GIFT OF 
 MICHAEL REESE 
 
f 
 

LECTUKES 
 
 ON 
 
 LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTIC METHOD 
 IN THE SCHOOL 
 
MORRISON AND GIBB, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH. 
 
 
LECTURES 
 
 ON 
 
 LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTIC METHOD 
 
 IN THE SCHOOL 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 
 EASTER TERM, 1889 
 
 BY 
 
 S. S. LAUKIE, A.M. EDIN, LL.D. ST. AND. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF THE INSTITUTES AND HISTORY OF EDUCATION 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 
 
 SECOND EDITION, REVISED 
 
 EDINBURGH: 
 
 JAMES THIN, PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY. 
 
 LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL & CO. 
 
 1893 
 
 [All rights reserved.] 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 THESE Lectures were delivered at the request of the 
 Teachers' Training Syndicate of the University of 
 Cambridge, and re-delivered at the College of Pre- 
 ceptors, London. The form of Lectures leads to the 
 use of the first personal pronoun more frequently than 
 is desirable. The reader will pardon this. 
 
 S. S. L. 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, 
 May, 1890. 
 
 SECOND EDITION. 
 
 The book has been revised, and a short chapter on 
 the teaching of French has been added. The Lectures 
 have occasionally been broken up so as to make the 
 volume more suitable as a text-book, and certain 
 expressions omitted or modified which are apt to 
 suggest themselves to a Lecturer as effective. Many, 
 however, are left which could not have been excised 
 without altering the whole form of the book. 
 
 S. S. L. 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, 
 June, 1893. 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTUEE I. 
 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME INSTRUMENT IN EDUCATION. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Education is through the experiences of life. The most potent 
 of experiences is the distinctive national life in all its 
 forms. Function of the school to focus these national 
 influences. There is, however, a universal as well as a 
 national element present in the education of a human 
 being. Excellence of the individual. Formal discipline 
 of Reason would seem sufficient for this. This too abstract 
 to be available in the education of the young. A concrete 
 subject must be found which contains the abstract in its 
 primary form, and at the same time gives substance of 
 instruction. This subject also must be universal in its 
 character if it is to be effective for its end in the fullest 
 sense. That subject is Language (1) As a formal disci- 
 pline. (2) As a concrete or real study. (3) As an 
 aesthetic or Art study. By Language is meant primarily 
 the Vernacular, ..... 1-19 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 THE REAL AND FORMAL IN LANGUAGE. 
 
 Distinction between discipline and training. The comprehen- 
 sion of Language trains as well as feeds the mind, . . 20-27 
 vii 
 
Vlll CONTEXTS. 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY CONVEYING 
 SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 (a) Infant stage of Language - teaching. (6) Primary and 
 
 Upper-primary school stage, (c) Secondary school stage, . 28-42 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY continued. 
 
 1. Word-building, synonyms and ambiguities. 2. History of 
 Words. 3. Sentences and Paragraphs. 4. Paraphrasing. 
 5. Reading and Elocution, . ' . . . . 43-54 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY continued. 
 
 1. Oral Composition. 2. Transcription. 3. Elementary written 
 Composition. 4. Abridgments and Narrations. 5. Trans- 
 lations. 6. Imitation. 7. Original Essays or Theses and 
 Reproduction, . . . . . . 55-62 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL STUDY. GRAMMAR. 
 
 Method in general. Relation of abstract study to Discipline 
 as distinguished from Training. Grammar a system of 
 Abstractions. Method. 1. Tlie When: should not be 
 begun till the twelfth year. 2. The How Much. 3. The 
 Method must be the Real Method, .... 63-75 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. METHOD. 
 
 First stage : successive'Steps. Second stage : successive steps. 
 Psychological process in parsing. Historical Grammar 
 and Comparative Philology, . . . .76-95 
 
CONTENTS. IX 
 
 V 
 
 LECTUKE VIII. 
 
 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Relation of literature to moral, {esthetic, and religious training. 
 Must be begun early. Method : little to be said of a formal 
 kind. Literary impressions : literary criticism. Import- 
 ance of Literature in the education of the young. Can 
 literature be taught ? . . . . 96-123 
 
 LECTURE IX. * 
 FOREIGN TONGUES. LATIN AS TYPE. 
 
 (a) Reasons for teaching Latin. (b) Method of procedure 
 
 generally, ...... 124-135 
 
 LECTUKE X. 
 
 METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. " 
 Application of Rules of Method to teaching Latin. Greek, . 136-165 
 
 LECTURE XI. 
 
 METHOD OF TEACHING MODERN LANGUAGES. 
 Method as applied to the teaching of French, . . 166-177 
 
 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 LANGUAGE v. SCIENCE IN THE SCHOOL, . . . 179-197 
 
LECTURES ON LANGUAGE 
 AND LINGUISTIC METHOD IN THE SCHOOL. 
 

OF THE ^ 
 
 CVERSITT) 
 OF . ./ 
 
 LECTUKE I. 
 
 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 
 
 Education must be first of all national. There is also 
 an universal element. Through Language we best 
 secure both aims. The educational relations of 
 Language as a concrete subject, a formal subject, and 
 an cesthetic subject. 
 
 EVERY human being is educated by the experiences of 
 life. The experiences begin very early. The babe at 
 .its mother's breast is receiving impressions for good or 
 for evil as certainly as a seed, which has just begun 
 to sprout, is already absorbing from the soil what is 
 to make it or mar it as a vigorous plant of its kind. 
 Thereafter, as the child walks non cequis passibus 
 at his mother's side, the whole world of nature is 
 seeking to form him. Earth and sky, the events of 
 his little life, the words and acts, nay even the gestures, 
 of those about him are all busy in the work of his 
 education. Unconsciously at first, and thereafter con- 
 sciously, he is organising into himself the vast and 
 infinite material of outer impression and inner feeling. 
 
2 LAXGFA-OE THE SUPREME [LECT. 
 
 Every human being undergoes this process of educa- 
 tion; and it is not at all a question whether he 
 is to be educated or not, but simply how ?nd to what 
 end he is to be educated. 
 
 Neither the unconscious education of environment, 
 nor the conscious education of the school, however, is 
 independent of native predisposition and inheritance. 
 No two human beings are precisely alike in respect 
 of their native capacity to receive experiences and 
 to utilise them for the building up of their characters. 
 There is much, very much, a much that is almost in- 
 calculable, in the instincts and aptitudes of race. It 
 is impossible to compare the Chinese child, the Persian, 
 the Hindu, the Hellenic, the Eoman, the British, as we 
 find them in history, and not be convinced of this. Next 
 to the instincts and aptitudes of individuals and of race 
 in determining our education, is the spirit of the race 
 as shown in its national religion, laws, and customs, in 
 its more or less conscious aims as a political society, in 
 its public life and its corporate acts, past and contem- 
 porary, and, above all, in the literary expression of its 
 way of looking at the world. These alone, without the 
 help of schools, will, under favourable conditions, make 
 a people, and a great people ; and, whatever may be 
 done of set purpose by schools and teachers, national 
 life in its various forms will alwa^-s be, as it ought 
 always to be, the dominant factor in the education of 
 the young. 
 
 It is through the family that these educative 
 influences are best conveyed ; and no State is in a 
 
I.] INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 
 
 healthy condition where the family life is not always 
 the most potent, as it is the nearest, of educative in- 
 fluences. As the pressure of life grows heavier, and 
 social conditions grow more complex, it becomes neces- 
 sary to appoint a substitute for the parent, but not on 
 this account to supersede the domestic by the public 
 school. The school fulfils its purpose when it is a 
 mere auxiliary of the family. What now is the 
 function of trie school in view of these facts ? 
 
 I have said that it is the individual experiences, 
 and the national life in all its forms as the most potent 
 of those experiences, that chiefly educate ; and from 
 this I will draw the conclusion that where schools are 
 instituted, their main function is to focus, so to speak, 
 the life of the nation, and bring its best elements its 
 language, laws, religion, ethics, art, literature, history 
 to bear on the young whom we gather into our 
 public seminaries. This we do, in the hope that by so 
 doing we may make sure that the experiences which 
 educate shall not be arbitrary and uncertain, but 
 assured, and wisely ordered to the making of a good 
 citizen. To this end, it is the best in the life of the 
 nation to which they belong that we have to give to 
 the young. All other languages, literatures, histories, 
 are to be regarded as merely contributory to the native 
 elements and the continuation of national character in 
 its highest and best form. 
 
 It is always character, indeed, and the highest 
 type of national character, that we as educators 
 have to keep before us, not knowledge. It is an 
 
4 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME [LECT. 
 
 educational truism, that however various a man's know- 
 ledge may be, if it does not enter into the texture of 
 his mind, it may as well be on his bookshelves. 
 Knowledge, which is not woven into life and conduct, 
 is so far from being wisdom, that it is often an enemy 
 of wisdom and an obstructor of wise counsel. 
 
 But there is an universal element as well as a 
 national element in education, by means of which the 
 best national type can be created. As islanders, we, 
 more than other nations, have this forced upon us. 
 Even setting aside all questions of ideal manhood, we 
 yet must grant that to form the good citizen here and 
 now, we must first form the good man. So thought the 
 ancient Athenian ; so thought the Eoman, whether he 
 spoke through the mouth of Cato, or Cicero; or Quin- 
 tilian; so assuredly must think the Christian, for he has 
 to seek first the Kingdom of God. Hence it is that, 
 when the education of the young is not wholly left to 
 casual influences and custom, we are compelled to ask 
 the questions, What is a good man ? and, How shall 
 we form him ? The answer to these questions is con- 
 tained in the science and art of education. Surely, 
 then, this is a subject worth considering by all, neces- 
 sary to be considered by those who mean to devote 
 their lives to the task of educating. 
 
 Both the universal -and the national elements 
 in education are passed on to the young, chiefly 
 by Language. Language is intensely national; it is 
 a reflex of the inner mental habit of a people. It 
 
I.] INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 5 
 
 is also through their languages, much more than 
 through a knowledge of their institutions, that we 
 share the lives of those nations which have a literature, 
 and absorb those elements of life in which we are our- 
 selves defective. This gives rise to self-criticism, and 
 contributes to the growth of the universal in mind and 
 character, as opposed to the national, the parochial, 
 and the individual. I am not to be understood as 
 suggesting that a child should be educated as a cosmo- 
 politan. The weakening of national individualism 
 enfeebles the personality of each citizen, breaks the 
 springs of action, and dries up the sources of living 
 energy. 
 
 Of the education of man in the universal sense, we 
 may say with the Greeks that our aim is aperf, the 
 excellence of the individual after his kind, and that 
 the action of mind in attaining to this excellence is 
 crw^pocrvvr], if we give it the sense of selfrxegulation. 
 This self-regulation, which is the wise conduct of life, 
 is dependent on the Will, which, as the dominant 
 characteristic of man, sets in motion (speaking broadly 
 and sinking metaphysical subtleties) his intelligence 
 and selects his motives. But this intelligence and 
 this will cannot work in the air : materials on which 
 they may exercise their formal activity must be pro- 
 vided, and it is these which the instincts of our nature 
 and the experiences of life furnish to all. The school 
 interposes merely to formulate, enrich, and elevate these 
 experiences, and to focus the principles and aims of life 
 out of which the fabric of motives may be built. A 
 
6 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME [LECT. 
 
 richly endowed mind, however, may be weak in intelli- 
 gence and will. It is the power of discriminating and 
 of rightly reasoning, of separating the right from the 
 wrong, the true from the false, the good from the bad, 
 the wise from the unwise, and of giving effect to our 
 judgments, which must always be the governing aim 
 of education. 
 
 Now, if this be so, it may plausibly be maintained 
 that, by exercising the intelligence purely as such as 
 a system of abstract powers, we shall best fit it for 
 coping with the complex materials of experience ; 
 that, by disciplining the mental processes which 
 enter into all knowledge and make it possible, we 
 shall best fit a human being to discern the true, 
 and to regulate his life in accordance therewith. And 
 why so ? Because these processes of mind are 
 universal and not partial in their application : they 
 cover the whole field of possible human knowledge and 
 activity. But we cannot do this ; because the exer- 
 cise of the abstract faculties of man is not possible 
 at all in their purity. They can be exercised only in 
 and through material of some sort. That material, 
 no doubt, may be the mind itself in its formal activities ; 
 but this kind of abstract exercise is not practicable till 
 the period of adolescence, when the great mass of the 
 population has already escaped from scholastic control. 
 Not the formal and abstract, then, by itself (i.e. logic 
 and metaphysics), but the formal as entering into and 
 constituting some real subject, something which has 
 substance in it, must be the instrument of intellectual 
 
I.] INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 
 
 line with a view to power : and, of all subjects, 
 that will necessarily be the most effective which is 
 most universal. 
 
 1. The concrete subject which is best suited for 
 training the abstract and formal powers of mind is 
 Language. Here you have mind, in all its formal 
 relations, expressed in a substantial form, as some- 
 thing not purely abstract, but concrete, and capable 
 of being grasped and handled. By the analysis of 
 language, then, you introduce the young intellect to 
 the unconscious analysis of its own thinking in its whole 
 range. While engaged in this exercise, the abstract 
 powers are so involved in a concrete that is familiar 
 to all, that the formal discipline is not made obtrusive 
 and distasteful. A boy who is intelligently analysing 
 language is analysing the processes of thought, and is 
 a logician without knowing it. And this is the reason 
 why the study of language in its formal aspects has 
 always been regarded as the best preparation for the 
 logician and philosopher, and, according to Quintilian, 
 of the orator also. Hence, too, it is the best prepara- 
 tion for the study of all or any of the sciences. 
 
 The formal study of language is the study of the 
 abstract; and as abstraction is difficult to the young 
 (and to the old, too, for. that matter), it demands an 
 effort such as the " real " or concrete never does, and 
 hence it is that it gives power. A very young child, 
 for example, may receive and enjoy the sentiments 
 of Tennyson's "May Queen," or Wordsworth's "We 
 
8 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME LECT. 
 
 are Seven," and yet find the formal analysis of the 
 language to present insuperable difficulties : but it is 
 precisely this formal and abstract exercise in the 
 mere vehicle of expression that we must give, if we 
 are to give power to the mind. 
 
 ^That the discipline yielded by the study of the 
 formal or grammatical in language gives to the mind 
 power and discrimination to find its intellectual w T ay 
 amid the conflicting experiences and contradictory 
 motives- of daily life, all must admit ; but few 
 recognise the close connection between this kind 
 of discipline and moral discipline. Moral discipline 
 is the habituating of the will the dominant fact 
 and function in a human being to overcome the 
 difficulties of temptation to stray from what is seen 
 and affirmed to be the right path. '* But it is the same 
 a- ill which I call upon for energizing activity when 
 I present the mind of a boy with the intellectual 
 difficulties of formal studies, and call upon him to 
 overcome these. There are not two wills in a man. 
 The effort, then, which all formal studies demand of 
 the young, that they may overcome intellectual 
 difficulties, is not merely intellectual, but moral, in its 
 effects on character. ^ It is an old saying that labour 
 produces ingenuous minds; and if we translate ingenu- 
 ous as well-bred, or well-conditioned, we see the truth 
 of the apophthegm. 
 
 It may be said with a show of truth, that to attain 
 this great result intellectual and moral discipline 
 the language of elementary mathematics, physics, or 
 
I.] INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 9 
 
 biology would serve. It would serve, unquestionably, 
 but not so well, because the language of these studies 
 is partial and restricted, whereas the language of which 
 we are speaking the language of everyday inter- 
 course and of literature is universal in its sweep, and 
 presents a variety, a delicacy, and subtlety of the think- 
 ing process which all the sciences of nature taken 
 together cannot for a moment approach. The language, 
 then, of ordinary human intercourse and of literature 
 is, when pursued as an abstract study i.e. in its 
 historical forms and logical relations the best of all 
 possible disciplines of the intellect ; first, because it is 
 the study of the intellect itself, but this in a concrete 
 material which brings it within the capacity of the 
 immature mind of boyhood ; and, secondly, because of 
 its universal character because, that is to say, all the 
 processes of mind are presented for analysis, and this 
 in every possible relation of simplicity, complexity, 
 and subtlety. 
 
 2. This brings us to the second ground of the claim 
 which language makes for a supreme place in the 
 education of youth. Language presents to us not 
 merely the process of thinking made visible, the clothed 
 form of thinking, but it is also itself concrete thought 
 on all that concerns the life of man as an individual, 
 and as a member of society. There is no aspect of 
 human life, no complication of human motive, no 
 ethical relation, no aesthetic emotion, no religious 
 aspiration, which language, as medium of intercourse, 
 
10 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME [LECT. 
 
 
 
 and as literature, does not convey, and, while convey- 
 ing, illumina 
 
 Accordingly, important as is the formal discipline 
 which the analysis of logical processes gives as these 
 are embodied in language, still more important are the 
 training and instruction which language, as embodying 
 the substance of thought, yields. It is in and through 
 language that man enters on the inheritance which the 
 past has bequeathed to him. Every word, almost, has 
 a lesson for him. Verba ante res is as sound an axiom 
 as res ante verla. A large proportion of words intro- 
 duce the pupil for the first time to moral and religious 
 truths ; others define his social relations ; others, again, 
 contain in their bosom the counsels of perfection. 
 Nay, there are words which bring into his conscious- 
 ness not merely one thought, but a whole system of 
 thought. If we wish to train a boy in the true, or the 
 good, or the beautiful, how are we to do it ? There is 
 no way but by introducing him to the utterances of 
 the wise and good on those questions, so vital to all, 
 and a right answer to which alone makes humanity 
 worth preserving. Through the perusal of literature 
 alone can man enter into the possession of the hard- 
 won \ictories of the past, and make himself the fellow 
 and companion of the greatest and noblest of his race 
 the prophets of all time. The content of literature 
 in its various forms is a moral content, a religious con- 
 tent, and an aesthetic content. It is the substance of 
 mind and the whole of Man. 
 
 The substance of thought, it cannot be doubted, is 
 
I.] INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 1 1 
 
 of more importance in education than discipline in the 
 logical forms by which that substance has been elabo- 
 rated and expressed. After what has been already 
 said, I shall not be accused of underrating the discipline 
 which the formal or grammatical study of language 
 gives ; but yet there can be no doubt that it has been 
 allowed to obscure the education that lies in the real 
 study of it. The necessity of acquiring the ancient 
 tongues has led to the exaggerated importance assigned 
 in school especially in the secondary school to the 
 pursuit of the formal, i.e. grammar, to the exclusion 
 of the substance of the language, the real as opposed 
 to the formal. Far more effectual in moving and 
 raising the mind than any logical analysis of language 
 can possibly be, is the food, the nutrition of thought, 
 which language as literature conveys. What was the 
 Kenaissance in its influence on the School, but the 
 substitution of substance for form the reading of 
 authors instead of grammars, and rhetorics and logics ? 
 \Through substance (it was felt) you may best reach 
 form and the formal itself ; through the formal you 
 can rarely, and only by accident, reach substance.^ 
 The Kenaissance movement, by identifying itself with 
 form in the sense of style, died of its own 
 elegances. 
 
 Let me apply this same conception to the moral 
 and religious sphere. It is to be presumed that in 
 educating a boy you wish to make him familiar with 
 great thoughts, and to inspire him with a high ethical 
 spirit. If you do not aim at this, then in what sense 
 
12 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME [LECT. 
 
 and for what end do you educate at all ? Now, it is 
 easy, if only you set about it in the right way, to 
 engage the heart of a child, up to the age of eleven 
 or twelve, on the side of kindliness, generosity, self- 
 sacrifice, and to fill him, if not with ideals of greatness 
 and goodness, at least with the feelings or emotions 
 which enter into these ideals. You thus lay a basis 
 in feeling and emotion on which may be built a truly 
 manly character at a later period. Without such a 
 basis you can accomplish nothing ethical, now or at any 
 future time. But when the recipient stage is past, and 
 boys begin to assert themselves, they have a tendency 
 to resist, if not to resent, professedly moral and 
 religious teaching: and this chiefly, because it then 
 comes to them or is presented to them in the shape of 
 abstract precept and authoritative dogma. Now, the 
 growing mind of youth is keen after realities, and has 
 no native antagonism to realities merely because they 
 happen to be moral or religious realities. It is the 
 abstract, preceptive, and barren form, and the presump- 
 tuous manner in which these are presented, that they 
 detest. How, then, at this critical age to present 
 the most vital of all the elements of education, is a 
 supremely important problem. It is my conviction 
 that you can only do so through literature ; and the 
 Xew Testament itself might well be read simply as 
 literature. The words, the phrases, the ideals, which 
 literature offers so lavishly, unconsciously stir the 
 mind to lofty motives and the true perception of the 
 meaning of life. We must not, of course, commit the 
 
I.] INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 13 
 
 fatal blunder of making a didactic lesson out of what 
 is read. We take care that it is understood and 
 illustrated, and then leave it to have its own effect. In 
 short, just as language treated on its formal or abstract 
 side introduces a boy to logic without his knowing 
 that it does so, so language on its real side introduces 
 him to the ethical life in all its relations without his 
 being aware that it is doing so. He gradually forms 
 his own saws out of many instances. 
 
 1 1 will now conclude that language, as formal, is 
 the most effective and universal of all pure disciplines 
 possible in the school ; and that language, again, as 
 real, is the most effective and universal of all in- 
 structors of the mind of man. 1 ] 
 
 3. But this is not all : for language is also the 
 most universal teacher of Art. I shall not venture 
 even to attempt to answer the vexed question, What 
 is Art ? But this much, in the interests of my argu- 
 ment, I may safely say. fArt is the beautiful in a 
 concrete form. J What, again, is the beautiful ? When 
 we say a thing is beautiful we use a word of complex 
 meaning ; no other one word can define it. But this 
 at least is a prominent factor in the notion which the 
 
 1 "As all civilisation really takes its rise in human intercourse, so 
 the most efficient instrument of education appears to be the study 
 which most bears on that intercourse, the study of human speech. 
 Nothing appears to develop and discipline the whole man so much as 
 the study which assists the learner to understand the thoughts, to enter 
 into the feelings, and to appreciate the moral judgments of others." 
 Middle Schools Report, 1867 (vol. i..4). 
 
