↓w—I |