14 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME [LECT. 
 
 word conveys the beautiful is a feeling of the per- 
 fection of a thing after its kind, the ideal of its 
 kind, i 
 
 In the earlier portion of this discourse, I said that 
 we might very well take the Greek apery, excellence 
 (or perfection) of a thing after its kind, as summing 
 up in a single word our aim in the educating of a 
 human being, and our own aim consequently in educat- 
 ing ourselves. No man, in whom the process of 
 thinking has been once started, but has an ideal of 
 life for himself more or less consciously expressed. 
 Whether this ideal is truly the aperr), or excellence of 
 Man, it is for the thinkers of the world to say. By 
 the help of these thinkers every nation and every age 
 forms its ideal- the apertj for it ; and it is to this 
 ideal that we seek, more or less consciously, to train 
 our children. We cannot say that a man is educated 
 until he is possessed by a conscious ideal of life. And 
 this means that a man is not educated until the ordi- 
 nary precepts and maxims of the understanding, which 
 regulate his conduct, have been conceived by him, not 
 as mere judgments of wisdom, but as ideas. Now, to 
 conceive an ordinary maxim of virtue or any form of 
 goodness, as not merely a judicial maxim, but as an 
 idea, is to conceive it as at once instinct with emotion, 
 and as the Divine law of our being. A certain infinite- 
 ness and majesty are thereby given to the prosaic and 
 finite maxim ; and the idea be it of benevolence, or 
 of integrity, or of purity, or justice, or holiness, or 
 fortitude, now stands out in our consciousness as at 
 
I.] INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 15 
 
 once imperative motive and ideal end of all our 
 doing. It is only now that a man is a spiritual 
 being as opposed to a merely moral being. If, 
 then, we can train so as to give a conscious ideal/ 
 of life, and so as to raise maxim and precept to the 
 potency of Divine ideas, we have attained our chief 
 ethical purpose as educators : the discipline of life 
 must do the rest. 
 
 { The study of Art (whatever else it may be) is the 
 study of the idea in the concrete, and the emotion 
 which the perception of the concrete idea evokes is an 
 emotion similar in kind to that which those spiritual 
 ideas that bear on the conduct of life evoke in us.\ It 
 is not to be supposed that we can moralise a man by 
 art, or that there is salvation in aesthetics. But this 
 may be said, that . however immoral a man may be, 
 yet if he is alive to the beautiful in nature and art, 
 he must be, though perhaps an animal, yet a more 
 refined, a more delicate, and altogether a more human 
 animal, than he would be without aesthetic perceptions. 
 The transition from the aesthetic and becoming to the 
 ethical ought not to be difficult. The unquestionably 
 close alliance between the beautiful and the good was 
 fully recognised by the Greeks. All aesthetic training, 
 accordingly, if not put forward as itself moral and 
 spiritual training, but kept in its due place, is to be 
 recognised as ancillary to the spiritual life ; and it 
 may even awaken the spiritual in boys and men 
 who are inaccessible to the less sensuous forms of 
 ideas. 
 
16 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME [LECT. 
 
 Xow, the most universal form of Art is to be 
 found in language as literature. Painting has its 
 limits, sculpture has its limits, architecture has its 
 limits. Literature is the universal medium for the 
 expression of the whole range of man's nature under 
 the impulse of the emotion of the beautiful. Its 
 highest form is poetry. But it is also true that, 
 wherever we find apt and felicitous expression of mind, 
 whether in prose or poetry, we have so far a work of 
 [ art to be admired for its beauty. And this, I take it, 
 means that the expression of thought so conveyed not 
 only engages the activity and the assent of our reason, 
 but touches also our emotions the emotion of the 
 beautiful, the eternal joy in the ideal. 
 
 Thus, and so far, the teaching of literature is a 
 training in ideals ; and whether it moralises or not 
 directly, it is, certainly, a potentindirect force in the for- 
 mation of spiritual ideals. Let me give an illustration. 
 The brutality, egoism, snobbery of the English school- 
 boy is part of history see the records of fagging, etc., 
 and his peculiar measure of men and things when you 
 meet him. ||Now, what I venture to say is this, that 
 even were there no moral or Christian education at all 
 from day to day (and it would almost seem that there 
 is little consciously aimed at in our public schools, 
 except by an individual here and there), .yet, a boy who 
 had been enjoying, in his master's company and that 
 of his schoolfellows, a fine creation of Wordsworth or 
 Tennyson, could not possibly leave the room and go 
 and do a mean or unworthy thing ; or if he did, he could 
 
I.] INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 17 
 
 not do it without bringing down on his head the 
 reprobation of his fellows and his own self-condemna- 
 tion. |1 And this, not because of the substance of the 
 thought alone, but because of its form, because of the 
 ideal impulse which it gave the capacity for "the 
 Idea " which it touched in him. Honestorum turpiumque 
 nullum est consortium, says Quintilian ; and again Plato 
 in the Republic says, " The words of truth and beauty 
 are the best garrison of souls whom God loves," and 
 that because the truth is beautifully expressed. Thus 
 it is that the poets are our great educators : " Through 
 the sweet bait of their numbers they steal into young 
 spirits a desire of honour and virtue." l 
 
 The beautiful in art or language is not only uni- 
 versal in its character, but it is universal in its rela- 
 tions to the human mind as compared with other forms 
 of art. The material used language is familiar to 
 all ; all can be made, at least, to understand it ; and 
 the great majority may be led by a skilful master 
 to feel it, and so be aesthetically trained, by being 
 brought under the influence of art-forms, of the beauti- 
 ful in the concrete of ideals. 
 
 Enough has now been said to show that, whether 
 we regard the discipline of intellect, the substance of 
 morality and wisdom, or the growth of the distinctively 
 spiritual life (the life in ideas and ideals), language as 
 a formal or logical study, as a real study, and as 
 a literary or art study, is, and must always be, 
 the supreme subject in the education of a human 
 
 1 Edmund Spenser in his View of the Present State of Ireland* 
 2 
 
18 LANGUAGE THE* SUPREME [LECT. 
 
 being, the centre round which all other educational 
 agencies ought to range themselves in due subordi- 
 nation. 
 
 In conclusion, when I say that language is the 
 supreme subject in all education, I mean the verna- 
 cular language, with some foreign tongue as a necessary 
 auxiliary. It is not, however, my intention here to 
 advocate English as a subject of school instruction, 
 although I am well aware that Ben Jonson, Mulcaster, 
 and Brinsley have been crying aloud almost in vain for 
 three centuries. I must here assume that the good ex- 
 ample set by some schools is universal But this one 
 argument let me press on the recalcitrant. Mind grows 
 only in so far as it finds expression for itself : it cannot 
 find it through a foreign tongue. It is round the language 
 learned at the mother's knee that the whole life of 
 feeling, emotion, thought, gathers. If it were possible 
 for a child or boy to live in two languages at once 
 equally well, so much the worse for him. His intellectual 
 and spiritual growth would not thereby be doubled, but 
 halved. Unity of mind and of character would have 
 great difficulty in asserting itself in such circumstances. 
 Language, remember, is at best only symbolic of a 
 world of consciousness, and almost every word is rich 
 in unexpressed associations of experience which give 
 it its full value for the life of mind. Subtleties, and 
 delicacies, and refinements of feeling and perception 
 are, at best, only suggested by the words we use. The 
 major part lies deep in our conscious or half-conscious 
 
I.] INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 19 
 
 life, and is the source of the tone and colour of 
 language, and of its wide-reaching unexpressed relations. 
 Words, accordingly, must be steeped in life to be living ; 
 and as we have not two lives, but only one, so we can 
 have only one language. 
 
 To the mother-tongue, then, all other languages we 
 acquire are merely subsidiary ; and not to speak here of 
 the introduction these languages give us to other litera- 
 tures, their chief value in the education of youth is 
 that they help to bring into relief for us the character 
 of our own language as a logical medium of thinking, 
 or help us to understand it as thought, or to feel it as 
 literary art. It is the same with the educative influ- 
 ence of the lives of other nations, such as the Greeks 
 and Komans : these are not to be substitutes for our 
 own national life, nor yet are they to be simply annexed 
 as alien possessions : they do their best work by deep- 
 ening, broadening, and raising the specific national life. 
 If they do not do this, they are better left alone. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 THE REAL AND FORMAL IN LANGUAGE. 
 
 Distinction between Training and Discipline. The, com- 
 prehension of a proposition trains as well as feeds 
 the mind. Language, accordingly, as a Eeal study 
 claims a supreme place in ike school. 
 
 Ix my first Lecture I have pointed out the threefold 
 claim of language to a supreme place in education : 
 first, as a formal or abstract study, that is to say, as a 
 logical and historical analysis ; secondly, as a real 
 study, conveying the substance of thought ; and thirdly, 
 as literature, in which are presented to us the forms of 
 the ideal Art. 
 
 These three aspects of language will now be looked 
 at more closely. First, I shall treat of language as 
 a Eeal study, as conveying the substance of thought ; 
 but before doing so I shall in this lecture speak of 
 the formal and the real, and of training and discipline 
 in general. 
 
 I have said that formal study disciplines the intelli- 
 gence more than the study of the real. Why, now, 
 
 20 
 
LECT. II.] THE REAL AND FORMAL IN LANGUAGE. 21 
 
 does the study of the formal specially discipline ? 
 For two reasons : first, because the spontaneous effort 
 demanded of the pupil is greater and more self -sus- 
 tained than in other kinds of work ; secondly, because 
 the formal is only another name for the abstract ; and 
 as the abstract is removed to a certain distance (so 
 to speak) from the substance or matter from which 
 it is abstracted, it follows that dealing with the 
 abstract is a purer exercise of the intellectual processes, 
 simply as such, .than occupation with the concrete or 
 real possibly can be. Exercise in the abstract thus 
 tends to give greater force to our intellectual processes 
 a force which, inasmuch as these processes are always 
 the same, is of universal application. An exercise in 
 the abstract approaches in its character the exercise of 
 mind on the formal operations of mind as such. For 
 example, in mathematics, instruction in practical 
 mensuration doubtless both trains and disciplines the 
 mind ; but the abstract study of geometry, just because 
 it is formal or abstract, demands more self -initiated 
 and self-sustained effort, and, as a purer exercise of 
 intellect, disciplines the mind more effectually. 
 
 The formal study of language I shall henceforth, 
 for shortness, call by the traditionary name grammar. 
 It stands, as we have seen, midway between language 
 as a real subject, conveying substance of thought, and 
 logic. It is logic in its concrete form, and it is 
 language in its abstract form. As such it disciplines 
 in the sense which I have above explained. But 
 while this is so, there is no essential difference between 
 
 OFTHE 
 
 (UNIVERSITT 
 V /> 1_ 
 
22 THE REAL AND FOBMAL IX LANGUAGE. [LECT. 
 
 discipline and training. The same processes of mind 
 are exercised in both, but under different conditions. 
 Discipline is a severer kind of training ; training is an 
 easier kind of discipline. A great many minds refuse 
 to respond to discipline, but all minds can be trained. 
 There is no essential difference, as I have said, between 
 discipline and training, though there is a distinction ; 
 and the point I wish to make is this, that much more 
 can be accomplished for the education of intellect by 
 training than the advocates of discipline have been 
 in the habit of recognising. The question is an 
 important one in its general educational relations as 
 well as in its linguistic ; for teachers have too hastily 
 assumed that in the mere understanding of what is 
 read or taught, there is no training of the processes of 
 mind, but only the storing up of information. Let us 
 look at this more closely. 
 
 Language studied as the substance of thought is 
 food for the mind ; but it is so only in so far as it 
 is comprehended. Now, this act of comprehension 
 carries the intelligence through a mental process. This 
 process is necessarily the grammatical and logical 
 process in the concrete, for language is the reflex, not 
 merely of thought, but of the thinking process. But 
 there are various stages of comprehension, rising from 
 the vague and indefinite feeling that something or 
 other has been said, to the partial and fragmentary 
 understanding of what has been said (and this stage 
 again has many degrees), and thereafter, to the final 
 grasping of the thought in all its particularity and 
 
II.] THE REAL AND FORMAL IN LANGUAGE. 23 
 
 fulness. When a piece of language is so grasped 
 that the thought it conveys is reduced, in the mind of 
 the reader, to that order and relative subordination 
 of parts which it had when it first took complete 
 shape in words, his mind has been carried through 
 the mental processes which originally produced the 
 thought and its word-vestment. Now, to the extent 
 to which any mind is carried through such processes 
 of thinking, it is being trained as well as fed. This is 
 training : let us now restate by way of contrast the 
 nature of discipline. 
 
 It is only in so far as we look at the relations of the 
 word-vestment apart from the concrete substance that 
 we deal with the formal in thought and language 
 the abstract the logical and grammatical. It is this 
 occupation of the mind with form which, as I have 
 tried to show, gives discipline to the intelligence as 
 distinct from training (though it necessarily also com- 
 prehends training). The fixing of the mind on the 
 formal or abstract, on thinking deprived of the support 
 of the concrete, is a difficult exercise of mind, and 
 rightly not attempted till boys have left school. It is 
 formal logic. The fixing of mind on the generalised 
 character of words and their inter-relations in a 
 sentence is also a difficult exercise ; but this, which is 
 grammar and grammatical analysis, is not beyond the 
 reach of the schoolboy, because his mind is supported 
 by the symbols which we call words, and these are 
 presented to his senses. It is by such exercises that 
 we give what is to be distinctively called discipline. 
 
24 THE REAL AND FORMAL IX LANGUAGE. [LECT. 
 
 We thus strengthen reason for all particular exercises 
 of whatsoever kind. For the subject-matter of formal 
 exercises is not necessarily this or that particular 
 thought or reasoned statement, but thinking, and 
 reasoning, and the conditions of rational expression 
 through words, simply as such. Formal exercises are 
 thus universal in their relations, and extend the range 
 of mental power simply as power, and, while extend- 
 ing, also intensify, the power. 
 
 The distinction between training and discipline is, 
 it is to be hoped, made clear. Training has con- 
 stantly been assumed to be identical with discipline. 
 It certainly is contained in discipline ; but I would 
 further point out that it also lies outside it, and 
 that training is possible when there is no discipline 
 in the strict sense. This is apparent from what I 
 have said. To the neglect of the distinction between 
 these two educational notions is due the corresponding 
 neglect of a whole side of education. Had school- 
 masters been convinced that mental training can be 
 given by the study of language as the concrete 
 embodiment of thought, and that accordingly you 
 could give food to the mind, while, at the same time, 
 securing the training of it, school would have been 
 a pleasanter place for boys, and the results of school 
 work, both intellectual and moral, would have been 
 much more satisfactory than they have been. 
 
 For it is manifest that when a schoolmaster 
 realises that he can truly train the mind by getting it 
 
II.] THE REAL AND FORMAL IN LANGUAGE. 25 
 
 merely to understand literature, he will be more ready 
 to believe in the real or substance of language as 
 educative than if he regards reading as giving merely 
 information. He will then see that it is not necessary 
 that the organism of words which constitute sentences 
 should be studied with his pupils formally and 
 abstractly as an organism in order to secure training. 
 It is enough that they be studied for what they convey. 
 And in this there will be a great gain for his pupils. 
 For not only is the assimilation of food a training 
 of the intelligence-processes, but it is food ; not only 
 is it food, but it is a training of the intelligence- 
 processes. Now, food is what the hungry want, drink 
 is what the thirsty want, and all human beings hunger 
 and thirst more or less, and so can be trained through 
 their intellectual appetites. 
 
 The most real of all " things " are the thoughts of 
 man. One true thought, take it whence you will, 
 once fairly rooted in the mind of a boy, will do more 
 for him, whether he is to be a shoemaker or a statesman, 
 than grammar or the calculus or the syllogism will do. 
 So subtle are the secret relations of the material of 
 feeling and the suggestions of experience which are 
 always flowing into our consciousness, that one such 
 rooted thought quickly finds some worthy mate, and 
 is the mother of a whole tribe. Nay, even a partial 
 thought which fails to sustain itself, but dies where it 
 took root, is not wholly lost ; it enriches the soil and 
 stimulates future productivity. Mind is not the 
 machinery of thinking only, but it is a complex of 
 
26 THE REAL AND FORMAL IX LANGUAGE. [LECT. 
 
 substantial thought ; and you nourish thought in the 
 young only by thought. 
 
 f Let us conclude, then, that by the study of language 
 as a concrete study, as substance, as reality, we both feed 
 and train the mind ; we enrich the blood of mind, so to 
 speak, and we, at the same time, teach mind its courses. 
 
 Accordingly, if we were compelled to choose 
 between the formal or grammatical, and the real or 
 substance of language in educating youth, we should 
 unquestionably prefer the latter, and leave grammar 
 out altogether. For more than two thousand years 
 the formal has in all subjects been too much with us. 
 Definition, precept, dogma can be easily set down in 
 propositions, and prescribed for a boy's learning. The 
 work is memory work. The progress of the pupil 
 thus seems to be something measurable in respect 
 of quantity, and the master's task is easy ; whereas, 
 as a matter of fact, the true process of education is a 
 matter of quality, and is not measurable. 
 
 You will not conclude from this that I am disposed to 
 depreciate the formal in language grammar. I have 
 shown its bearing on the discipline and strengthening 
 of the mind in all its relations, including the conduct 
 of life. But it is quite consistent with this to hold 
 that in the education of a boy or girl, language is to 
 be regarded mainly as a concrete study, and that, as 
 the medium of all experience and of all thought, it 
 claims a much more dominant place in the school 
 than has hitherto been assigned to it, on this ground 
 among others that it trains. 
 
II.] THE REAL AND FORMAL IN LANGUAGE. 27 
 
 What is the actual state of things ? The technical 
 arts of reading and spelling being acquired with more 
 or less success, the teacher's work is thereafter largely 
 restricted by himself to the formal or grammatical. 
 You certainly discipline the mind in this way, but, 
 most assuredly, you cannot so best educate it. The 
 growth of mind and the growth of language in the 
 mind go together. There has to be organised in the 
 boy the language of his inner life, so that the language 
 may grow with the life and the life may grow with the 
 language. Now, this great object can only be attained 
 by the pupil's reading and re-reading, and comprehend- 
 ing the thoughts of others as expressed in fitting 
 words, and by his expressing his own observations and 
 thoughts native or borrowed in fitting words. 
 Both these intellectual occupations must be carried on 
 together. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY CONVEYING SUBSTANCE 
 OF THOUGHT. 
 
 Method of acquiring Language. Infant stage. Prim art/ 
 school stage. Secondary and advanced stage. 
 
 LET us now consider Method with reference to the 
 study of Language as substance of thought. Our aim 
 here is not to teach reading and writing, but to put 
 the young in possession of language as the articulation 
 of thought. 
 
 I shall be here very practical, and take the different 
 stages of language-teaching as these are fairly enough 
 indicated by the external division of school- work 
 the Infant stage (to the age of seven), the Lower and 
 Upper Primary, and the Secondary. 
 
 (a) Infant Stage of Language- Teaching m relation 
 to Thought. 
 
 In the child up to the eighth year, the range of 
 language is very small ; he probably confines himself 
 to the use of not more than two or three hundred 
 
LECT. III.] LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY. 29 
 
 words. Our business as educators is to give to 
 these words definite and clear significations, and to 
 help the child in adding to his stock. For in adding 
 to his stock of understood words, we add to his stock 
 of understood things, and, consequently, to his material 
 for thought and the growth of the fabric of mind. 
 
 In doing this we must follow the method which 
 nature is itself pursuing : the pupil is daily and almost 
 unconsciously adding to his store, in conversing with 
 others and in hearing the names of the common objects 
 which pass daily and hourly before his eyes. The 
 infant teacher, then, will not only respect taking 
 care that they are clarified, so to speak, and used in 
 a determinate sense the store of vocables already 
 acquired, but will add to the stock in seven ways, and 
 so promote the parallel mental growth. 
 
 1. By conversing with the class on any subject 
 suggested by the incidents of the day or of the class- 
 room, in such language as, while it may be in advance 
 slightly of that which the children themselves use, is 
 yet within their comprehension if they make a slight 
 effort. Teachers seem to forget that children have 
 ears through which they at this stage can acquire more 
 than from a printed book. 
 
 2. By telling them simple stories, and narrating or 
 reading to them fairy tales. Some educationalists have 
 objected to fairy stories for children because of their 
 fictitious character. It suffices here merely to point out 
 that the imagination of little children is very active 
 in the sphere of the possible and impossible ; that this 
 
30 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY [LECT. 
 
 normal activity of the imagination contributes largely 
 to the growth, culture, and enrichment of mind ; and 
 that it has to be taken advantage of by the educator 
 who respects law wherever he finds it. Where would 
 Homer and Sophocles have been had they not imbibed 
 mythological lore with their mother's milk ? Even 
 the genius of Shakespeare would have perished in the 
 thirsty desert of a childhood of bare facts. I would 
 further say, in passing, that what applies to children, 
 applies a fortiori to the adult ; and that fiction, the 
 drama, and art, ought, in consistency, to be excluded 
 from all life by those who would deny the unreal to 
 children. It might also be shown, were this the place 
 to do so, that in the active imaginations of children 
 and their appreciation of fairy stories, we see at work, 
 in a rudimentary way, the capacity for the ideals of 
 art and religion. In any case, let children listen to 
 readings by the teacher. 
 
 3. By means and this, at the earliest stage, chiefly 
 of object-lessons. Here words are learnt in close 
 connection with the sensible things they denote. 
 
 4. By means of the reading-lessons and examina- 
 tion on them, or rather conversation about them. 
 You will see the importance of the kind of reading- 
 books which should at this early period be preferred. 
 They must contain all the ordinary worcb of child-life ; 
 they ought also to contain a gradual and graduated 
 extension of the child's vocabulary ; and give expres- 
 sion and shape to his infant thoughts and growing 
 conceptions of the world and man. 
 
III.] CONVEYING SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 31 
 
 5. By means of verses e.g. nursery rhymes first, 
 and thereafter verses regarding incidents of child-life, 
 and descriptive of simple, moral, and religious story. 
 These should be learnt by heart for repetition and 
 singing. 
 
 6. By calling on the children to give an account, in 
 their own words, of lessons they have read, or stories 
 that have been told to them. 
 
 7. By means of writing in the later stage. The 
 writing of words, and simple sentences consisting of a 
 few words, does much to lay the foundation of accurate 
 expression even though such exercises be only tran- 
 scriptions from a book or blackboard. 
 
 / (b) Primary and Upper Primary School Stage. 
 (7 or 8 to 14.) 
 
 The above procedure is continued, but in advanced 
 form. The transcription of passages and the recita- 
 tion of verses are at every stage a part of the second 
 method. 
 
 When the pupil has left the infant-stage behind 
 him, that is to say, when he has got his second teeth, 
 and can take a firmer bite of the outer world (so to 
 speak), and his fingers a firmer hold of all that comes 
 within reach of his sense-tentacles, his instruction in 
 language, as the highway to thought, as the gateway 
 of the humanities, is, so far as the school is concerned, 
 generally regulated by the reading-books used. These 
 
32 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY [LECT. 
 
 language lessons constitute for the boy (except among 
 the wealthier classes) his whole literary curriculum. 
 How important it is, then, that they should be so 
 constructed as to fulfil the requirements of a literary 
 course. By means of a good collection of prose and 
 poetry, we extend the range of thought and language. 
 This is not to be done by reading one book devoted 
 to one subject. Accordingly, collections of good 
 pieces are to be preferred, and several books should 
 be read some with great exactness, others curs- 
 ively. 
 
 The question of method at this stage resolves itself 
 very much into this How shall we best use the 
 reading-lesson as a lesson in language, and through 
 language in the humanities ? Here, more than any- 
 where else, the cultivation, the knowledge, the 
 sympathy, the imagination, the educative skill of a 
 teacher reveal themselves. The reading-lesson is the 
 common ground on which the true mind of master and 
 pupil meet. 
 
 I take it for granted that object-lessons, including 
 nature - lessons, are always going on, and that, by 
 means of these, the words of the pupils are gradually 
 increasing in number and in exactness of application. 
 But this is a small matter compared with the training 
 in language as the vehicle of that which is not given 
 to us through the senses, of that which is the product 
 of the human spirit at work on the things of sense 
 and the facts of human life and conduct. 
 
 We must always bear in mind that every pupil has, 
 
III.] CONVEYING SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 33 
 
 as yet, technical difficulties to encounter in reading 
 the lesson prescribed. The lesson is, in fact, not 
 merely a lesson of thought, or feeling, or imagination 
 to him, but also a lesson in the deciphering of 
 words, and in articulate utterance always allow for 
 this. 
 
 The lesson (we shall say) is on " Courage," or 
 " Truthfulness," presumably well written as regards 
 form, and illustrated by examples. 
 
 To begin with : What is the subject before me as 
 a subject of instruction and education ? Manifestly 
 the lesson as a whole, that is to say, the thought, 
 the moral teaching of the lesson in its totality. And 
 next, what are the units of the lesson on which I 
 must base my detailed examination ? Not the indi- 
 vidual words, but the sentences. 
 
 Accordingly, we should proceed thus : 
 
 1. On giving out the lesson we should tell the 
 subject of it ; we should try to bring the children's 
 minds en rapport with the subject by conversing with 
 them briefly about it ; all in a very informal and easy- 
 going style. This we do in order that we may bring 
 what the pupils already .know to bear on the fresh 
 thought or information which they are about to 
 receive. Thereby the unknown lesson grows out of 
 the known, and is an organic, and not a mere mechan- 
 ical, extension of the thought of the pupil. "This, 
 now," we say, " is what the lesson you are going to 
 prepare speaks about, and you have now to go and 
 make out the sentences, and find what 
 
 3 /^ OF THE 
 
 (UNIVERSITY 
 
 V ~ Of _ 
 
ru [LECT, 
 
 to say on the subject, and we shall 
 afterwards." 
 
 2. We then see whet: . in the lesson 
 
 any words wholly new. a.nd to these wo direct the 
 
 .ition of the i 
 
 give theffl MMQQB; and this i .-;:: \- Driven ir.l> in 
 conn i' \ords air-. 
 
 The pupils are t: 
 for the follow 
 
 Ayuf^m^n^KM^mfm^m^^ufiK^A We 
 do not need in - 
 above mode of pr 
 point, niora.] or ^ 
 
 allude, and t .Id suffi, 
 
 way as to4qprive the lesson of 
 
 
 3, 0-.. ;:!; :. .'..-^-i:^ ;,.-,\ :':- '.-.;, > :v;..i with due 
 
 prooe0iB to examine n tftft JBMPH| soepe nd import 
 of theleBwfa>fe. What isitdIJMBt? What 
 
 OK mil^ Iwfaw kim, j* ^e^tfe iafe 
 
 W AM applt T:::s process 
 nclndnig^ 
 
in.] OONVKYIN., 9UBSTANC1 Of ni.MV.nr. 
 
 knowledge on tlu 1 basis of kno\\Kd iU v ahead\ pos 
 sessed. And this idea must run through all exmninu- 
 tions on the whole of a lesson, from the infant school 
 up to the age of seventeen. When this is lost 
 of, the art of examination is lost. Think of a man 
 doing this sort of tiling with a cane in his hand or 
 with severe magisterial airs ! 
 
 4. The next step is to take the units of lan-ii.i-r 
 (which I have said are the sentences) in their order 
 with the look open; just as in an object-lesson I 
 
 the total object to perception first, and thercafh i 
 proceed to look at the units \\hieh nuke up the total 
 object, which units are qualities, so now I lake the 
 sentences of the lesson as parts of tin- \\hoh-. Kadi 
 sentence is read again, and, after hein^ read, I ho master 
 asks such questions as will brine; info view it varioii 
 parts and relations, us well as the si^nilie.-niee of th,- 
 individual words. Thin is tin- pn-liiiiin.-n-v Hta^ of 
 what, as an abstract study, we know M analjlia, i$, it 
 ifi an analysis in relation to tin- syntln-iie ,r concrete, 
 which must ulwa.ys proeede the ;d. !i;id ;m<l r..Mii;i,l, if 
 UK; latter is to be intelligent, i.e.. have tt real hiniH. 
 
 5. The lesson should now Ji^ain he \ir\\e<| ,/.-, ,, 
 whole, having a he^innin^, a. middle, and an end; ami 
 UK; children should be. a -k<-d to j^ivo, an ace,, mil, <.f it 
 in their own words. OIK; or two of !,be mox- HH.M! 
 
 uptin^ thin, the, rest will be too happy l. lie in 
 wait for omissions and error;-;, with a view to mippl\ 
 and correct them. In this way r th<; le,s;-;on, win-Hi, i it 
 be descriptive, nar'rative, or didaH.ic, will be, reproduced 
 
36 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY [LECT. 
 
 by the combined efforts of the class. The master will 
 then read the lesson to the pupils himself, as it ought 
 to be read, they having their books shut. Thus, the 
 ear is trained. 
 
 6. The teacher may now also, at this stage (and with 
 the books shut), enter on the familiar and colloquial 
 illustration and extension of the subject of the lesson, 
 in more or less detail, according to the time at his 
 disposal. He will call on the pupils for voluntary 
 contributions to the subject, in the form of facts drawn 
 from their own experience, or for thoughtful sugges- 
 tions. Thus is the lesson " turned to use " by being 
 made productive of many deductive or collateral 
 lessons. It is at this stage that the practical applica- 
 tion of the lesson, if it be a moral one, comes in. Do 
 not dwell too emphatically on this, however, as if 
 children were so constituted that they naturally re- 
 sented moral and spiritual ideas. Take for granted 
 that they are children of God. 
 
 It may not be possible to do all that is suggested 
 above for want of time ; but it is none the less 
 necessary to understand what should be aimed at, if 
 we are to do for a complex literary lesson what is done 
 for a complex object of sense, when we give an object- 
 lesson. 
 
 So much for the lesson as a whole, and in its indi- 
 vidual sentences ; but addressing, as I do, those who 
 mean to be teachers, I would go now more into detail 
 with the fourth step in the examination process that 
 
III.] CONVEYING SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 37 
 
 in which we deal with sentences. By so doing I shall 
 make clear what is meant by the teaching of words in 
 relation to thought. It is presumed that the boy is 
 at the end of the primary stage, that is to say, about 
 fourteen years of age. 
 
 Take the following passage as illustrating how much 
 training as well as instruction (which, let me repeat, 
 is the building up of knowledge in the mind out of 
 the knowledge already there) may be extracted from 
 a few lines, bearing in mind that the questions 
 and answers are merely the skeleton of a prolonged 
 conversation. (The book is, of course, open.) 
 
 " Every student who enters on a scientific pursuit, especially if at a 
 somewhat advanced period of life, will find not only that he has much 
 to learn, but much also to unlearn. Familiar objects and events are 
 far from presenting themselves to our senses in that aspect, and with 
 those connections, under which science requires them to be viewed, and 
 which constitute their rational explanation." 
 
 Q. What kind of student is referred to here 1 
 
 A. The student who enters on a scientific pursuit. 
 
 Q. What is said of such a student ? 
 
 A. That he has much to learn. 
 
 Q. Is anything else said of him ? 
 
 A. That he lias much to unlearn. 
 
 Q. The author says that every student of a science has much 
 to learn and unlearn ; but he says that this is more particularly 
 true of a certain class of students ; what class ? 
 
 A. Those who begin at an advanced period of life. 
 
 Q. What is meant by the word " student " ? 
 
 A. One who studies. 
 
 Q. And what do you mean by studying any subject ? 
 
 A. Reading about it, and thinking about it. 
 
 Q. The student referred to is, you have told me, the student 
 " who enters on a scientific pursuit " pursuit here means subject : 
 What is meant by a scientific "pursuit or subject" ? 
 
38 LANGUAGE AS A KEAL STUDY [LECT. 
 
 A. A subject carefully arranged, so as to show its facts, causes, 
 and reasons. 1 
 
 Q. This explanation is difficult for you to understand ; you will 
 best explain it by an example. 
 
 A. Astronomy, Geology, etc., are " scientific subjects " or 
 sciences ; that is to say, the real facts about the stars (not merely 
 what seem to be the facts at first sight), arranged so as to show 
 their connections and causes, constitute the science of the stars, 
 or Astronomy (and so of Geology). 1 
 
 Q. Can any of you now, looking carefully at the sentence, shut 
 the book and giye me the substance of it in your own words ? 
 
 A. A person beginning to study a science will find that he has 
 much to learn as well as to unlearn, and this all the more if he is 
 grown up before he begins. 
 
 Teacher. We shall now take the second sentence. 
 
 (The teacher here reads it slowly, while the pupils follow with 
 the eye.) 
 
 Q. What is here said about " familiar objects and events " ? 
 
 A. That they are "far from presenting themselves," etc. 
 
 Q. What things are " far from presenting themselves," etc. ? 
 
 A. "Familiar objects and events." 
 
 Q. In the science of Astronomy, for example, what would the 
 " familiar objects and events " be ? 
 
 A. The heavenly bodies and their motions. 
 
 Q. Which are the objects, and which the events 1 
 
 A. The bodies are the objects, and their motions are the 
 event*. 
 
 Q. Now the author says that these objects and events are " far 
 from presenting themselves in a certain aspect and connection : " 
 What do you mean by " aspect " ? 
 
 A. Appearance. 
 
 Q. What by " connection " ? 
 
 A. Their union with each other, or other things, or their rela- 
 tion to these things. 
 
 Q. What kind of appearance and connection do they fail to 
 present themselves to our senses in ? 
 
 1 Of course an answer of this sort is worked out by the help of the 
 master, and must be the result of many leading questions which call 
 to memory all that a boy already knows in this department of 
 knowledge. 
 
III.] CONVEYING SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 39 
 
 A. The appearance and connections under which science re- 
 quires them to be viewed. 
 
 Q. Does the author say anything else about that " appearance " 
 and " connection " ? 
 
 A. Yes. He says that they constitute their rational explana- 
 tion. 
 
 Q. What " constitutes the rational explanation " of what ? 
 
 A. A certain aspect and certain connections of objects and 
 events constitute the rational explanation of these objects and 
 events. l 
 
 Q. Can we accurately say that an aspect or appearance and 
 certain connections constitute an explanation of anything ? 
 
 A. No. What is meant is that the presentation of them to the 
 mind in a certain light, and with certain connections, " constitutes 
 their rational explanation." 
 
 Q. What is meant by " constitute their rational explanation " 1 
 
 A. That the kind of presentation referred to is such an expla- 
 nation as satisfies the reason of a man. 
 
 Q. Now, can any of you, looking carefully at this sentence, shut 
 your book and give me the substance of it in your own words ? 
 
 A. The author says, that "things to which we are accustomed, 
 are not always seen in such a way as science requires them to be 
 looked at, and that the way of looking which science requires 
 gives us an explanation of these things which satisfies our 
 minds." 
 
 Teacher. Now, take your slates and go to your seats. Your 
 composition lesson to-day will be putting these two sentences in 
 your own words. In doing this you may make as many sentences 
 of them as you please. 
 
 I select the above sentence from Herschell, because 
 it is representative of the graver kind of prose reading 
 suited to the age of fourteen or fifteen the transition 
 from the upper - primary to the secondary stage of 
 education. 
 
 A school library must furnish the cursive reading, 
 and it should do so abundantly. 
 
 1 Vid. note on preceding page. 
 
40 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY [LECT. 
 
 (c) Secondary School Stage. 
 
 Of this Secondary stage all that can be said is, 
 that you go on as you have begun, taking care, when 
 perusing an essay or treatise, to exercise the boys in 
 the analysis of its reasoning as a whole, so as to reach 
 the principles on which the argument ultimately rests. 
 With this one remark I might dismiss the subject of 
 Language as a real study in the Secondary School, 
 especially as we have more to say under the head of 
 Language as Literature. But before doing so, let me 
 further illustrate my argument by citing passages 
 which may fairly represent the prose reading of boys 
 between fifteen and eighteen : 
 
 OF EECREATION. 
 
 " Spill not the morning (the quintessence of the day !) in recrea- 
 tions. For sleep itself is recreation. Add not, therefore, sauce 
 to sauce ; and he cannot properly have any title to be refreshed, 
 who was not first faint. Pastime, like wine, is poison in the 
 morning. It is, then, good husbandry to sow the head which 
 hath lain fallow all night with some serious work." THOMAS 
 FULLER. 
 
 CARE OF OUR TIME. 
 
 " God hath given every man work enough to do, that there 
 shall be no room for idleness ; and yet hath so ordered the 
 world, that there shall be space for devotion. He that hath the 
 fewest businesses of the world, is called upon to spend more time 
 in the dressing of his soul ; and he that hath ne most affairs, 
 may so order them that they shall be a service of God ; whilst 
 at certain periods they are blessed with prayers and actions of 
 religion, and all day long are hallowed by a holy intention. . . . 
 Idleness is the greatest prodigality in the world ; it throws away 
 that which is invaluable in respect of its present use, and irre- 
 
III.] CONVEYING SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 41 
 
 parable when it is past, being to be recovered by no power of art 
 or nature." JEREMY TAYLOR. 
 
 LEARNING AND GENIUS. 
 
 " Besides, who can tell whether learning may not even weaken 
 invention in a man that has great advantages from nature and 
 birth ; whether the weight and number of so many other men's 
 thoughts and notions may not suppress his own, or hinder the 
 motion and agitation of them, from which all invention arises ; 
 as heaping on wood, or too many sticks, extinguishes a little 
 spark that would otherwise have grown up to a noble flame. 
 The strength of mind, as well as of body, grows more from the 
 warmth of exercise than of clothes ; nay, too much of this foreign 
 heat rather makes men faint, and their constitutions tender or 
 weaker than they would be without them. Let it come about as 
 it will, if we are dwarfs, we are still so though we stand upon a 
 giant's shoulders ; and even so placed, yet we see less than he, if we 
 are naturally shorter sighted, or if we do not look so much about 
 us, or if we are dazzled with the height, which often happens 
 from weakness either of heart or brain." SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE. 
 
 The thinking out of such passages as these alone 
 with boys and girls in a kind of conversational exami- 
 nation will do much to feed and train mind in the 
 largest sense ; and if a boy is made to apply himself 
 independently to the comprehension of such passages, 
 he will also have his pure intellect so far disciplined. 
 In any case, it must be self-evident that we cannot 
 carry a boy through such readings without giving him 
 intellectual training, as well as substance of instruc- 
 tion. He is led to accompany the writer step by 
 step in his thought, and so, without being aware of 
 it, he is being exercised in the processes of thought, 
 
 I by identifying his own thought-activity with that of 
 another and more mature mind. Such intimate fellow- 
 ship with thinking must make a boy thoughtful. If 
 
42 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY. [LECT. III. 
 
 there is intellectual training to be got anywhere, it is 
 surely to be got here. The study of Oratio teaches Ratio. 
 
 I should like to complete the school study of 
 language as substance of thought, by reading with a 
 youth of seventeen or eighteen the Advancement of 
 Learning, Bacon's Essays, with the help of Whateley 
 and Abbott, and Locke's Conduct of the Human Under- 
 standing. In such studies there is true education of 
 the whole mental capacity. There is nutrition, train- 
 ing, and discipline, such as a youth cannot possibly get 
 from painful exercises in extracts from Greek authors. 
 It is at this stage, too, that historical readings from 
 our best writers are introduced, and large and rational 
 views of world history have their beginning. 
 
 We often hear of the value of translation from a 
 foreign tongue into our own. The English studies 
 I advocate are translations from the more difficult to 
 the more easy, translations, moreover, in which the 
 finding of equivalent terms by the help of diction- 
 aries will be of little use without a close study of 
 the thought of the writer. 
 
 " A boy reading the vernacular," says M. Fouillee, 
 " is carried along by the general sense of the passage, 
 and is not compelled to attend to details and delicacies 
 of expression as when he translates from a foreign, 
 especially any ancient, tongue." True ; but, this superfici- 
 ality is what good method exists to prevent ; it secures 
 the benefits which translation gives, and secures the 
 result which M. Fouillee rightly thinks so valuable 
 the making the work of the thinker and writer his own. 
 
LECTUEE IV. 
 
 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY CONVEYING SUBSTANCE OF 
 
 THOUGHT continued. 
 
 Method continued. Word-building. History of 
 Words. 
 
 I TRUST it will now be granted to me that in 
 teaching language as a concrete or real subject we 
 truly train the mind, although we cannot, perhaps, be 
 said, in any strict sense, to discipline it : Logos means 
 Eeason as well as Word. The right method of effect- 
 ing this training in language with a view to the growth 
 of the individual life and thought, through the com- 
 prehending of the thought of others, has also been 
 briefly put before you. The question of method, how- 
 ever, as applied to instruction in the substance of 
 language, is far from being exhausted. Numerous 
 subsidiary processes may be thought of by the teacher, 
 and some of these I shall now advert to. 
 
 1. Word-building. The great majority of the words 
 in use are not English, but Latin. The compositeness 
 
 43 
 
44 LANGUAGE AS A KEAL STUDY [LECT. 
 
 of the English Language is one of the causes of its 
 value as an educative instrument, as it is of its power 
 of delicate and various expression. Mere custom will, 
 of course, give a knowledge of the signification of these 
 foreign words, especially of those which have become 
 thoroughly domesticated. But even with these, and 
 still more with all the others, a thorough acquaintance 
 can be gained only by a conscious analysis of their 
 elements. The^mere statement of the root helps very 
 little. The word " element," for example, has just 
 been used by me ; but I get little light as to its signifi- 
 cation by being told that its root is elementum. Better 
 tell me the meaning in English at once, and then give 
 me elemental, eleinentary as derivatives. It is clear 
 that if we are to give boys effectually the derivatives 
 of any simple word, we must introduce them to the 
 prefixes and affixes, and exercise them in the precise 
 force of these. This is far more important, and (like 
 everything that is important in education) far more 
 interesting, than the Latin origin of the word, which 
 in itself, and by itself, is often barren of all intellectual 
 nourishment, except, of course, when it is part of a 
 Latin lesson. 
 
 With those words, however, which are fruitful, and 
 have a progeny, the root is most instructive. To 
 confine ourselves to words used hei# within the 
 compass of a few lines, let us take " signification." 
 It unquestionably is of great value in the acquisition 
 of the language to know the root signum, a sign, 
 and, having understood this, to build on this founda- 
 
IV.] CONVEYING SUBSTANCE OF THOUC4HT. 45 
 
 tion, signal, signify, signification, significant, signifi- 
 cance, design, designation, etc., resign, resignation, etc., 
 consign, and so forth. All these words are then bound 
 together by a common root-idea, and are thus better 
 remembered, and ever after more correctly used ; and 
 let us never forget that the correct use of a word is 
 the correct perception of a thing. So, " constitution : " 
 here we have stare, to stand, and out of it we have a 
 numerous progeny. Can any one doubt the value of 
 this kind of exercise ? Is it not, indeed, indispensable, 
 if we are to take possession of our native tongue the 
 sole vehicle of expressing our own thoughts, and 
 understanding the thoughts of others ? Let it be 
 carefully noted that this kind of instruction is not to 
 be given from text-books and in the form of lessons, 
 but must arise casually out of the daily reading, the 
 pupils having note-books in which they enter all that 
 is of value. Interest disappears the moment you leave 
 the page before you and try to give a formal and 
 didactic character to word-teaching, apart from the 
 living use of language. The teaching, moreover, is in 
 that case easily forgotten, because of its being divorced 
 from its natural associations. So much for the archi- 
 tecture of words. 
 
 It may be objected that* while prefixes and affixes 
 substantially retain their meanings wherever used, 
 English vocables derived from the Latin, especially when 
 they have come to us not directly, but through the 
 French, frequently lose their primary meaning. But 
 the fact that this is so, or that the primary meaning 
 
46 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY [LECT. 
 
 has acquired connotations in the course of daily use, 
 gives them an additional claim on our attention, and 
 additional importance as a mental training. The 
 words we acquire by scientific study are like the words 
 we acquire through an object-lesson, as meagre as they 
 are simple. White is white, horse is horse, and there 
 is an end of it. But the words which carry down 
 through the ages the thought of man, and not merely 
 his fact-observation, are complex in their nature, subtle 
 in their relations to each other, full of imagination, 
 rich in history. They are the mind of man in an object- 
 ive form nature itself speaking in all its richness, 
 and not in scientific formulae ; and were we to substi- 
 tute for them the boasted exactness of scientific terms, 
 we should destroy our inheritance. Mankind would 
 have to begin over again : there would be nothing 
 left but the " prairie value " of our opulent estate. 
 
 2. History of Words. These remarks naturally 
 introduce us to our second subsidiary process under 
 the head of method the history of words as distin- 
 guished from the formal building up of words. This is 
 a most stimulating study for the young, especially in the 
 secondary school stage. It is itself a kind of historical 
 education, and calls forth and cultivates the imagination 
 in a variety of ways. 
 
 The history of words is well handled by Archbishop 
 Trench in his well-known book (whether he is always 
 etymologically accurate or not is beside the present 
 question). The moral and intellectual benefit to be 
 
IV.] CONVEYING SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 47 
 
 derived from this kind of teaching is too obvious to 
 require more than mention. Take, for example, 
 " idiot," which means originally only, in the language 
 from which it comes, a " private person ; " then a man 
 either careless of public duties or incompetent to 
 exercise them ; hence a man uneducated and with 
 undeveloped intelligence ; finally, an " idiot " in the 
 present sense of the word. Much significant instruc- 
 tion, surely, for the young citizen here. 
 
 So also many lessons lessons full of moral sub- 
 stance may be drawn by the intelligent teacher from 
 such words as " simple," " silly," " virtue," " honour," 
 and so forth. These and numerous other words illus- 
 trate the history that is in all words, save those that 
 record a mere sense -fact. And yet we are told to 
 teach " things," that is to say, realities of sense and 
 not words, because words are barren ! Why, it is 
 through words first of all, as vehicles of things things 
 of the mind that we learn all that is worth learning. 
 Wendell Holmes well says, " By words we share the 
 common consciousness of the race which has shaped 
 itself in these symbols." Again, "Every word we 
 speak is the medal of a dead thought or feeling struck 
 in the die of some human experience." l " Words," 
 again says Emerson, " are fossil poetry." 
 
 In further enforcing this teaching of word-history, 
 I cannot do better than introduce Archbishop Trench 
 to plead for it. After speaking of " tribulation " as 
 derived primarily from tero, to rub, from which came 
 
 1 Elsie Venner, cliap. xxviii. 
 
48 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY [LECT. 
 
 tribulum, a threshing - sledge (which was a wooden 
 platform studded with iron teeth underneath), hence 
 tribulare, to crush and oppress, he says : 
 
 " This word some Latin writer of the Christian Church appro- 
 priated for the setting forth of a higher truth ; and sorrow, 
 distress, and adversity being the appointed means for the separat- 
 ing in men of whatever in them was light, trivial, and poor from 
 the solid and the true, their chaff from their wheat, he therefore 
 called these sorrows and trials ' tribulations,' threshings, that is, 
 of the inner spiritual man, without which there could be no 
 fitting him for the heavenly garner. Now, in proof of my asser- 
 tion that a single word is often a concentrated poem, a little 
 grain of pure gold capable of being beaten out into a broad 
 extent of gold-leaf, I will quote, in reference to this very word 
 ' tribulation,' a graceful composition by George Wither, a prolific 
 versifier, and occasionally a poet, of the seventeenth century. 
 You will at once perceive that it is all wrapped up in this word, 
 l)eing from first to last only the explicit unfolding of the image and 
 thought which this word has implicitly given it is as follows : 
 
 "'Till from the straw the flail the corn doth beat, 
 Until the chaff be purged from the wheat, 
 Yea, till the mill the grains in pieces tear, 
 The richness of the flour will scarce appear. 
 So, till men's persons great afflictions touch, 
 If worth be found, their worth is not so much, 
 Because, like wheat in straw, they have not yet 
 That value which in threshing they may get 
 For till the bruising flails of God's corrections 
 Have threshed out of us our vain affections ; 
 Till those corruptions which do misbecome UB 
 Are by Thy sacred Spirit winnowed from us ; 
 Until from us the straw of worldly treasures, 
 Till all the dusty chaff of empty pleasures, 
 Yea, till His flail upon us He doth lay, 
 To thresh the husk of this our flesh away, 
 And leave the soul uncovered ; nay, yet more 
 Till God shall make our very spirit poor, 
 We shall not up to highest wealth aspire ; 
 But then we shall : and that is my desire.' " 
 
IV.] CONVEYING SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 49 
 
 "Great will be our gains our pupil's gain and ours," the 
 Archbishop goes on to say, p. 42, " for teacher and taught will 
 for the most part enrich themselves together if, having these 
 treasures of wisdom and knowledge lying round about us, so far 
 more precious than mines of Californian gold, we determine 
 that we shall make what portion of them we can our own, that 
 we shall ask the words which we use to give an account of them- 
 selves, to say whence they are and whither they tend. Then 
 shall we often rub off the dust and rust from what seemed to us 
 but a common token, which, as such, we had taken and given 
 a thousand times ; but which now we shall perceive to be a 
 precious coin bearing the image and superscription of the great 
 King ; then shall we often stand in surprise, and in something 
 of shame, while we behold the great spiritual realities which 
 underlie our common speech, the marvellous truths which we 
 have been witnessing for in our words ; but, it may be, witnessing 
 against in our lives. And as you will not find (for so I venture 
 to promise) that this study of words will be a dull one when you 
 undertake it yourselves, as little need you fear that it will prove 
 dull and unattractive when you seek to make your own gains 
 herein gains also of those who may be hereafter committed to 
 your charge. Only try your pupils, and mark the kindling of 
 the eye, the lighting up of the countenance, the revival of the 
 nagging attention, with which the humblest lecture upon words, 
 and upon the words especially which they are daily using, 
 which are familiar to them at their play or at their church, 
 will be welcomed by them. There is a sense of reality about 
 children which makes them rejoice to discover that there is 
 also a reality about words ; that they are not merely arbitrary 
 .signs, but living powers ; . . . not innumerable disconnected 
 atoms, but growing out of roots, clustering in families ; con- 
 necting and interwining themselves with all that men have been 
 thinking and doing and feeling from the beginning of the world 
 till now. 
 
 " And it is, of course, our English tongue out of which mainly 
 we should seek to draw some of the hid treasures which it 
 contains, from which we should endeavour to remove the veil 
 which custom and familiarity have thrown over it. We cannot 
 employ ourselves better. There is nothing that will more help 
 than will this to form an English heart in ourselves and in 
 others." 
 
50 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY [LECT. 
 
 In the more advanced stages, synonyms and 
 ambiguous words should receive attention (see Appen- 
 dix to Whateley's Logic). 
 
 3. Sentences and Paragraphs. I have already shown 
 in the examination on a sentence from Herschell how 
 we should proceed in order to secure full comprehen- 
 sion of a passage by the pupil, and to make it the 
 basis for an extension of his linguistic and general 
 knowledge ; but I introduce the subject here again for 
 the purpose of saying that, as boys grow in years, 
 much more may be aimed at and accomplished than 
 I have yet suggested. If you wish to see what this 
 " more " is, I refer you to Locke's Conduct of the 
 Human Understanding a book too seldom read by 
 teachers and others. And I shall here hold it as read, 
 and so save space and time. 
 
 4. Paraphrasing. To facilitate the full compre- 
 hension of difficult sentences and paragraphs, the exer- 
 cise of paraphrasing came into general use in this 
 country about twenty -five years ago. Paraphrasing 
 consists in the turning into commonplace language, 
 which " any fellow may understand," the verses of a 
 poet, or the succinct prose of such writers as Bacon 
 and Browne. A more detestable exercise I do not 
 know. It is a vile use of pen and ink. One would, 
 of course, submit to it as an unhappy necessity were 
 there no other way of showing that we understand 
 an author. But this is very far from being the 
 
IV.] CONVEYING SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 51 
 
 case. To paraphrase Milton or Shakespeare, is to 
 turn the good into the inferior or bad, and to 
 degrade literature. Moreover, it is false. For the 
 youth who has done it imagines that his bald sen- 
 tences give all that is to be found in the original 
 passage of Milton or Bacon. If this were so, then 
 there would, alas ! be no such thing as literature, no 
 such thing as Art in language. When all is done, 
 you have no longer got Bacon or Milton, but only 
 your much lesser self. This exercise is based on a 
 misunderstanding of the whole situation. 1 Teachers 
 were vaguely groping for some means of assuring 
 themselves that their pupils really saw their way 
 through the organism of a piece of poetry terse, 
 elliptical, and frequently inverted in the ordo verborum. 
 But this object can quite well be attained by a process 
 which might be called " Kesolution," or, to please those 
 fond of big words, " Dialysis." It simply consists in 
 the writing out of the piece of poetry in grammatical 
 prose order, supplying words understood, but always 
 preserving the language of the poet. This prevents a 
 boy from contenting himself with that vague knowledge 
 which is not knowledge at all, but mere impression 
 supported by dim, disconnected images, or, it may be, 
 by the mere musical sounds or rhythm of language. It 
 compels him to be exact, and may, perchance, startle 
 
 1 Quintilian may be thought to approve of paraphrasing; but a care- 
 ful reading of the passage (x. 5) shows that paraphrasing with him 
 was, in truth, rather imitation certainly not the paraphrasing of our 
 examination halls. Ascham, again, with reference to Latin says, 
 ' ' Paraphrasis is not mete for grammar schools. " 
 
52 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY [LECT. 
 
 him for the first time into the perception that poets, 
 after all, talk plain sense, and may thus awaken his 
 critical faculties. To shut the book and try to ex- 
 press the substance of the thought of a prose writer 
 in your own words is an excellent exercise, but this 
 is not " paraphrasing " as commonly practised. 
 
 5. Reading and Elocution. To read well is difficult. 
 It is a rare accomplishment : nowhere more rare than 
 among teachers of elocution. 
 
 The secret of good reading lies in the practice (a) 
 of distinct articulation (even a little exaggerated in the 
 case of very young children), (b) of deliberateness, 
 These conditions secure reading that is intelligible. 
 (c) Emphasis comes next the emphasising of words 
 in clauses, so as to bring out their relative import- 
 ance, (d) Further, I would direct the teacher's 
 attention to what I should call Phrasing: that is to 
 say, the regulating of the rapidity and intonation of 
 subordinate clauses so as to bring into view their 
 subordinate character. The necessary prior conditions 
 of all good reading are, of course, the full comprehen- 
 sion of the passage to be read and the opening of the 
 mouth. 
 
 All this is quite teachable and attainable in the 
 lower-primary stage, and may be much improved in 
 the upper-primary. But more than this we cannot 
 expect (save where there is a genius for reading), and 
 we ought not to try to get more. If we call upon 
 children to add to intelligibility and emphasis and 
 
IV.] CONVEYING SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 53 
 
 phrasing, the emotional and imaginative as dramatic 
 elements, we at best secure a wooden imitation of 
 somebody or other a falsetto elocution. Nothing 
 can be more hurtful or more offensive. The teacher, 
 however, may so read the passage to them as to bring 
 out its full emotional meaning, if he feel himself 
 competent to do so. 
 
 In the secondary school stage, we may begin to 
 aim at really good reading. We shall finally attain 
 our aim only when there is a combination of physio- 
 logical, intellectual, and emotional conditions, which, 
 though not so rare as the natural qualifications for 
 good singing, is in truth a gift of nature. We may 
 approximate to it in a good many cases, however. 
 To begin with, it is based on imitation, and yet it 
 is not to be got by the mere imitator. There is 
 always a certain originality in it which an elocution 
 master never respects, but which has to be respected 
 if we are not to call forth mere slavish imitation of a 
 model. This makes reading artificial and false. Good 
 reading comes from within. It is not acting, no, 
 not even when reading a drama. The reader has 
 always to subordinate himself to his author, and let 
 him speak. As to the best style of reading, I like 
 much the words of Quintilian : " Beading should be 
 manly and grave, but grave with a certain sweetness." 
 Comenius' rule, " present a good model," is in reading 
 specially applicable. All teachers of English should 
 be good readers, and should read to their pupils much 
 more than they do. 
 
 UNIVERSITY. 
 
 rtcr 
 
54 LANGUAGE AS A EEAL STUDY. [LECT. IV. 
 
 As to the reading of ordinary prose, I think we 
 approach nearest perfection when we read what is in 
 the book as if we were speaking our own thoughts. 
 But it is difficult to appropriate from a printed page 
 what another says, and then say it as from oneself. It 
 is, in truth, a complex psychological process. 
 
 But all this about reading is intended in the in- 
 terests of language -teaching. For, by reading well, 
 training in language as the vehicle of thought as 
 a mental process uttered is largely aided, not only in 
 the case of the reader, but of those who hear him. 
 Good class-reading is thus one of the most valuable 
 of the imitative processes by which a boy acquires 
 language ; while the practice of it also contributes to 
 the growth of aesthetic perceptions. 
 
LECTUKE Y. 
 
 LANGUAGE AS A EEAL STUDY CONVEYING SUBSTANCE OF 
 
 THOUGHT continued. 
 
 Method continued. 
 
 Expression of a Pupil's own Thought in Language. 
 
 Oral Composition, Transcription, Elementary Written 
 Composition, Abridgments and Narrations, Transla- 
 tion, Imitation, Original Essays, and Reproduction. 
 
 THE growth of mind, if it is to be an effectual growth, 
 must be at the same time the growth of language. 
 In many and subtle ways they act and react on each 
 other. This must be so, because language is merely 
 the externalising of the inner life of mind. 
 
 1. Oral Composition. In giving rules for language- 
 teaching in the infant school (Lecture III.), I had to 
 include the synthetic exercise of putting words together 
 so as to form sentences, as both an oral and a written 
 exercise ; but above all, as an oral exercise at that stage. 
 
 55 
 
56 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY. [LECT. 
 
 It would be superfluous to repeat what was then 
 said ; but I must assume that, through the whole 
 period of education, the rules laid down are duly 
 observed. Much may be done to aid oral composition, 
 by always requiring a complete sentence from the 
 pupil in reply to questions. However scurvily we 
 adults may treat our noble language, content to convey 
 our meaning in any sort of way, the process of educa- 
 tion assuredly demands that language, simply as 
 language, be respected. 
 
 The habit of oral composition should ~be kept up during 
 the ivhole scJwol period. 
 
 2. Transcription. To make boys and girls sit down 
 and write out, with due attention to legible writing 
 and punctuation, prose paragraphs and poems from 
 celebrated authors, is an admirable exercise. It gives 
 linguistic material. At all ages, but especially in the 
 earlier years of language-teaching, this exercise should 
 be almost a daily one. Why should we dwell on the 
 many advantages that belong to this practice ? Is it 
 because it is so simple that teachers disdain it ? 
 Much of teaching and much of learning is unnecessarily 
 laborious, because teachers will not do what is simple 
 and natural and obvious. There is no strain in this 
 exercise, and it is all the better for that. 
 
 In connection with transcription we naturally men- 
 tion the learning of good pieces of literature by heart. 
 It is these two exercises, along with much intelligent 
 reading and intelligent conversing on the basis of the 
 
V.] EXPRESSION OF A PUPIL'S OWN THOUGHT. 57 
 
 day's lesson, that constitute the imitative in language- 
 education ; and they are as remarkable for not over- 
 straining the powers of mind as they are for building 
 up these powers in the healthiest possible, because the 
 most natural, way. 
 
 3. Elementary Written Composition. The next 
 stage in training to the expression of thought is the 
 formation and writing of connected sentences, either 
 in answer to some question naturally arising out of 
 the reading lesson, or in the record of some incident of 
 the day. Though I am opposed to the early begin- 
 ning of formal grammar, I think that at a very early 
 age, say eight, the attention of pupils should be 
 directed to the fact that a proposition or sentence is 
 an affirmation regarding something or other, and that 
 the distinctions of " subject " and " predicate " should 
 be taught. By frequent observation of numerous examples 
 on the blackboard, and not by definition or the expound- 
 ing of the teacher, children quickly learn this logical 
 groundwork of the sentence, and their knowledge can 
 then be used to correct the sentences which they them- 
 selves are required to write on their slates. In this way 
 they will very soon get a firm and solid hold of the 
 structure of a sentence. In examining the sentences 
 made, the teacher should invite the children to inspect 
 each other's productions ; and he should always select 
 some sentence shown up to him which contains a 
 typical blunder, and place it on the blackboard for 
 the criticism of the class. It is well also to select 
 
58 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY. [LECT. 
 
 the sentence or paragraph which he considers the 
 best and write it on the blackboard, and if he can 
 improve on it himself he should do so there and 
 then. 
 
 In all such lessons, Composition text-books are to 
 be avoided. They are not only superfluous, but hurt- 
 ful. Children should learn to express themselves in 
 connection with the ordinary reading - lessons, the 
 lessons in history and geography, and the ordinary 
 events of the day. Exercises should always arise, as 
 a matter of course, out of the day's experience. The 
 moment we formulate processes in a text-book and 
 give the book to the children, the formal, pedantic, 
 and formidable aspect of the subject frightens the 
 pupil, and misleads him into the notion that he is 
 required to do something very hard and uninteresting, 
 whereas he is really engaged in what is natural and 
 pleasant. The elements of composition should be 
 acquired without the children knowing that they are 
 acquiring them. 1 
 
 4. Abridgment and Narrative Writing. The next 
 stage is to accustom the pupils to write consecutive 
 paragraphs which contain an abridgment of the day's 
 reading-lesson, or of the lesson in geography or history 
 or which reproduce something read te them. The 
 stories read should, up to the beginning of the upper- 
 primary period, be dEsop's Fables, and pieces of this 
 
 1 The teacher should have one or two text-books for his own private 
 guidance. 
 
V.] EXPRESSION OF A PUPII/S OWN THOUGHT. 59 
 
 class. This for many obvious reasons which it is 
 unnecessary to give in detail. In order to compel 
 the children to see when they have made a complete 
 sentence, each sentence should be written for a time 
 as a separate paragraph. Abridgments should fre- 
 quently be made with the book open. Abridgment 
 and reproduction take the form of precis- writing in 
 the secondary stage ; and by precis- writing I mean the 
 reproduction of some historical narrative or some 
 report, so arranged as to bring out its leading points 
 logically and clearly and briefly. 
 
 5. Translation. During the secondary stage of 
 education, and indeed also in the last year of the 
 upper-primary, advantage should be taken of the study 
 of a foreign language for the purposes of English 
 composition. The day's lesson should be written out 
 in good English. There is, probably, no exercise so 
 useful as this for giving a command of the native 
 tongue. In the first place, the materials are provided, 
 and the pupil has simply to think of the language he 
 shall use : linguistic expression, as such, is thus brought 
 into prominence. In the second place, the language 
 to be used is suggested. In the third place, the contrast 
 between the foreign and the vernacular comes into 
 relief and compels attention to the comparison of the 
 two, thereby evoking that consciousness of language 
 which it is one of our aims to give. In the fourth 
 place, the different turns of expression which must be 
 resorted to, when translating into the vernacular, lead 
 
60 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY. [LECT. 
 
 the pupil to weigh words and phrases and idioms, and 
 to decide as to the right and wrong, the better and 
 the worse. Thus not only is his range of English 
 extended, but the critical faculty, as applied to 
 language, is cultivated. The imagination, as well as 
 the judgment, is exercised. 
 
 6. Imitation. About the close of the secondary 
 stage, it may not be a bad exercise to require youths 
 to read a good deal of an 'author, such, say, as Addison, 
 or Macaulay, or Burke, and to write on some subject 
 in their style not at all with a view to acquire that 
 style, but mainly as an exercise. But I cannot attach 
 much importance to imitation, though it had a leading 
 place in the rhetorical schools of the ancients. In the 
 case of a foreign tongue, on the other hand, whether 
 ancient or modern, I am disposed to think that a 
 youth who means to acquire style, in addition to 
 grammar, should select some one good author, and 
 always write in imitation of him. 
 
 7. Original Essays or Theses and Reproductions. 
 The word essay is a hateful word : it is associated 
 with so much in schools especially girls' schools 
 that is false and hollow and showy. The Komano- 
 Hellenic word Thesis or Theme is perhaps less objec- 
 tionable. Independent essays on subjects prescribed 
 may be begun as early as the upper-primary period, if 
 you confine the subjects to a narrative of what has 
 been experienced, or to a description of something 
 
V.] EXPRESSION OF A PUPIL'S OWN THOUGHT. 61 
 
 which has leen seen. Abstract subjects, such as 
 Patience, Fortitude, Justice, and so forth, are wholly 
 out of place, and indeed ridiculous, till the age of 
 sixteen or seventeen at the earliest; and, even then, 
 compositions on such subjects should be written con- 
 fessedly (and not furtively) on the basis of treatises 
 by good writers. They thus become essentially re- 
 productions, and are harmless. They are also useful 
 in so far as they enable boys to try to fly with their 
 own wings, and if they should fall, they fall much to 
 their own advantage, and not, like " Lucifer never 
 to hope again." Letter-writing, giving an imaginary 
 account of a journey, is a useful form of original com- 
 position ; and I need scarcely add that no boy or girl 
 should leave even a primary school without being 
 taught to use the ordinary forms of business or social 
 correspondence. 
 
 But whatever is done, let it arise out of the daily 
 work and occupations, or contemporary events, and be 
 natural and not forced. Matter before form. No one 
 can build without building materials. And always 
 remember that it is chiefly by the extensive and critical 
 reading of good authors that we get possession of our 
 own or any other language. Schoolboys should read 
 much more in school or for school than they do. It 
 is true that we cannot be said to possess language, or 
 anything else, till we can use it : but we ' must first 
 have the language to use ; and this we shall never get 
 out of the miserable scraps read in school, even when 
 supplemented by boys' books of adventure. 
 
62 LANGUAGE AS A REAL STUDY. [LECT. V. 
 
 8. Attend to the rule of Method, Present a good 
 model. I have seen teachers labour at composition 
 for months with very poor results, simply because they 
 did not themselves write on the blackboard or dictate, 
 and require the pupils to copy, their own perfected 
 specimen of the exercise which had been called for. 
 
 9. The rule as to exactness in linguistic work is 
 as applicable to the native tongue as to a foreign. 
 Corrected exercises should be returned, to be rewritten 
 and shown up a second time. Masters may be assured 
 that this is the quickest way of attaining their end. 
 One exercise thoroughly revised and rewritten teaches 
 more composition than a dozen loosely done. 
 
 XOTE 1. The teacher should have a list in his own possession 
 of the more common errors in composition, and give exercises 
 on these. 
 
 NOTE 2. By instruction in the language of books, in accordance 
 with the suggestions in Lecture IV., the acquisition of the power 
 of accurate composition will be greatly aided. 
 
 In these lectures I am speaking of the primary and 
 secondary periods of instruction only. As to the 
 graces of style : these, I think, cannot be taught till the 
 university stage. In universities, rhetoric, free from 
 the pedantry of figures and formulae, can be made a 
 most cultivating study. 
 
 Let us now look at language-instruction in its 
 Formal or Abstract character, i.e. as Grammar. 
 
LECTUKE VI. 
 
 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. GRAMMAR. 
 METHOD IN GENERAL. 
 
 I HAVE entirely failed in the preceding argument if it 
 does not now appear to every unprejudiced mind that 
 language taught as a concrete subject, that is to say, 
 with special reference to the substance of thought, 
 both nourishes and trains the mind nourishes it 
 intellectually and morally, and trains it by carrying it 
 through the processes of thinking, which find their 
 concrete embodiment in the forms of utterance. Our 
 own language, indeed, at once nutrifying and training, 
 must always be the main instrument of education : it 
 is only by an ample and adequate treatment of it that 
 the teaching of the school can be made contributory 
 to the maintenance of the national life, and, above all, 
 to the supreme ethical purpose of man's existence as 
 an individual and as a member of a society. Let the 
 young then read largely with understanding. 
 
 But there is such a thing as Discipline of iiitel- 
 
 63 
 
64 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 I 
 
 ligence ; \ and this discipline, as distinguished from 
 
 training, is most directly and effectively insured by 
 formal or abstract studies, such as arithmetic, mathe- 
 matics, grammar, and logic ; s and this because the 
 occupation of the mind with the abstract is the 
 nearest approach to the occupation of mind with 
 itself as an organism of thinking. Education without 
 discipline must be held to be defective, both as an 
 intellectual and moral process. Discipline, in brief, is an 
 essential part of all education, intellectual and moral, 
 of a rational being ; but it is always to be kept in due 
 subordination to nutrition and training especially up 
 to the age of puberty. 1 
 
 Given, then, that we recognise the significance of 
 the teaching of the formal in language with a view to 
 the education of a mind, the question now is, How 
 shall we proceed ? In other words, What shall be our 
 method ? 
 
 Now, we cannot adequately deal with method in 
 teaching grammar without applying the principles and 
 rules of Method. Were this the time and place, I 
 should ask you to follow me through an analysis of 
 the movements of the human mind in learning any- 
 thing whatsoever, with a view to the deduction of 
 these rules from the Science of education. As I am 
 now, however, dealing with the Art of instruction 
 
 1 Moral instruction, training, and discipline have to be separately 
 treated. It is only in so far as intellectual training and the study of 
 language bear on them that they enter into our argument in these 
 lectures. 
 
VI.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 65 
 
 alone, I must assume these rules as established. They 
 are not rules applicable to grammar alone, but to all 
 subjects of instruction. I shall draw on them only so 
 far as necessary. As deduced by me from the Science 
 of education, they will be found briefly summarised in 
 the Appendix. 
 
 A few words, in addition to what has been said in 
 past lectures, on the nature of the abstract, will intro- 
 duce us to our fundamental principle of procedure in 
 dealing with the abstract and formal in education. 
 Man does not live upon abstracts. There is no feeding 
 in them. And yet he is for ever abstracting and 
 generalising, correctly or incorrectly, consciously or 
 unconsciously. He perceives anything only by deter- 
 mining it as a single ; but if he stopped there, the 
 world of knowledge would be a world of isolated atoms. 
 He sees the common in the diverse, and then proceeds 
 to abstract and generalise. But this he does, not for 
 the sake of the abstract or general in itself. It is 
 merely a logical device, so to speak, whereby he attains 
 to a true knowledge of the individual real things them- 
 selves, as they truly exist in all their complexity. 
 The general and abstract, in short, reveal to him a 
 community of character and principle in the diverse, 
 and so help to reduce all to a unity of fact and pro- 
 cess of which all individuals are only the particular 
 manifestations or cases. The moment we begin to 
 play with abstractions, without constant reference to 
 things, we find ourselves in a sea of troubles. Accord- 
 ingly, abstraction and generalisation, while they start 
 5 
 
66 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 from real things, must return also to real things ; they 
 interpret them by showing their relations and common 
 ground. 
 
 The occupation of the intelligence with the abstract 
 is, as I have said, in a special degree, a discipline, 
 because in contemplating the abstract we are not far 
 from the contemplation of mind itself in its nakedness 
 as a living process, and are thus making an almost 
 direct acquaintance with the organon of all knowledge. 
 But this is not in the truest and fullest sense educa- 
 tion, but only that part of it which we call discipline : 
 it is to be compared to the sharpening of the edge of 
 a tool and the strengthening of the body of it for some 
 practical purpose. Grammar, as the logic of common 
 speech, is a system of abstractions. And, like all other 
 abstractions, it must be always kept in close intimacy 
 with the real, on which it rests the real of words and 
 sentences, if the abstractions are to have any signi- 
 ficance at all for the mind of a boy; or, for that 
 matter, of a man. As to method ; 
 
 1. The formal or abstract in language in other 
 words, Grammar should not be begun until the mind 
 of the pupil is sufficiently advanced to be able to grasp 
 it. " Of course not," will be the general response to 
 -this obvious proposition. And yet this rule of method 
 is scarcely ever attended to in practice. My own 
 opinion is (but .this is a matter on which there will be 
 difference of view) that the beginning of the twelfth 
 year is quite the earliest age at which grammar can 
 be effectively taught taught so as to be educative 
 
.VI.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 67 
 
 in its effects. At an earlier age it is hearsay know- 
 ledge. Prior to the age of eleven, and indeed very 
 early, a child should, by the help of numerous 
 examples, be taught to recognise the subject and its 
 predication the whole logical subject, that is to say, 
 and the wJwle predicate as constituting a sentence 
 or proposition. This formal condition of a possible 
 sentence can not only be taught very early, but it 
 is for practical reasons desirable to teach it early. 1 
 A recognition of this fundamental fact of both 
 grammar and logic is very helpful in enabling children 
 to understand what they read, and to express what 
 they desire to express. Beyond this one grammatical 
 fact we should not go until the pupil has entered his 
 twelfth year. Before this age, grammar has no place, 
 either in the infant school or the lower-primary, that 
 is not usurped. 
 
 The first objection which will meet us is this : 
 Inasmuch as a subsequent rule of method demands 
 that foreign grammars should be based on the native 
 grammar, we should, by not beginning native grammar 
 till the twelfth year, have to postpone Latin and French 
 till the thirteenth at the earliest. To which my 
 answer is : By all means ; why not ? In the case of 
 boys and girls who are intending to study French 
 and Latin, there would be no objection to giving them, 
 by the help of the blackboard, a certain number o.f 
 French or Latin vocables before the beginning of the 
 thirteenth year names of the familiar things of 
 
 1 In a previous lecture I have said at eight years of age. 
 
68 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 ordinary experience, and making use of these to teach 
 correct pronunciation and a few of the more common 
 phrases of ordinary intercourse. But more than this 
 it is not desirable to do. I am speaking of general 
 school education : the merely imitative acquisition of 
 French or German in the nursery mere memory 
 work at best lies outside my present argument. 
 But let me repeat here, in passing, that children 
 should be made to live in the atmosphere of their 
 mother-tongue alone, and think through the vehicle 
 of it alone, if we are to promote in them depth and 
 solidity of nature and unity of character. 
 
 2. As the first rule of method concerns the " when," 
 so a second rule of method concerns the " how much." 
 The rule of method to which I refer is that which 
 requires us always to keep the practical aim in view. 
 " Turn everything to use which you teach, and teach 
 nothing which you cannot turn to use." This is a 
 large question, and would afford materials for much 
 interesting discussion were I writing a big book on 
 method instead of a brief course of lectures. I must 
 be excused for dealing here somewhat dogmatically 
 with this, as indeed with some other requirements, of 
 method. 
 
 You at once see that you would ?.ot shovel the 
 whole of grammar, even in the restricted school range 
 of this subject, into the mind of a child in his first 
 year of studying it. And yet we all know that in the 
 department of Latin this was done for hundreds of 
 
VI.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 69 
 
 years, and still is done in many places not only the 
 whole of the formal generalisations, but the exceptions 
 to boot. 
 
 Here we have to encounter the obvious remark 
 which all of us can for ourselves put into the mouth 
 of a certain class of teacher before he utters it : " And 
 yet they got up their grammar somehow, and knew it 
 too, perhaps better than any of your modern boys 
 brought up on your new-fangled methods." To this I 
 reply, " Did they ? Who were the " they " ? The teach- 
 ing of Great Britain, in its secondary schools, has been, 
 till quite recently, exclusively the teaching of Latin 
 and Greek. A few clever boys out of the thousands 
 who have passed through the schools boys whose 
 brains were such that they would have mastered 
 Egyptian hieroglyphics and Etruscan inscriptions, with 
 all that has been written about them, if these had 
 been prescribed have, of course, overcome the defects 
 inherent in the no-method of the past through the 
 innate energy of their own minds. But what of the 
 rest ? Is it not high time that classical masters 
 should cease to throw dust in the eyes of the public 
 on this subject ? 
 
 In this connection I would have you observe an 
 irresistible claim of sound method. It is this : it 
 always, and at every point, secures the education of 
 the mind. By this I mean that at whatever point a 
 boy's study of a subject may be arrested, he has yet 
 received from the study, so far as it has gone, 
 an education in the exercise of the processes of mind 
 
70 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 which is not measurable by the quantity of material 
 annexed, but is yet the most potent of all disciplinary 
 influences in his future intellectual life. If method 
 as opposed to no-method does not accomplish this, but 
 merely makes the acquisition of this or that subject 
 quicker and surer, it can have little interest for the 
 philosophical educationalist, though it may still retain 
 its attractions for the practical instructor. But 
 as regards mere acquisition, it is notorious that 
 " no-method " has been a scandalous failure. Let us 
 then give method a chance. 
 
 Let us return to the " how much," as determined 
 by practical use. What is the practical use of English 
 grammar as distinguished from pure intellectual dis- 
 cipline, which intellectual discipline may be called a 
 theoretical use ? I answer, first, the enabling a boy 
 better to grasp the language of literature; and, secondly, 
 the enabling a boy better to express his own experi- 
 ences and thoughts (when he has thoughts to express). 
 Do you think you do this by the detailed analysis of 
 sentences now in vogue ? Beyond that general analysis 
 which brings into relief the logical construction of a 
 complex sentence, you do not help the boy. You 
 present him with linguistic riddles to solve, and make 
 his native tongue as offensive to him as w r as Latin 
 when it meant a mass of Latin rules iu Latin. Let 
 us protect our vernacular literature, at least, from this 
 barbaric dissection, and not defeat the literary purpose 
 we should always keep prominently before us in 
 teaching language. 
 
VI.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 71 
 
 We have been speaking of the " how much " we 
 should teach in all, that is to say, up to the close of 
 the secondary school course, the age of seventeen com- 
 plete, at which point I place the proper termination of 
 the secondary school. But it is evident to you that 
 the " how much " applies equally to each successive year 
 of study, and that we must limit each year of study 
 by the age of the pupil, and by what we can at each 
 successive period turn to use. All else is useless ; all 
 else is positively hurtful. 
 
 Here now enter the subsidiary rules of method : 
 " Little at a time, and that little well." " Little by 
 little, step by step, step after step." " Without haste, 
 but without rest ; " and so forth. 
 
 It may seem strange to you that one lecturing on 
 method should (especially after what he has said in his 
 first lecture) insist so strongly on the practical, and 
 keep out of view the theoretical aim, the formal disci- 
 pline of the intelligence. It would be too long a task, 
 and carry me too far into the psychology of method, to 
 explain this. But if I did, you would find the result 
 to be this, that a sound theory or philosophy of in- 
 struction and education is always practical, both in 
 its instruments and its aims. Further, that a sound 
 method of mere instruction is also a sound method of 
 mental discipline ; that the one secures the other, and 
 thus the two duties of the teacher discipline and 
 instruction are harmonised. 
 
 3. The method of procedure must be EEAL. The 
 
72 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 real, the real, and again the real that is the one 
 governing word, not only in all matter of education, 
 but also in educational method, especially in the sphere 
 of the formal and abstract. In teaching real subjects, 
 such as literature, geography, science, it is manifest 
 enough that the method must be real ; but what I say 
 is, that in teaching formal or abstract subjects, such as 
 grammar, arithmetic, mathematics, logic, rhetoric, the 
 method must be real that is to say, the abstract must 
 rest on the concrete, be led up to through the concrete, 
 and return to the concrete. For, in truth, there is no 
 abstract in the universe, and there is no abstract in 
 the mind of man which is not an abstract of, and in, 
 the concrete. Hence the rule of method to which 
 I am directing your attention, viz. the abstract and 
 general, must always be taught through the concrete. 
 
 We have spoken above of the abstract in general : 
 this is a fitting place to repeat the substance of what 
 was then said, but now in specific relation to the sub- 
 ject of language. Language, as an abstract or formal 
 school study, is the study of those generalisations of 
 likenesses and differences in vocables, and in the 
 organic relations of these in propositions, which, with 
 the addition of the external history of word -forms, 
 we usually sum up under the one name Grammar. 
 When, again, we generalise the characteristics of con- 
 tinuous composition, its logical sequence and persuasive 
 characteristics all viewed in relation to the attainment 
 of its end, whatever that end may be, whether to please 
 or convince we call the body of generalised rules 
 
VI.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 73 
 
 and maxims of composition which the analysis yields, 
 Ehetoric. Grammar and Ehetoric, alike, necessarily 
 tend to become a complicated body of organised rules, 
 and as such to be an object of study with a view 
 to correct expression in the one case, and eloquent 
 expression in the other. Now, the learning of the 
 body of grammar, even with examples tagged on, will 
 not make a correct writer, nor will the learning of the 
 rules of rhetoric, with illustrations tagged on, make an 
 eloquent writer. Nay, I go further than this, and hold 
 that neither the one nor the other will even enable 
 you to appreciate grammatical accuracy and nicety on 
 the one hand, or literary form and the secret of 
 oratorical or poetical beauty on the other. 
 
 To be of any utility, either as a discipline, or as 
 training, or as knowledge, grammar and rhetoric have 
 to be studied through examples. Grammar has to be 
 studied in and through sentences, and to be extracted 
 from sentences by the pupil, if it is to be really taught; 
 and so also rhetoric has to be studied in and through 
 the masterpieces of literature, and extracted from them, 
 if it is to be really taught. This last sentence, indeed, 
 sums up the true significance of the Eevival of the 
 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the department 
 of education. The meaning of the Eevival was not 
 always fully comprehended by the teachers of the 
 time. Hence the belief in style simply as style, and 
 the craze of the Ciceronians. Hence, too, the inevit- 
 able reaction and retrogression in the school to words, 
 rules, and forms, to the neglect of the realities of 
 
 or THE 
 XTKIVERSITt" 
 
74 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 literature and of observation. Accordingly, the 
 Baconian school, when it arose, was perfectly justified 
 in its assault on " words ; " and to this day it is 
 justified. 
 
 It is, in truth, in the interest the perennial 
 interest of the revival of letters that we call on 
 teachers to note that grammar and rhetoric, if taught 
 as abstract systems, are a mere aggregate of names, 
 dead names. These so-called " arts " must be taught 
 in close connection with the living body of flesh and 
 blood on which they rest. To illustrate this in detail 
 would carry me beyond my present purpose. I am 
 content thus far to have brought before you the dis- 
 tinction between language as a real study, and language 
 as a formal or abstract study, and to have emphasised 
 the further fact, that in teaching the formal we should 
 do so really, if we desire to succeed in our educative 
 aim. " Matter before Form," says Comenius. 
 
 All this is said in vindication of what I consider to 
 be the leading rule of method in all formal subjects, 
 which is, that they should be taught, much more than 
 they are, as real subjects, and in their practical rela- 
 tions ; and that the methods should be real. Grammar, 
 in brief, should always be taught in close relation to 
 the use to which words are put in expressing a thought, 
 and the functions of each word and phrase and clause 
 in the thought as expressed ; and, however advanced 
 a pupil may be, the secret of maintaining a living 
 intelligence is always to keep returning to the " real " 
 on which the formal reposes. 
 
VI.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 75 
 
 4. From what has been said, it follows that gram- 
 matical rules are to be taught, not logical rules. 
 Grammar is the logic of speech, but it is not logic. 
 A logical statement of word-relations is the logic of 
 grammar ; and as grammar itself is an abstraction, the 
 logic of grammar is the abstraction of an abstraction, 
 and incomprehensible by the young mind. 
 
 The above remarks on the teaching of grammar are 
 of general application. Let us now pass to the teach- 
 ing of the grammar of our native tongue. 
 
LECTUEE VII. 
 
 GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. 
 Method. 
 
 WHAT I have here to say necessarily involves a 
 repetition of the principles laid down in the previous 
 lecture, but now considered in a specific reference. 
 
 It is apparent from the nature of an examination in a 
 sentence of English, with a view to the thorough under- 
 standing of it, an examination which I gave you in a 
 former lecture, that the pupil who fully comprehends 
 it, has already analysed words and clauses in relation 
 to thought, and performed an important analytico- 
 synthetic exercise. He may now be said to have an 
 implicit knowledge of the grammar and analysis of 
 the sentence. Our object in teaching grammar is to 
 make the implicit knowledge explicit and conscious, 
 and to do this we classify words and clauses under 
 certain abstract generalisations or heads which we call 
 Noun, Adjective, and so forth, according to the func- 
 tion they respectively discharge in the expression of a 
 thought. We then generalise the logical connection of 
 
 76 
 
LECT. VII.] GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. 77 
 
 the words and the rules observed in connecting them, 
 and we call this Syntax. 
 
 Grammar, then, is the analysis of words and sen- 
 tences, with a view to collecting together all those 
 words and clause-relations that are like each other 
 under a common designation or name. The exercise, 
 accordingly, is pre-eminently analytico-synthetic, or 
 inductive. 
 
 At the risk of repetition let me say : we are not 
 now teaching concrete realities by means of their 
 symbols words and sentences ; we are teaching the 
 generalised and abstract relations of words and 
 sentences ; and our instruction is therefore formal, and 
 no longer concrete. It is Grammar. 
 
 When we carry this analysis further, and deal with 
 the inner logical development of any writing, and pro- 
 ceed still further to its aesthetic characteristics, we train 
 (as I have said above) in real logic and rhetoric. 
 
 I 
 
 The scope of our grammar teaching is limited by 
 
 what is practicable within the years of school life, and 
 must therefore be so taught that at whatever stage a 
 boy's education ceases, he shall have obtained the benefit 
 which grammatical teaching is supposed to give; in 
 other words, that the purpose of teaching it shall be 
 so far attained. 
 
 Now, this purpose is to give discipline by means of 
 a highly analytico-synthetic exercise of an abstract or 
 formal kind, whereby we make him conscious, through 
 the concrete, of intellectual processes ; and further, to 
 
78 GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. [LECT. 
 
 give greater command over words and their relations, 
 as used by others and by himself. 
 
 Method : First Stage. 
 
 1 . I think that the second rule of method (see Appen- 
 dix), which requires us to adapt subjects of instruction 
 to the growth of mind, demands special attention in our 
 consideration of the way of teaching grammar, or the 
 analysis of language. We must not burden the young 
 with this abstract work too early. By the perusal of 
 simple literature as a synthetic study after the method 
 already laid down, and by the practice of composition 
 as an imitative exercise, a boy is subjected to the 
 training which language gives without deliberately dis- 
 secting it. My opinion is that we should rely on these 
 exercises almost solely till a boy enters his twelfth year. 
 Prior to this, however, and solely with a view to 
 obviate the blunders that pupils constantly make in 
 imitative composition, it is recommended that the 
 division of every sentence into subject and predicate 
 be given even as early as the ninth year, and con- 
 stantly applied on the blackboard to correct errors in 
 the sentence-making of the pupil. Nothing more than 
 this, in my opinion, should be taught up to the begin- 
 ning of the twelfth year, and then tfre dissection of 
 language should be set about as a daily exercise. In 
 what way ? 
 
 2. We are dealing with generalisations, consequently 
 we ought not to give these general words called the 
 
VII.] GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. 79 
 
 parts of speech, or rules of syntax, to our pupils, but 
 guide them in the attempt to find them out for them- 
 selves. This is what is meant by the real method. 
 You do not, however, leave the pupil to flounder 
 unaided : you propound to . him the object of search, 
 just as a science professor would propound the 
 object of search to his pupils in a laboratory. For 
 example, the proper analytic exercise consists in 
 seeking for those things among a multitude that have 
 a common character, and collecting these together 
 under that common character, to which you then 
 give a name. This is a generalisation. But in teach- 
 ing the very young we must lead the way by telling 
 them the character which we are seeking; e.g. this 
 sentence, " the warm sun shines by day, and the bright 
 moon and twinkling stars by night," having been 
 written on the board, we ask for those words that are 
 names of things. These being picked out and arranged 
 in a column by themselves on the board, we next give 
 a few additional sentences, and proceed in the same 
 way. The words thus brought together as " Name- 
 words " in the column are then revised, and the first 
 lesson in grammar is given. The child has brought 
 them together himself with your co-operation and 
 guidance. 
 
 Thus we fulfil two rules of sound method, for we 
 teach generalisations as generalisations, i.e. through 
 particulars, and we get the pupil to instruct himself. 
 
 3. The next step is to pick out name- words from 
 the day's lesson, and to give this as a slate exercise in 
 
80 GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. [LECT. 
 
 school or to be done at home. Thus we fulfil the 
 rules of sound method which require us to repeat and 
 revise, and further to turn to use, what has been 
 acquired. We ma} 7 at this stage substitute the word 
 noun for " name-word," but we should, in the whole 
 course of grammatical teaching, be continually testing 
 the pupil in the knowledge of the simple meaning and 
 force of all the technical words used, and this because 
 they are Latin and abstract terms. 
 
 The greatest difficulty you will meet with at this 
 stage of teaching will be the recognition by the boy of 
 those nouns which are names of things not sensible. 
 This is because a considerable power of abstraction is 
 necessary to the mere identifying of them. You over- 
 come this and other difficulties only by frequent 
 repetition of the same sentences and continual con- 
 struction of similar ones on the blackboard, taking care 
 to confine yourself to simple, or, at most, compound 
 sentences. Exposition will not be of much use. By 
 constant presentation of instances, the pupil learns to 
 form his own abstract. 
 
 Never give a lesson of more than ten minutes' 
 length. Three lessons of ten minutes each daily are of 
 far greater advantage than one of sixty minutes. Thus 
 we fulfil the rule, " Little by little." 
 
 4. We now proceed gradually in the same way 
 (i.e. step by step, little by little, repeating and revising, 
 and turning to use daily) with adnouns (or adjectives), 
 then for-nouns, then verbs, and then adverbs, giving 
 five or six lessons, at least, to each new part of speech. 
 
 
VII.] ClIJAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. 81 
 
 A verb should be introduced as a " doing or telling 
 word," and an adverb as qualifying a verb. But a 
 mechanical help may be given (in the case of verbs) 
 by suggesting to them to try a word by putting " /" 
 before it and see if it makes sense. 
 
 5. Having reached this point, we should pause a 
 while until we are satisfied that these generalisations 
 are thoroughly known ; in this way obeying the rule 
 demanding exactness as necessary if there is to be a 
 sure foundation for the next step, further knowledge 
 being an organic growth out of what is known (assimi- 
 lation, apperception) ; obeying, too, the further rule 
 which requires us to dwell long over the beginnings of 
 a subject. [If we put " a " and " the " among the ad- 
 nouns, which is the simplest way of doing, as well as, 
 perhaps, the most correct, we reduce the parts of speech 
 to seven, for interjections do not count ; and of these 
 seven, the five most important are now acquired.] 
 
 In the course of three or four weeks from the date 
 of beginning, provided there is continual turning to use 
 of the knowledge gained, we may go on to prepositions, 
 and thereafter to conjunctions. When the words under 
 a class-name are. limited in number, as in the case of 
 conjunctions and prepositions, I would have the children 
 make a list of them as they occur, and enter them in a 
 grammar note-book, with which each child should be 
 provided. In this way the child gradually makes his 
 own grammar-book, and the rule as to self -instruction 
 is fully operative. 
 
 The pupil, before he has begun this grammar course, 
 6 
 
82 GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. [LECT. 
 
 is presumed, remember, to be familiar with the things 
 and names " subject " and " predicate." If he is not, 
 you must interpose this instruction before you can 
 rationally teach conjunctions. 
 
 6. The next step is to teach number. This we do 
 by asking the children themselves to make the plural, 
 and then putting down such words as they may make 
 e.g. horse, horses; church, churches on the board. The 
 pupils quickly see that the one word denotes a siiiglc 
 thing, and the other a more-than-single thing ; and w r e 
 may now teach the terms " singular " and " plural," 
 as more convenient. Thus we follow the rule of 
 teaching through the senses, and the further rule of 
 constructing the abstract term out of particulars 
 known. 
 
 7. Having become familiar with singular and plural 
 in a single lesson followed by a home exercise, we can 
 now have an amusing exercise in exceptional words, such 
 as mouse, ox, sheep, and so forth. Thus you follow 
 the rule, " The prominent or salient facts of a subject 
 should be taught first ; details and exceptions after- 
 wards." To bother children with rules for the forma- 
 tion of the plural, and to require them to learn by 
 heart lists of exceptions which they already know 
 through colloquial usage, seems to me a perverse attempt 
 to make difficult what is easy, and to*disgust children 
 with what is, when properly taught, a pleasing, stimu- 
 lating, and even amusing, exercise. You are entitled 
 to ask for the plural of child, or ox, etc., but not to 
 ask for a list of irregular plurals. This last is rote- 
 
VII.] GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. 83 
 
 memory work. Many examination papers are con- 
 structed on this false principle, not only in schools, 
 but in universities, and on other subjects than 
 grammar. 
 
 8. Gender is in English a very easy matter. It 
 is, however, better to use, for a time, the terms male, 
 female, and neither, and to employ the word kind 
 instead of the Latin term gender. I think you may, 
 without danger to the child's intellectual and moral 
 progress, omit the feminine of " Landgrave " and cer- 
 tain other words of this class. 
 
 9. The knowledge up to this time acquired by the 
 pupil and I use the word acquired advisedly, for it 
 lias not been put into him, but brought out of himself 
 by himself, with your guidance and co-operation 
 having been thoroughly revised, the pupil is now in a 
 position to name the class of each of the words in four 
 or five lines of the reading-lesson of the day. Occa- 
 sionally he should transfer these to the slate in columns. 
 From day to day also he is adding to his stock of pre- 
 positions and conjunctions as he meets with them, 
 and these he inserts in his note-book. He may now 
 learn the distinction between proper and common 
 nouns, but further distinctions should be scrupulously 
 avoided. The salient and prominent are to take pre- 
 cedence of the rare and exceptional. Note that we 
 are daily turning to use what has been acquired ; and 
 in order to maintain an intelligent connection with past 
 teaching, and consequently the organic character of our 
 teaching, we must be constantly going back, by the 
 
84 GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. [LECT. 
 
 help of the blackboard, to past introductory lessons, 
 and thereby testing intelligence. . 
 
 A short daily lesson during one school term ought 
 to bring a class composed of pupils in their twelfth 
 year as far as I have yet got. A fair familiarity with 
 the parts of speech, the numbers and genders, will 
 now have been obtained, and we then enter upon the 
 second stage of grammar-teaching, which involves us 
 in syntax ; and syntax is unintelligible save as analysis. 
 
 Second Stage. 
 
 1. What has hitherto been learned has been taught 
 on the basis of the sentence in which alone the function 
 and consequent classification of words find their concrete 
 basis. 
 
 You now, with a view to syntax, bring more con- 
 spicuously forward the knowledge the pupil already 
 has of subject and predicate, thus : 
 
 The child sleeps, 
 
 The child cries, 
 
 The child dresses her doll, 
 
 and so on. Keep always in mind the rule of method 
 that generals are to be formed out of known particulars. 
 The verbs having been named, you row call for the 
 difference between cries and dresses, and bring into 
 view the fact of transitive verb and the noun as an 
 object. And why ? Because the verb does not express 
 by itself a complete sense. 
 
VII.] GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. 85 
 
 2. For the next week or two (taking care meanwhile 
 to observe the memory rule of method and daily to 
 revise briefly all the child as yet knows), you do nothing 
 but exercise your pupils in this distinction of subject 
 with intransitive verb as the principal word in the 
 predicate, and transitive verb as the principal word in 
 the predicate but requiring an object. In the course 
 of these exercises, the change of form which the verb 
 in the present tense undergoes, when we substitute a 
 plural subject for a singular one, is apparent. We 
 dwell on this step that we may obey the rule of Exact- 
 ness as necessary to a sure and solid foundation for 
 further knowledge. 
 
 Observe that at this stage we still continue to give 
 the whole subject and the whole predicate, but we have 
 now begun to distinguish the subject-noun and the 
 object-noun. The words in italics in what follows 
 are the whole subject : " That fierce nation, the Goths, 
 emerging with daring plans from the northern regions 
 of Europe, armed with sword and spear, advanced 
 slowly but steadily southward." 
 
 Subject-noun and object-noun are the terms to be 
 used instead of nominative and objective case. 
 
 I need not further illustrate this stage to those who 
 have studied the analysis of sentences. 
 
 3. The pupil next "turns to use" all that he 
 had been taught (thus revising and repeating) ; for 
 he now parses sentences from his daily reading- 
 lesson that is to say, he names first the whole 
 subject of a sentence and the whole predicate ; he 
 
86 GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. [LECT. 
 
 then selects the predicative verb, and next the lead- 
 ing subject-noun, and the object-noun in relation to 
 the verb when it is transitive. He then names each 
 part of speech successively, points out the nouns 
 which the adjectives qualify, also their number, gender, 
 and so on. The second term of the school year is noiv at 
 an end. 
 
 Third Stage. 
 
 1. You next direct the pupil's attention to the fact 
 that the words called prepositions, which he has been 
 gradually collecting in his note-book, do not make 
 a complete sense any more than transitive verbs 
 do, without an object ; and you exercise him in this 
 with the help of the blackboard, and embrace this 
 piece of syntax^ in your parsing lessons hence- 
 forth. 
 
 2. When you enter on tense, you follow the rule that 
 in teaching vernacular grammar you are raising vague 
 and implicit knowledge to clear and explicit knowledge, 
 by beginning thus : " When you leave school you say, 
 ' 1 go home ; ' but you left school yesterday also, and 
 would you say, ' I go home yesterday ' ? To-morrow also 
 you will leave school, and you say, ' I shall go home 
 to-morrow.'" They know the tenses implicitly already, 
 and you are now simply raising the vagueness of the 
 implicit to the clearness of the explicit ; the word 
 time being always used instead of the word tense. 
 Every fresh step is to be written on the board, and in 
 some cases, as in that of time, illustrated to the eye. 
 
VII.] GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. 87 
 
 But only present, past, and future should at this stage 
 be taught. All this will carry you well into the third 
 school term ; for an endless variety of simple exercises 
 are needed at this stage, and you cannot go fast. 
 (Step by step : little by little : be exact : repeat.) 
 Moreover, remember that you are parsing daily as far 
 as the pupil can parse, and so applying all the know- 
 ledge as yet acquired. 
 
 3. Observe now that the pupil has been gradually, 
 as the result of his own observation, acquiring a few 
 general rules of Syntax, viz. : " A verb agrees with its 
 subject-noun ; " "A transitive verb and a preposition 
 require an object-noun." These, after they have been 
 inscribed on the blackboard, should be written out by 
 him in his note-book. 
 
 4. You now decline the pronouns, introducing them 
 in connection with the verbs and not by themselves : 
 thus, you say, " / learn my lesson," but if you are 
 speaking to another you say what ? " You learn your 
 lesson." [Here explain about " thou " as the true- 
 singular.] If speaking of another you say, " He or she 
 learns his or her lesson." 
 
 In this way you pick out the personal pronouns 
 and write them out fully declined on the board, and 
 get the pupils to copy them down in their note-books 
 with a view to a home lesson. 
 
 5. The pupil is then led to extend his knowledge 
 of time or tense and then moods, you using such words 
 as telling-mood, commanding-mood, " may"-mood. You 
 work out the verb in all its tenses and moods on the 
 
88 GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. [LECT. 
 
 blackboard in the same way, i.e. by drawing them out 
 of the children, and getting them, after a few slate 
 exercises, to write them out in tabular form in their 
 note-books. 
 
 A thorough knowledge of the above course gives a 
 child as extended and definite a knowledge of the founda- 
 tions of grammar as any boy or girl need have. Kevise 
 and re-revise, and apply the knowledge in every pos- 
 sible way ; always forcing your way through words 
 to realities ; e.g. gender is kind, singular is single, verb 
 is word, tense is time. Use these words indifferently, 
 or repeat them ; e.g. " What time or tense is it ? " 
 
 You will have observed that I have assumed that 
 you teach orally by the aid of the blackboard and the 
 ordinary lesson-book only, the child making notes in 
 his book, and, in point of fact, constructing a Grammar 
 for himself. But you yourself should be guided by 
 some little text-book : this for the sake of the exercises, 
 and as a relief to your own mind and memory. 
 
 The pupil has now reached his thirteenth year 
 (twelve complete), and may have some cheap text-book 
 put into his hands. I speak of the mass of children. 
 He will now, at the beginning of his second year, very 
 quickly run over the text-book with you ; revising all 
 he has acquired in one term : but the chief addition to 
 his knowledge in doing so will be ia the relative 
 pronouns. There is really little or nothing more to do 
 except to confirm what has been already acquired by 
 means of a daily brief exercise. The pupil will now 
 begin a foreign language with confidence, while daily 
 
VII.] GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. 89 
 
 parsing his English and extending his knowledge of 
 analysis, step by step and slowly. 
 
 But let me beseech you not to go beyond what is 
 called general analysis. Analysis of sentences is 
 unquestionably overdone. The value of it will be 
 found to consist in the correct application of a little 
 thoroughly Jcnoivn. For example, if a boy, even at 
 fourteen, can readily distinguish the enlargement of 
 the subject, the extension of the predicate, the principal 
 and subordinative clauses, the noun clause, the adnoun 
 clause, and the adverb clause, he knows the logical 
 organisation of a complex sentence, and this is enough. 1 
 Avoid minute distinctions which confuse, and by confus- 
 ing the mind subvert discipline and draw attention away 
 from the broader and more uniform relations of clauses ; 
 but take care that the boy is thoroughly familiar with 
 the broader relations, and ready in discriminating them. 
 I need scarcely say that analysis, like ordinary grammar, 
 should be extracted from sentences by the pupil with 
 your help, not learned from a book. I am disposed to 
 think that the tabulating or pigeon-holing of the 
 different clauses, and the use of symbols, should not 
 be encouraged. The function of every clause in a 
 complex sentence should be worked out in its relation 
 to the meaning of the sentence as a whole and as a 
 reality. In the writing out of tables there is too 
 much of formulation, and the pupil becomes the slave 
 of formulae to such an extent that he parts company 
 
 1 The clauses should always be named in these grammatical terms as 
 far as possible. It is grammar, not logic, that \ve are teaching. 
 
 or THE r \ 
 TJN1VERSITT' 
 
 Of 
 
90 GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. [LECT. 
 
 with the real, and, strange to say, may turn out a very 
 good tabulated exercise, and yet have no conception 
 of the real relations of the parts of the sentence. 
 
 The purpose you have in view must never be lost 
 sight of. It is a disciplinary purpose ; but besides 
 this, and chiefly, you wish to increase the boy's power 
 of seeing through the meaning of long and complex 
 sentences, especially in poetry, and so extending his 
 grasp and comprehension of literary language. You 
 have the further practical purpose of giving him a 
 more exact grasp of the language he himself daily 
 uses, with the view to his employing it in his set 
 compositions. 
 
 As a help it might be well to draw up a wall- 
 sheet of the chief points in grammar and analysis to 
 be constantly referred to. Do not buy somebody 
 else's wall-sheet. I do not know what may be best 
 in training mechanical engineers, but, in general educa- 
 tion, the master and his boys should not only make the 
 machine, but also their own tools as they need them. 
 
 Historical grammar may occasionally be referred to 
 by yourself to illustrate peculiarities, such as oxm, 
 kine, etc. ; but no historical grammar should be 
 formally taught before the age of fifteen, and even 
 then very sparingly. If you attempt it in the early 
 stages of study, you will hopelessly conKse the child's 
 mind. His business is to learn what is, and not either 
 what was, or may be, or will be. 
 
 I have not spoken of the whole of grammar. It 
 
VII.] GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. 91 
 
 would be an insult to the intellect of teachers were I 
 to enter into details of method over the whole field. 
 
 The importance of method, moreover, in abstract 
 subjects lies in the initiation into the subject, the lay- 
 ing of the foundations of the new knowledge in its 
 organic relations to what is already known already 
 in the mind of the pupil. 
 
 The principal defects found in the teaching of 
 grammar in schools is, first, the piecemeal character of 
 the teaching. The teacher forgets that every sentence 
 is an ' organism to be taken to pieces and built up 
 again as a living logical statement. Secondly, want of 
 accuracy and precision, which prevails to a scandalous 
 extent. This defect manifestly vitiates the whole 
 teaching, and makes it worse than useless. The 
 importance of grammar, remember, for boys and girls 
 lies in this, that it is a valuable exercise of " mind in 
 analysis and in the discrimination of verbal distinctions 
 and relations. It thus cultivates the power of dis- 
 tinguishing in general ; and, above all, of distinguish- 
 ing between things which are objects of reflection 
 (notional), and not merely the more easily distinguished 
 things of external observation. Now, if the distinctions 
 made cross each other, or are vague and indefinite, 
 parsing and analysis of sentences are illusory as a 
 discipline. And, again, however accurate the dis- 
 tinctions may be, if they are too numerous, they 
 defeat their own end by confusing the pupil. 
 
 Grammatical teaching, I have said, can have only 
 three possible objects in a school the formal discipline 
 
92 GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. [LECT. 
 
 of mind, the more thorough understanding of reading- 
 lessons, and the art of composition. The first is not 
 only not promoted, it is unquestionably retarded, by 
 vagueness of definition or the slurring over of diffi- 
 culties ; the second and third are not to be attained by 
 mere parsing, unless it take the form of analysis, and 
 be supported by actual practice in the construction of 
 sentences and paragraphs. 
 
 Merely "fair" results in a subject of a formal kind, 
 be it grammar or logic or mathematics, are of little 
 practical value, disciplinary or other. 
 
 In conclusion, let the teacher, or the man of science 
 who does not always fully appreciate grammar, consider 
 for a moment the mental processes a boy is putting 
 himself through when he parses a sentence, and he 
 will see that there is in intelligent and accurate parsing 
 a true discipline of the understanding. Take one of 
 the simplest exercises the parsing of " shall have 
 seen." The boy first selects the word to which the 
 others are auxiliary, referring it to a class in respect 
 of the function it discharges in the sentence a pro- 
 cess first of analysis and then of deductive reasoning ; 
 he refers the auxiliary portions to their proper " time," 
 an act of discrimination among possible times or 
 tenses ; he relates the whole to its antecedent subject 
 and its sequent object, which involve? a perception 
 of relations among separate thoughts and symbols of 
 thoughts. Each successive word attacked is, in truth, 
 a separate problem ; and it is this characteristic which 
 gives a subject of school instruction disciplinary value. 
 
VII.] GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. 93 
 
 Realise this, and you cannot fail to realise at the same 
 time the importance of the exercise and the necessity 
 for exactness. Analysis of sentences is a repetition 
 of the same kind of intellectual process in relation to 
 the clauses of a complex sentence as that which we 
 apply to words alone in ordinary parsing. 
 
 On this special branch of grammatical teaching 
 known as analysis of sentences, I have not time here 
 to do more than repeat what I have already said : It 
 should be restricted within narrow limits ; and, secondly, 
 the terms applied to words should also be applied to 
 clauses, viz. noun, adnoun or adjective, adverb, etc. 
 
 In dealing with grammatical teaching, I have been 
 restricting myself to the upper-primary school, which 
 begins at the age of eleven. 
 
 If pupils continue at school during the strictly 
 secondary period of instruction, fourteen to seventeen 
 or eighteen, the formal grammatical studies find their 
 completion in historical grammar and the elements of 
 comparative philology ; but the elements only. By 
 this time both boys and girls have some know- 
 ledge of two or three languages, and whether it be 
 Romance or Teutonic or Classical philology which we 
 teach, we are exercising the young scholar in scientific 
 work work as scientific in all its aspects as physics 
 more scientific in the large sense than chemistry or 
 zoology. No man is a competent linguistic teacher in 
 a secondary School who has not made a study of the 
 comparative sgience of language. But bear in mind 
 
94 GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. [LECT. 
 
 that the teaching of comparative philology and the 
 genesis of English is not instruction in the English 
 language, but a teaching of the science of language as 
 illustrated by the particular case of English a most 
 interesting study, but a science like any other 
 science, and to be taught only when it ought to be 
 taught. 
 
 About the age of sixteen, boys and girls who have 
 had a good foundation laid, begin to reason actively, and 
 are not only fit for inductive and deductive scientific 
 studies, but, if these are kept within due limits, they 
 are attracted by them. Here, as everywhere else, all 
 depends on the teacher, on his fulness of knowledge 
 and on his method. Anglo-Saxon, etc., belong to the 
 university stage of instruction. In the school they 
 are out of place. Text-books of comparative grammar 
 and rules, got up and applied deductively, reduce the 
 elements of even this subject, naturally so fresh and 
 stimulating, to the dreariness and aridity which char- 
 acterised all teaching in the past, and afflict very 
 much of it now. 
 
 In grammar, as in everything else, let us remember 
 that the desire to attain to a measurable result in 
 acquisition is ruinous. What we should aim at is 
 a natural and pleasing activity of intelligence in the 
 direction and on the lines of the various subjects we 
 teach. Let us have quality, and quantity will take care 
 of itself. This, I think, is certain, that if we fail to 
 arouse intellectual interest and a voluntary and happy 
 mental activity in connection with the subjects we teach, 
 
VII.] GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE. 95 
 
 either we are, as educators, entirely on the wrong 
 track, or our pupils are hopelessly stupid. 
 
 It is true that there are some things boys must 
 learn, whether they can be led to take a living interest 
 in them or not. Out of this compulsory learning 
 arises a certain discipline and training of the common- 
 place boy in submission to conventionality and external 
 rule, which lead to the formation of a safe habit of 
 mind, and help to make him a respectable law-abiding 
 citizen when he grows up a result not to be despised. 
 I fully recognise this ; but my business in these 
 lectures is to speak of education in its true living 
 sense, as an inner movement of mind from ignorance 
 to knowledge; and, were I dealing with moral educa- 
 tion, I would add, from anarchy of feeling to ordered 
 character. 
 
LECTUEE VIII. 
 
 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 
 
 THE third claim which language makes as a subject of 
 instruction in the school is, that as literature it gives 
 aesthetic culture. Here, as in preceding lectures, we 
 speak of our native tongue alone. 
 
 As substance of thought, language instructs and fills 
 the mind of youth with the words of wisdom, with the 
 material of knowledge, and guides it to the meaning 
 and motives of a rational existence, and while doing all 
 this, it at the same time trains the intelligence : as a 
 formal study, it further disciplines the intelligence, and 
 gives vigour and discriminative force to intellectual 
 operations in all the relations of the human mind to 
 things, and therefore to the conduct of life : as literature, 
 in which aspect we would now regard it, language 
 cultivates, by opening the mind to a perception of the 
 beautiful in form and the ideal in thought and action. 
 It does this by bringing the prosaic truths of goodness 
 and duty into the sphere of the idea, and so evoking 
 and directing those aspirations, inherent in reason, 
 which find their highest expression in spiritual realities. 
 
 96 
 
LECT. VIII.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 97 
 
 In an excellent paper by Mr. Courthope-Bowen I 
 find the following remark : " If we were to inquire 
 in any hundred English schools, taken at random, 
 whether literature formed a part of the regular school 
 course, I think we should get positive, very positive, 
 answers in the affirmative from at least ninety-nine. 
 And yet I am prepared to maintain that at least 
 ninety-eight of the ninety-nine answers would be 
 wrong." I believe Mr. Courthope-Bowen to be right, 
 and I say the same of Scottish schools. Chaucer's 
 " Prologue " torn to bits, or a drama overlaid with 
 Clarendon Press notes, this is what schoolmasters 
 too often call literature. 
 
 The question. What is literature as distinguished 
 from the straightforward, logical, and lucid expression 
 of thought ? is, like the question, " What is poetry ? " 
 one excessively difficult to answer. One thing is 
 certain that literary expression is not merely gram- 
 matical and logical and fit expression, but " beautiful " 
 expression. We are here in the domain of Ehetoric. 
 Thus far all may agree, and we may amble out of the 
 difficulty on that skittish and bright-winged Pegasus, 
 " the Beautiful," leaving each man to attach to the word 
 his own more or less vague conceptions, but always 
 more or less definite feelings. The Renaissance, as we 
 know, restored to men the perception and enjoyment 
 of the beautiful in language ; and we do not misjudge 
 the apostles of the Eevival if we say that in their con- 
 viction the most beautiful language always embodied 
 the highest thoughts and the deepest realities of life. 
 7 
 
98 LANGUAGE AS LTTEKATURE. [LECT. 
 
 Barbarisms in Latin or Greek meant barbarisms and 
 crudities in thought. The inevitable result of this 
 view was that men strove after eloquence and elegance 
 of expression, and, ere long, style governed all. Now, 
 to cultivate style for style's sake is the pharisaism of 
 the intellect. The great masters of style, Sophocles, 
 Euripides, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, did not do this. 
 With them, as with all writers who live in the esteem 
 of generations, thought comes first, and style is nothing 
 more than the apt and felicitous expression of prior 
 thought. Style is not to be compared to the vesture 
 which covers a man's body, but rather to the native and 
 natural covering of the beasts of the field. The play 
 and elasticity of the close-fitting lion's hide is very 
 different from any vestment with which the fashionable 
 tailor covers the lion's master. In fact, a beautiful 
 thought and a beautiful expression either occur as one 
 in a man's mind, or the thought remains as a vague 
 possibility or anticipation only (on the plane of mere 
 feeling), until it finds fitting words. At this point a 
 man, to use the words of Montaigne, is only " licking 
 the formless embryo of thought." When the thought 
 is born, it is born with its natural vestment. It is 
 that natural vestment which, looked at apart from the 
 thought, we call style. 
 
 My business here and now, however, is not with the 
 principles of literary aesthetics, but only with so much 
 of the literary, in contradistinction to the merely 
 grammatical, as concerns the education of boys and 
 girls. And I have said enough in my first lecture to 
 
VIII.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 99 
 
 show that you cannot bring a pupil to the perception 
 and appreciation of a beautiful and felicitous phrase 
 without admitting him thereby to the comprehension 
 of the beautiful and felicitous thought. I have en- 
 deavoured in past pages to show that it is through 
 words that we educate to things, for words are the 
 records of the past conquests of humanity over things : 
 they have been called " the fortresses of thought ; " and 
 but for them, each generation would have to begin 
 all over again, and barbarism would be permanent. 
 Words are the title-deeds of the inheritance of each 
 child of man. So also in the sesthetic sphere, it is 
 by dwelling on beautiful language, and learning to 
 appreciate it, that we reach the beauty of the reality 
 the thought. 
 
 Whatever may be the definition of literature, it is 
 incumbent on us to find out, if we can, its relation to 
 the ethical aim of education. I am disposed to put 
 it thus : 
 
 The true man of genius, as opposed to the litUra- 
 teur, who lives by simply borrowing the clothes of the 
 great, and wearing them in a flaunting free and easy 
 way as if they had been made for him, is always in 
 search of the " idea." Do not conclude, however, that 
 all who are in search of the idea are men of genius: 
 The idea simply means the perfected truth of things, 
 and of each thing be it the law of the stars, the law 
 of the animal organism, or the " truest truth " of the 
 encounter of man's mind with nature and human 
 
100 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 life. This truth, put in a concrete form, is the ideal 
 within its own sphere. Hence the paradox, the ideal 
 is the real ; for the idea is the ultimate truth, and the 
 ultimate truth is the sole reality. What Lord Bacon, 
 in a well-known passage, says of the highest form of 
 literature is true, in due degree, of all literature. 
 " Poetry," he says, " doth raise and erect the mind by 
 submitting the shows of things to the desires of the 
 mind, whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind 
 unto the nature of things." This ami of poetry does 
 not weaken the mind, as Plato would seem to say, 
 but admits us to the truth and reality of things 
 by admitting us to their idea, to which Plato would 
 force an entrance by means of philosophy. Doubt- 
 less there are some nations whose youth would ^ be 
 best trained by the prosaic teachings of hai 
 and the severe discipline of science ; but, 
 nation is certainly not one of these, 
 with literature in its purest forms we 
 character without weakening it. Nay, elevation is 
 itself strength. 
 
 Without dwelling longer on this question than is 
 necessary for my purpose, let me now assume that 
 literature the beautiful in expression is the ideal. 
 It is the striving after the highest and truest truth of 
 things finding at last fit utterance. Jte in the pursuit 
 of the idea., so in the contemplation of it, there is a 
 large element of emotion. There is an excitement of 
 feeling which intellect by itself could not give. 
 
 Pass now, then, to the minds of boys and girls when, 
 
VIII.] LANGUAGE AS L1TEI12OT5E: 101- 
 
 after they have reached the age of puberty, there 
 begins to be felt the underground swell of ethical 
 emotion, and, along with this, the intellectual tendency 
 to idea and ideals. We as educators have to meet, 
 to satisfy, to direct this into proper channels. Several 
 agencies suggest themselves, but' I here speak only of 
 language. It is at this point in the growth of a mind 
 that language as literature exhibits its supreme power 
 as an instrument in the hands of a sensible teacher. 
 
 Grant this ; yet the result of all converse with 
 literature, it may be said, is, after all, only an sesthetic 
 result. It adds to the happiness of life, and increases 
 the pleasures of the imagination. This is a desirable 
 thing, as all legitimate pleasure is, but it is not 
 essential to a good life, nor even to a noble and heroic 
 life. True so far : art is not ethics ; but it is precisely 
 because it contributes so powerfully to ethical culture, 
 that I beg the teacher to take possession of art in literary 
 form as the most potent of all subsidiary agencies 
 at every stage of school life, and especially in the 
 critical years of adolescence : nothing is so formative. 
 
 The state of the spiritual, as opposed to the merely 
 moral, man is, I suppose, that the former lives in 
 ideas and the ideal as the true and ultimate ex- 
 pression of the reason of man as the God-given 
 reality of his nature. Ideas may be said to be the 
 thought of God in man, the "words that proceed 
 out of the mouth of God;" and by living in ideas we 
 truly live in Him and with Him. So seductive, indeed, 
 
 is the spiritual life the life in ideas, so much does it 
 
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 DIVERSITY] 
 
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102' LAXGtJ-AGE'AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 transcend the merely moral and juridical relations of 
 the hearth and the market-place, that men of strong 
 spiritual tendencies have been, as history abundantly 
 shows, frequently led to regard the ordinary duties of 
 the family and the State as superseded by spiritual 
 emotions and ideal aspirations. There are probably 
 very few strongly spiritual natures which, owing to 
 this tendency, have not had at some period of their 
 lives a serious fall. They have forgotten that man's 
 feet are on earth, and that the true ideal is the ideal 
 of the ordinary and the commonplace, and, as such, the 
 true real. " In this poor hampered Actual, here or 
 nowhere is this ideal," says Carlyle. Certain natures 
 are apt to forget that all idealism of emotion, all 
 religious aspiration, is spurious except in so far as it 
 grows out of the soil of the domestic and civic virtues, 
 and is dominated by law. It is a spurious ideal 
 which transcends duty : the true ideal is always the 
 recognition of law the true and ultimate law of 
 our nature. As a matter of metaphysical fact, the 
 spiritual life, the life in ideas, the life in God, bears 
 the same relation to the real of common duty as the 
 abstract in the sphere of the purely intellectual bears 
 to the real and concrete of things. Except in so 
 far as the general and abstract is seen in particular 
 things, except in so far as things a?e seen in the 
 general and abstract, both are, in their isolation, 
 unmeaning and unfruitful : and what is true in the 
 sphere of knowledge is equally true in the sphere of 
 life and conduct. 
 
VIII.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 103 
 
 It is only after he has reached the age of puberty 
 that a youth begins to be alive to ideas, and it is 
 generally at the end of the secondary period of in- 
 struction about the age of eighteen that they begin 
 to take possession of him as potent factors in his life. 
 It would almost seem as if many boys and girls, and 
 men and women, are constitutionally unfitted for ideal 
 conceptions, and consequently for the ideal in living. 
 But this is a wrong way of looking at the actual facts. 
 The finer organisations, by their innate force, pass 
 from the preceptive morality of the boy-life into the 
 ideal life of adolescence without effort and without 
 teaching. The mass have the capacity but not the 
 inner impulse. They have to be educated into it. 
 The passage from the one mental condition into the 
 other is what old theological writers described as con- 
 viction and conversion and regeneration. This it is to 
 be born again. This is, fundamentally, Christianity. 
 This is to escape from the schoolmaster, the law, into 
 the freedom of the spirit, from morality into spirit- 
 uality. It is the perception of the intrinsic worth and 
 beauty of the ethical as itself in itself aim and end of 
 life. Are parents and teachers to let this transforma- 
 tion come or not as it pleases ? If so, then I ask what 
 I have asked before, What do they mean by education, 
 and why do they educate at all ? 
 
 If you think that physical science will work this 
 regenerative change, you are mistaken. How to 
 promote it is a difficult and delicate question. 
 
 But however difficult and delicate it may be, it 
 
104 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 is our duty to try to solve it, and to look about among 
 the materials of school education and see if we can find 
 an instrument suited to our purpose. Direct instruc- 
 tion in the dogmas of religion and in spiritual truths 
 does not seem often to succeed. Now, in language 
 as literature, we shall find the instrument we want ; 
 for literature is the aesthetic expression of ideas, and 
 by habituating the mind to live in this ideal atmo- 
 sphere we predispose it to all things spiritual. We do 
 not call forth the antagonism of the young mind by 
 dogmatically repressing its growing self-assertiveness, 
 and trying to overawe it. We would rather counter- 
 balance it by giving it an objective and universal 
 outlook. We turn the eye of the mind to con- 
 template what is beautiful, and to enjoy it ; and 
 Plato truly tells us that with the eye the whole 
 mind turns, and not merely a part of it. We 
 thus insensibly lead the human spirit by green 
 pastures into the life in ideas; and we believe that 
 that life will then move forward by its own innate 
 force of aspiration, its own inherent vitality, until it 
 has become the conscious life in God the religious 
 life. 
 
 The criticism of language as literature belongs chiefly 
 to the latter half of the secondary period ; and it is 
 not till a boy is sixteen at least that I should 
 endeavour, of set purpose, to interest him in the self- 
 conscious literature for its own sake as an ideal 
 expression of human life. 
 
VIII.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 105 
 
 But it does not follow from this that we are not to 
 bring the young mind face to face with literature before 
 the secondary school stage. Even in the infant school 
 we begin our work. In this, as in everything else in 
 education, we begin at the beginning. The simple verses 
 which give fit and sweet expression to simple childlike 
 thoughts, are to be read and learned by heart. What 
 is not literature, in the best sense, to us, is literature 
 to a child. Every stage of mental life has its litera- 
 ture ; and at each stage, as one succeeds another, we 
 take care that the prose and poetry set before the 
 child are, though simple, good of their kind. We take 
 care, further, that he understands ; and by our own 
 good reading of the pieces, and by requiring them 
 to be learned by heart, we gradually make our pupils 
 feel the good in literary expression. We seek, in 
 fact, for many years simply to make impressions 
 of the right kind, deferring criticism, that is to 
 say, the conscious discrimination of the apt and 
 beautiful, until a later period. In religious education 
 all surely feel how important it is that goood hymns 
 be learned and sung by children. Hymns, aided by 
 the simple story of the life of Christ, will together 
 accomplish more for the religious education of the 
 young than all the catechisms and church-going in the 
 world. I might illustrate this ; but I am dealing with 
 literature as v part of secular instruction only, if indeed 
 there be such a thing as secular instruction. Let me 
 give one or two pieces which belong to the child 
 stage : , 
 
106 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 Take Hood's " Past and Present " 
 
 "I remember, I remember, 
 The house where I was born," 
 
 the last stanza of which runs thus : 
 
 "I remember, I remember, 
 The fir-trees dark and high ; 
 I used to think their slender tops 
 Were close against the sky ; 
 It was a childish ignorance, 
 But now 'tis little joy 
 To know I'm further off from heaven 
 Than when I was a boy." 
 
 This now is retrospective, and therefore may be said 
 to anticipate the experience of a child ; but I aru far 
 from thinking this an objection in a piece so easily 
 understood as regards language. It is sufficiently 
 understood at the tune of learning, and it comes back 
 after many days. Pieces which have a certain lilt 
 and alliteration about them are well suited to children. 
 For example : 
 
 " The cock is crowing, 
 
 The stream is flowing, 
 
 The small birds twitter, 
 
 The lake doth glitter, 
 The green field sleeps in the sun ; 
 
 The oldest and youngest 
 
 Are at work with the strongest ; 
 
 The cattle are grazing, 
 
 Their heads never raising ; 
 There are forty feeding like one. 
 
 Like an army defeated, 
 
 The snow hath retreated." 
 
 Etc. etc. (WORDSWORTH.) 
 
VIII.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 107 
 
 Take again Mrs. Hemans' " Child's First Grief," 
 which I need not quote. Then Wordsworth's 
 "Kobin:" 
 
 "Art thou the bird whom man loves best, 
 The sweet bird with the scarlet breast, 
 
 Our little English Robin 
 The bird that comes about our doors 
 When autumn winds are sobbing? 
 
 The bird that by some name or other 
 
 All men who know thee call thee brother?" 
 
 Keble's "Book of Nature," Logan's "Cuckoo," 
 Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray," "Alice Tell," and "Pet 
 Lamb," and Tennyson's " May Queen," and many 
 others of this class, at once suggest themselves. All 
 these, with the best of Longfellow's poems, not to 
 speak of the riches of ballad literature, national songs 
 (see also " The Children's Garland," by Palgrave), the 
 natural and breezy poetry of Scott, and good prose 
 pieces, will fill the waking mental life of a boy up 
 to the age of fifteen, till he, " by ever dwelling on 
 great thoughts, becomes like greatest men." The 
 " Iliad " and " Odyssey " in English might be read, and 
 the Arthurian cycle now or a little later. 
 
 * 
 Up to this point the age of fifteen or so we have 
 
 been daily guiding the pupil in making acquaintance 
 with words, that through them he may know things 
 the things of thought, the things that determine con- 
 duct. Mind and language have been growing together. 
 Our main object has been the nutrition and training of 
 
108 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 mind through language as a Eeal. Formal discipline 
 of intelligence through grammar (in the large sense in 
 which we have used that term) we have not neglected, 
 but we have always subordinated it to the claims of 
 the Keal. The pupil now not only comprehends 
 language in a wide and various range, but he can use 
 it for the expression, if not always of his own thoughts, 
 yet for the reproduction with grammatical correctness 
 of the thoughts of others. But in addition to all this, 
 he has, if wisely educated, received in abundance, liter- 
 ary impressions from simple and good poetry, and these 
 have been gradually moulding his life. 
 
 Mr. B. L. Nettleship, in expounding Plato, speaks 
 of the influence of plastic art on the young the pro- 
 ductions of those men who " have the genius to track 
 out the nature of what is fair and shapely," and to 
 embody it in their works. Young citizens, he says, 
 " should be like men living in a beautiful and healthy 
 place ; from everything that they see and hear, loveli- 
 ness, like a breeze, should pass into their souls and 
 teach them, without their knowing it, the truth of 
 which it is a manifestation." What is true of the 
 plastic arts is still more true of literature. 
 
 But now we may venture a step further, and go 
 beyond mere impressions. We have reached the epic 
 stage, for we are dealing with the period during which 
 action and heroism best meet the wants of the boy of 
 wholesome nature. Readings of this kind in prose 
 and poetry must mainly be relied on if we are to 
 
VIII.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 109 
 
 educate ; Shakespeare and such pieces as those con- 
 tained in " Lyra Heroica," l also Plutarch's " Lives," 
 and well-selected historical readings. But we may 
 go further than mere reading, especially in prose and 
 poetry of the concise and abstract character. We 
 may attend, not merely to the analysis of the thought, 
 but to the beauty of expression, and its felicity in con- 
 veying the complex emotions of human experience, or, 
 it may be, its failure to do so. We do not at this 
 stage part with our past training and discipline : we 
 carry it with us into the higher literary exercise. It 
 all helps us to see that aptness of phrase, balance 
 of rhythm, grace of structure, are not by themselves 
 good literature ; that, on the contrary, the inner 
 truth of the thing before us, and its logical coher- 
 ence, are the necessary foundations of the best literary 
 art. 
 
 It will be said, by a few, that this is to turn the 
 young mind into the field of literary criticism a pre- 
 mature occupation. It certainly is literary criticism 
 of a sort, because it is an attempt to see in what 
 respects the piece of prose or poetry before us is good 
 or bad, or middling. But why should a growing 
 mind be asked to accept phrases for realities, a jingle 
 of words for truth, a sensuous blotch for nature, 
 and be arbitrarily arrested in its natural desire to 
 discriminate between the good and bad, and so 
 gradually to form its own standard of the fit and 
 true ? Is not the very object of education to guide 
 
 1 By W. E. Henley. 
 
110 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 and help the action of mind in its successive stages of 
 comprehension of all that the various world presents 
 to its experience, either directly or through the inter- 
 pretation furnished by other and greater minds ? This 
 is the " criticism of life." 
 
 Doubtless such literary exercises may be overdone, 
 or misdirected. Everything depends on the teacher. 
 In the hands of a pedant they will become pedantic ; in 
 the hands of a fool they will be foolish ; in the hands 
 of a fanatic who can appreciate only one form of art 
 to whom Keats is perfection, and Wordsworth prosy 
 and nothing more they will be one-sided and mis- 
 leading. But not so much harm will be done, even in 
 these circumstances, as the good that will result from 
 rousing the interest, and stimulating the activity, of 
 mind, to the apprehension of ideal forms. 
 
 Perhaps I may illustrate from a personal experience, 
 not three weeks old, what I mean by an elementary 
 literary exercise. I was in a remote country school 
 frequented by boys and girls, the children of ploughmen 
 and crofters. The highest class, composed of five boys 
 and four girls, of the average age of thirteen, had read 
 to me a piece selected from their class-book by myself, 
 but already partially known to them Longfellow's 
 " Building of the Ship." When they had finished, it 
 occurred to me to say, " Now, instead of troubling 
 ourselves about the subject and predicate and extension 
 and all the rest of it, go to your seats, sit apart from 
 each other, read the poem carefully to yourselves, com- 
 pare one part with another, and mark the lines you 
 
VIII.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. Ill 
 
 think the most beautiful." They did so, and it was to 
 me, as an educationalist, a pleasant sight to see the 
 intentness of countenance with which these rough and 
 awkward country lads and lasses applied themselves to 
 this, their first lesson in literary criticism. After about 
 ten minutes had elapsed, I called for their opinions. 
 One boy and one girl had selected lines which 
 suggested sadness; the remaining three girls had 
 selected those which had reference to marriage the 
 bride and bridegroom ; a second boy selected the most 
 striking image, while the remaining three had selected 
 the lines which had to do with intense action. Each 
 read aloud the part which he had selected ; when this 
 was over, I made a few conversational remarks on one 
 or two points in the poem suggested by their own 
 selections. These they listened to with avidity, because 
 they were now prepared to listen. This is what I call 
 a literary lesson ; and I shall be much surprised to 
 learn that any teacher does not see how much more 
 educative and fruitful this simple and natural and 
 conversational treatment of a piece of good prose or 
 poetry must be, than any amount of sentence-analysis ; 
 or even (shall we say ?) of Latin grammar. 
 
 I know that some will say, " Do not be in a hurry ; 
 all the needed appreciation of literature, and the 
 culture and the ideas its brings with it, will come in 
 time." My conviction is that they will not come, 
 any more than religion comes of itself, or a scientific 
 habit of mind comes of itself. Is it not notorious 
 that, as a matter of fact, they do not come ? In 
 
112 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 language as literature we have to begin, as in all 
 other subjects, low down. We have to lay the founda- 
 tions early, and let them settle, if we are to build on 
 them to any good purpose. In everything Plato's 
 remark is true, that man, of all animals, stands most 
 in need of education, and is the most capable of being 
 educated. Setting aside the exceptional boy, it is 
 certain that if I suddenly introduce a boy of sixteen or 
 seventeen, who has had no previous education in the 
 language of literature and no training in feeling its 
 beauties, to Wordsworth or Milton, I shall fail to 
 interest him. So is it in other studies : I should fail 
 to interest the same boy in a truly scientific book on 
 Physics, or Geology, if I had not planted and daily 
 nurtured in him a habit of interest in nature, direct- 
 ing his attention to its more ordinary and superficial 
 phenomena, and to the explanation of these. I speak, 
 of course, of the ordinary boy, which means ninety- 
 five per cent, of boys. With boys of genius the edu- 
 cator has little to do, save to guide and control. It is 
 notorious that the mass of boys said to be educated 
 take no interest in nature ; and if we add to this that 
 they take no interest in pure literature, that is to 
 say, in the best thoughts of the best of their own 
 race expressed in fitting form, what is the use of 
 all our educational machinery ? Surely there is a 
 blunder somewhere. I am not such a cynic as to 
 believe that the human animal is so constructed by 
 his Maker, as to hayje a natural aversion to the con- 
 templation of the beautiful and various world in its 
 
VIII.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 113 
 
 causes and harmonies, and to the perusal of the 
 greatest thoughts on things and men as these are 
 finely expressed by the prophets and seers of his race. 
 It follows from what has been said that at all stages 
 of language-teaching we should read largely. At the 
 stage of which we are now speaking, our reading must 
 be varied and liberal, with a view to fill a boy's mind 
 with masterpieces. This is what the teaching of 
 English literature in the school ought to be. And by 
 such teaching the boy may, perchance, be gradually 
 led, as Plato thought, to recognise the forms of 
 goodness through what is presented to sense and 
 imagination. 
 
 As regards Method, we have done little as yet but 
 apply the great rule that a subject should be begun 
 from the beginning, and, as we proceed, be brought 
 into fit relation with the stage of mental progress the 
 pupil has reached. Step ly step, step after step. In 
 truth, however, there is scarcely a rule of method 
 which is not as applicable to the teaching of literature 
 as to the teaching of any other subject. Only one is 
 a little averse to be guilty of the pedantry of applying 
 them in detail. For in the domain of literature, as in 
 that of religion, it may be said that rules of procedure, 
 which may be of great use to a teacher in matters of 
 the pure intellect, are of little value unless he is 
 himself inspired. The genuine love of literature, the 
 sympathetic living with the growing minds of the 
 young, and the impulse to give to others that which 
 
114 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 enriches your own life and which you further enrich 
 yourself by giving, supersede all rules of method. 
 Still, a word or two may be profitably said in correc- 
 tion of obvious faults, although the result be merely 
 negative. 
 
 Here let me quote again from Mr. Courthope- 
 Bowen : " By the study of literature as literature, I 
 mean the study of a poem or prose-work for the sake 
 of its substance, its form, and its style ; for the sake 
 of the thought and imagination it contains, and the 
 methods used to express these; for the sake of its 
 lofty, large, or acute perception of things ; its power of 
 exposition ; the beauty, force, and meaning of its meta- 
 phors, its similes, its epithets ; the strength and music 
 of its language." I quote this because I think it well 
 said, and also because it describes the working of the 
 second governing rule of all method, " Let your pro- 
 cess be analytico-synthetic." To work this out in 
 detail is not my intention, but you will find most of 
 the suggestions for teaching a piece of prose as sub- 
 stance of thought, applicable also in the sphere of pure 
 literature. 
 
 As a matter of fact, it is notorious that many 
 schoolmasters cannot shake off their hardness, their 
 formalism, their pedantry, in this field' of instruction 
 any more than in that of religion; and the result 
 is that literature in the school resolves itself into a 
 list of literary names and dates, and sinks into the 
 examination of words, and of grammatical and historical 
 
VIII.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 115 
 
 forms and facts. A play of Shakespeare or Milton's 
 " Lycidas " is read with a view to its anatomy, not to 
 what the poems convey to the intellect and emotions 
 the satisfaction of the ideal in man. In the 
 editions used the product of the artist is lost in a 
 monstrous superfetation of notes. Why do so many 
 teachers make lessons of everything ? 
 
 Thus it is that the majority of boys at this secondary 
 school stage care nothing for books, except books of 
 impossible adventure or comic presentations of serious 
 things. In these they find relief from the dissection 
 of a great writer, whether the writer be English or 
 Latin or Greek. And they are justified in the course 
 they take. How can we expect any one to enjoy 
 " Lycidas," or Portia's speech, or Hamlet's soliloquy, or 
 Tintern Abbey, or the Ode to Duty, if they read ten 
 lines a day, have to learn by heart a lot of notes 
 (philological or antiquarian), and then begin to mangle 
 the passages by constructing parsing and analysis 
 tables finally, perhaps, resorting to the degrading 
 process of paraphrasing ? This would be to expect an 
 impossibility. You, the teacher, are ostensibly giving 
 him literature, whereas truly you are cheating him 
 and giving him grammar words, words, words. You 
 are ostensibly giving him the real of literature ; you 
 are truly palming off upon him the formal and 
 abstract. I would rather have the exclusive Latin 
 training back again in all its aridity. There are 
 plenty of corpora vilia in the English tongue on which 
 the dreary experiments of grammar and analysis may 
 
116 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 be made. But be honest here, and if you affect to 
 give him literature, give him literature. For one boy 
 who enters with spirit into the formal, there are ten 
 who appreciate the real, and five who appreciate the 
 beautiful. And is it not evident that, if out of a class 
 of forty boys we can send out even thirty inspired by 
 the great writings of great men, we have educationally 
 accomplished far more for them than by sending them 
 out with the most exact notions of grammar and 
 analysis, while dead to literature ? If we have ever 
 realised to ourselves that the final aim of all education, 
 both of the school and the world, is an ethical aim, we 
 cannot doubt this for a moment. 
 
 Select then the books which are within the com- 
 prehension of your class, and read them liberally, 
 generously. There is a superabundance of English 
 literature of this class, not to speak of good transla- 
 tions from other languages. Then, read the books 
 iviih the pupils. Let tlum read, and do you also 
 take your turn of reading. Enjoy the book together 
 not as a lesson, but as a pleasant symposium. This 
 is the sum and substance of the method. When you 
 come to a particularly fine passage, direct attention 
 to it, ask them to point out its artistic beauties, and 
 then read it to them a second time as it ought to be 
 read. That is to say, if you can read : it is not so 
 easy to read well. 
 
 I do not mean to say that in such literary school- 
 banquets you are to eschew all questionings. If a 
 difficult phrase or allusion occur, ask in a friendly and 
 
VIII.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 117 
 
 conversational way what the precise force of it is : 
 above all, let it be understood that you are there to be 
 questioned. If it be poetry you are reading, encourage 
 the boys to learn beautiful passages by heart, but 
 avoid prescribing them. This is no task-work in which 
 you are engaged. Says Quintillian (i. 8), " Point out 
 the beauty of the arrangement, the charms of the 
 subject-matter, the appropriateness of the words to the 
 characters represented, what is worthy of praise in the 
 substance, what in the words used," and so forth. It 
 is now, if ever, that you are living with your boys. 
 Now truly mind meets mind. It is now, and through 
 this literary sympathy, that you lay deep the founda- 
 tions of your moral influence on the whole future lives 
 of your pupils. It is now that you are truly develop- 
 ing the religious possibilities of the little men and 
 women before you. This, and not the spelling out 
 with tears and vexation a dozen lines of Virgil, is the 
 " Humanities." 
 
 The " practical " teacher, and most of all, strange 
 to say, the Latin and Greek expert, who, because he 
 " trades in classic niceties " and imitates felicitously, 
 thinks he makes good his exclusive claim to the name 
 of " Humanist," will tell me, " Ah ! this is theory ; you 
 don't know boys : why, even with the best teaching, 
 one-half of them would find all this a bore." To 
 which I can only reply that I think I do know boys, 
 and that if one-half of them find such intercourse as 
 this with their master a bore, it is due to previous 
 neglect of the real of thought and art, or to you the 
 
118 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 master. Perhaps you put on your gown and college 
 cap, and come down on them with a magisterial air, 
 and with the aspect of omniscience. Even the luminous 
 charm of Tennyson, or the deep calm communings of 
 Wordsworth, cannot drive the superiority and the 
 pedantry out of you. Who would accept " II Pen- 
 seroso " out of the mouth of the parish beadle ? You 
 come to your class-room to teach these poets, forsooth ! 
 to patronise them, and, through them, your boys. 
 Now, it is clear that this kind of work is too fine, 
 too delicate for you ; the college cap is out of place ; 
 the work must be done in your shirt-sleeves, if 
 it is to be done at all. The boys are to lead and 
 you are to follow. Pray, how much more do you 
 know than your boys in this field ? It will be a 
 stupid class that cannot puzzle you in the first five 
 minutes by its questions. And you are no true 
 educator if you do not rejoice to be puzzled by 
 them. 
 
 A certain percentage of inferior organisms will 
 doubtless be found in every class, and they will get no 
 good ; but how much larger is the percentage who 
 resist and reject your formal and grammatical teach- 
 ing ? And yet you go on with it, and rightly so, in its 
 proper place, which, however, is not here in the sacred 
 literary hour. Such things belong to tie outer porch ; 
 we are now within the Temple of the Muses. 
 
 The question was recently debated in connection 
 with Oxford University : Can Literature be taught ? 
 
VIII.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 119 
 
 It seemed to me that, as was natural in the case of 
 university dons, the question was mixed up with a 
 quite different one : Can Literature be examined on ? 
 " Chatter about Shelley and Harriet " this was the 
 description of the essays that would be sent up for 
 degrees. There is much truth in the criticism which 
 the bitter phrase would convey. Literature as litera- 
 ture can never be a good examination subject ; and 
 if it could, it ought not to be so degraded as to be 
 taught with a view to an examination. But it certainly 
 can be taught taught in the Infant school, and in the 
 High school, and in the University, and all through 
 life. Nor should any curriculum for an Arts degree 
 be held to be adequate which does not include attend- 
 ance on a course of literary history and criticism, as is 
 the case in the Scottish Universities. Its relative 
 place among other subjects for a degree can easily be 
 arranged. 
 
 The man who doubts whether literature can be 
 taught, must have strange notions of the meaning of 
 the word teaching. Is it not one of the pleasantest 
 occupations in the world to read a good piece of prose 
 or poetry with a young and ardent mind, and, by 
 dwelling on its true meaning and its beauties, to intro- 
 duce that mind to the humanities, and thereby raise 
 higher the plane of his daily life spiritualising him 
 by humanising him ? Why, then, is it not done ? The 
 answer perhaps is, because it is very difficult to do. 
 The teacher who will do the work successfully must 
 be himself a man of humane culture, andjof_sympathy 
 
120 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 with the nascent and adolescent life of mind. If some 
 so endowed have, notwithstanding, failed, it is because 
 the foundations in the minds of their pupils, as I have 
 said, have never been laid : the way has not been pre- 
 pared. As summer is waning and autumn approaches, 
 you hurry on with a view to a harvest, not only in 
 literature, but in all that pertains to the spiritual 
 life. You forgot to break up the soil in early spring, 
 and to sow the seed, and to harrow. The warm 
 summer sun consequently played ineffectually on a 
 hard surface, and if anything has been produced at 
 -all, as will certainly be the case where the native 
 qualities of the soil are worth anything, it is weeds 
 or wild oats. 
 
 If you think it necessary in the later years of the 
 secondary school to give some instruction in the history 
 of literature, you will give it in connection with the 
 history of your country. You will give the minimum 
 number of dates and the maximum of inner real 
 connections. When this is done, the reading of a 
 narrative of English literature will at least do no 
 harm. But read an author before you read about 
 him ; " Matter before Form." It is the extended read- 
 ing in history and native literature that strengthens 
 the patriotic spirit, out of which the highest expression 
 of the national mind in words and acts can alone 
 come. 
 
 Again I say, is it not the fact that the general 
 
 result of all our education is that boys and girls, 
 youths and maidens, do not, as a rule, even after 
 
VIII.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 121 
 
 they have grown up, read anything except narratives 
 of events, real or imaginary, which have a power of 
 exciting the mind? They care also, perhaps, for 
 accounts of proposals that affect their own immediate 
 material wellbeing. As regards literature, they are 
 barbarians. Listen to the drawing-room songs that 
 are sung and applauded. Are our upper classes the 
 pure product of the great Public Schools really above 
 the level of the Music Saloon ? No use complaining 
 of this; so it will be to the end of time, as regards a 
 section of every population. But if an enjoyment of 
 literature and a genuine interest in the beauties of 
 various nature be the marks of a cultivated mind, 
 then the culture and civilisation of a nation may be 
 fairly measured by the proportion of the population 
 who love literature and who have an open mind for 
 the Divine show of things, and for the moral meaning 
 of the world. This not Latin and Greek is the 
 Humanities; Latin and Greek are the Humanities 
 only in so far as they are this, and no further. As 
 educationalists, our duty is to increase the proportion 
 of those so humanised in each successive generation ; 
 and this, because the ethical life of a people is largely 
 determined by their interest in such things. And I 
 venture to affirm that, in the sphere of religion and 
 morality, nothing can so surely promote and sustain 
 purity of feeling, reasonableness of opinion, and eleva- 
 tion of standard, as love of literature and a sympathy 
 with nature. 
 
 The extent to which such great results are attain- 
 
122 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 able in the school depends on the conception which 
 the teacher forms of his spiritual function, and the 
 methods by which he gives effect to his conception. 
 Let it not be supposed that I advocate the undue 
 fostering of the emotional and ideal in youth. I merely 
 wish to satisfy and direct a need and a capacity which 
 God has given. No man is more profoundly con- 
 vinced than I am that the education of the human 
 spirit is not completed when it is merely permeated 
 by feeling and elevated by emotion. Eeason, whose 
 function it is to raise into the sphere of absoluteness 
 and duty the ideal teachings of emotion, must be 
 disciplined and strengthened. The heart has to be 
 subdued by the intellect, life and its purposes have 
 to be rationalised by each for himself, and the vague- 
 ness of sentiment has to become the certitude of the 
 science of conduct. Law must regulate and govern 
 emotion, but it is law within the sphere of emotion 
 and does not supersede it. 
 
 I have now dealt, as briefly as I could, with lan- 
 guage in the school in its concrete, its formal, and its 
 literary aspects. It is the mother-tongue of which I 
 have been speaking, and I hope I have made it clear 
 that no subject, or combination of subjects, approaches 
 the mother-tongue as an educational instrument. It 
 is the centre round which the life of every earnest 
 mind revolves : it is the soil in which alone it can 
 truly live ; and therefore it is and must be the centre 
 round which all true education of the young mind 
 
VIII.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 123 
 
 must revolve, the soil into which every growing mind 
 must strike its roots deep, if its growth is to be 
 vigorous, native, national, and humane. 
 
 I will now speak of foreign tongues and the method 
 of teaching them, taking Latin as type. 
 
LECTUEE IX. 
 
 FOREIGN LANGUAGES LATIN AS TYPE. 
 Reasons for Teaching Latin. 
 
 I HAVE already shown you that the best culture which 
 a man receives through language is to be obtained 
 only through his mother-tongue. While he seems to 
 be deriving culture from a foreign language, it is in 
 fact chiefly from the comparisons, similarities, contrasts 
 of the forms of thought and expression in that language 
 with the forms already familiar to him, that, he receives 
 intellectual and moral benefit and a finer aesthetic per- 
 ception. The foreign tongue, accordingly, will be of 
 substantial advantage in his education, apart from its 
 practical uses, only in so far as he, more or less con- 
 sciously, transmutes its forms, its thought, its images, 
 its delicacies, into the familiar vernacular which is, and 
 must always be, the vesture and expression of his own 
 inner life. Language, as I have frequently said, is a 
 necessity for the growth of mind. Growth depends on 
 finding fit utterance for those complex mental states 
 which succeed each other in the history of the race 
 
 124 
 
LECT. IX.] REASONS FOR TEACHING LATIN. 125 
 
 and of the individual, and are ever deepening their 
 significance and widening their range. If the form or 
 mould into which each man's mental life runs, and by 
 means of which he feels and thinks as a self-conscious 
 being, be his own vernacular, then Latin, Greek, or 
 French, or German, can never be a substitute for this, 
 but only contribute to its richness, explicitness, fulness, 
 and fitness. 
 
 Now, fortunately, it is impossible to learn any 
 foreign tongue whatsoever without the constant dis- 
 crimination of difference and recognition of likeness as 
 between that tongue and the vernacular, thus forcing 
 the latter into clearer consciousness, and making us 
 critical of our own utterances. The result is that 
 native words, phrases, syntactical forms, metaphorical 
 expressions, are no longer known and used by the 
 student in a merely rote or imitative way, but with 
 due regard to their true significance as symbols. And 
 although to be conscious of language is not to be con- 
 scious of the processes of thought as such, it is the 
 next thing to it ; andJlms a great step is made towards 
 a thinking life of intelligence, as opposed to the rote, 
 imitative, and conventional life of mind. Consciousness 
 becomes self -consciousness. In brief, it is just because 
 the conscious exercise of thought on the necessary 
 vehicle of thought is the nearest approach to the 
 exercising of thought on thought itself, that it is so 
 highly educative, both as a training and as a discipline. 
 
 I select Latin as type of foreign tongues for many 
 
126 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 reasons unnecessary to detail here. Our first question 
 when we admit a subject to the school curriculum 
 must always be, " Why~&Q we teach it ? " " It is the 
 province of a teacher," says Mr. Thring, " to know 
 why he teaches as well as what he teaches and how to 
 teach." A modest demand to make of the teacher 
 surely : is it an impertinence to suggest that, while 
 still young and not yet hardened in scholastic vices, 
 he should be trained to know all this ? 
 
 KEASONS FOR TEACHING LATIN. 
 
 Other reasons than those which influenced the 
 fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries must be 
 sought for. And there 'must be valid reasons which 
 have operated powerfully on the side of natural 
 conservatism ; for mere conservatism itself could 
 scarcely have done all that some attribute to it. 
 Other reasons, and, it seems to me, sufficient reasons, 
 there are. 
 
 I am not going to discuss the question whether 
 a foreign language should be approached from the 
 imitative or grammatical side. I shall content myself 
 with giving, dogmatically, my own conclusion, reached 
 in the light of the objects we have in view in teaching 
 a foreign tongue, as well as of some experience. That 
 conclusion is, that teaching in every foreign tongue 
 should embrace the grammatical, or formal, side, and 
 rest on it as its only sure foundation ; but matter 
 must always precede form. 
 
IX.] REASONS FOR TEACHING LATIN. 127 
 
 The question remains, How is the grammar of the 
 foreign tongue to be taught ? The general answer 
 must be, Just as English grammar is taught. The 
 method which I explained and illustrated in the teach- 
 ing of English grammar can be applied by any one, 
 without extraneous help, to Latin or French or German, 
 if he will only think it out. There are certain differ- 
 ences, it is true, but these generally arise out of the 
 specific reasons for teaching this or that foreign tongue. 
 Accordingly, I ask you to go with me into the reasons 
 for teaching Latin in these modern times, and I shall 
 then illustrate the method. I would only further 
 premise that, as we have to approach a foreign -tongue 
 in such a way as to insure a knowledge of its 
 grammar, it is impossible to separate the real from the 
 formal in our instruction. These advance pari passu. 
 
 We teach Latin 
 
 (1.) Because as a formal and grammatical study it 
 has peculiar advantages, and, more effectually than 
 any other language (except Greek), 1 ^^esjdis_cipline-to 
 the intelligence, and the_j_esult_ol, discipline, viz. intel- 
 lectual power. 
 
 (2.) The study of Latin gives (to an Englishman at 
 least), more than any other language can do, a training 
 in words the relative values and the functions of 
 words, and, consequently, training in the thought-things 
 which words denote. The shades of meaning in 
 vocables are brought into high relief. 
 
 1 For boys, Greek is inferior to- Latin, in my opinion, espeeially for 
 British boys. 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 Of 
 
128 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 (3.) The analysis and subsequent synthesis whereby 
 we truly comprehend an English sentence, and which 
 is a direct training of the processes of mind in knowing 
 (in the scientific or any other field), are most effective 
 as training when it is a foreign tongue that we are 
 teaching ; and, above all, when that foreign tongue is 
 Latin. This because, in order to give the English 
 translation, a pupil is forced, whether he will or not, 
 deliberately and of set purpose to consider the mutual 
 relations of the parts of a complex sentence ; and, 
 secondly, because of the exactness and precision with 
 which these logical relations are brought into promi- 
 nence in a highly synthetic language. In this relation, 
 Latin is better than Greek, because there is less 
 deviation in it from a normal type. There is breadth, 
 strength, and simplicity about its grammar. Let me 
 here quote from Marmontel's Mdmoires d'un p&re, etc. : 
 
 " The choice and use of words, in translating from one language 
 to another, and even then some degree of elegance in the con- 
 struction of sentences, began to interest me; and this work, 
 which did not proceed without the analysis of ideas, fortified my 
 memory. I perceived that it was the idea attached to the word 
 which made it take root, and reflection soon made me feel that 
 the study of the languages was also the study of the art of dis- 
 tinguishing shades of thought, of decomposing it, of forming its 
 texture, and of catching with precision its spirit and its relations ; 
 and that along with words, an equal number of new ideas were 
 introduced and developed in the heads of the young, and that 
 in this way the early classes were a course in elementary philo- 
 sophy, much more rich, more extended, and of greater real 
 utility than we think, when we complain that in our colleges 
 nothing is learned but Latin." l 
 
 1 From Prof. Payne's translation of Compagne's History of Pedagogy. 
 
IX.] REASONS FOR TEACHING LATIN. 129 
 
 (4.) The working out of a translation from a foreign 
 tongue is, further, a training of the imagination, which 
 has to bring itself into play in order to unite jnto 
 a whole, in their true signification, the parts of a 
 sentence. Latin in a special sense gives this training 
 because of its remoteness. The imagination, more- 
 over, is checked and kept within the wholesome bounds 
 of truthfulness by comparing the result achieved with 
 the original. 
 
 (5.) Latin is, to a very .large extent (to the extent 
 of two-thirds at least), our own tongue. In studying 
 Latin, therefore, we are studying our own tongue in its 
 sources, and getting all the discipline and nutrition of 
 mind which flows from the study of the origin and 
 history of words. Latin enables us to revivify our own 
 tongue for ourselves. Nay, we are studying our own 
 language in much of its syntactical mould also, as may 
 be seen by reading our early rose writers, and even 
 those of the eighteenth century. 
 
 (6.) It follows from the preceding reason, that, in 
 studying Latin, we are brought face to face with 
 modem conceptions as to moral duties, social relations, 
 and legal obligations in their origins, and that we thus 
 undergo a kind of unconscious philosophical training 
 suited to the, as yet, immature mind, and moulding its 
 conceptions from the foundation. Dr. W. T. Harris, 
 Education Commissioner for the United States, says : 
 
 " One may say that of a hundred boys, fifty of whom had 
 studied Latin for a period of six months, while the other fifty 
 had not studied Latin at all, the fifty with a smattering of Latin 
 
 9 
 
130 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 would possess some slight impulse towards analysing the legal '^ i 
 and political view of human life, and surpass the other fifty 
 in this direction. Placed on a distant frontier with the ta.^k 
 of building a new civilisation, the fifty with the smattering of 
 Latin would furnish law-makers and political rulers, legislators, 
 and builders of the State." 
 
 This may be an exaggeration, but there is an element 
 of truth in it. In any case, Latin is not a dead lan- 
 guage. Its influence is still living in our own tongue, 
 our thought, our feeling, our institutions, our law, our 
 religion, our policy. A language does not cease to 
 live because it ceases to be spoken. 
 
 (7.) In studying Latin we are taking possession 
 of the key of the Romance languages, shortening 
 the time needed for acquiring these by at least one- 
 half. 
 
 (8.) The study of Latin introduces the pupil in its 
 later stages to a conscious discernment of Art in lan- 
 guage the artistic or beautiful in expression. And 
 this to a degree which no modern tongue can do, 
 because, first, of its chaste severity of form ; and 
 secondly, because being so far removed from our own 
 time we can look at it as a fresh and alien object. 
 Thus, by contrast, our implicit feelings regarding 
 literary form in our own tongue are brought into 
 explicit consciousness raised, in short, from mere 
 feeling into knowledge. 
 
 (9.) The study of Latin, as a dead tongue, especially 
 in its later stages, when it is accompanied by the 
 study of the life, art, and literature of Eome, has 
 a remarkable influence on the tone of thought and 
 
IX.] REASONS FOR TEACHING LATIN. 131 
 
 character. It has this influence by connecting us in 
 a living way with what seems, but truly is not, a 
 dead past, and thereby expanding our intellectual and 
 moral sympathies so as to embrace that past as part 
 
 y of our own life. It makes us members of a larger 
 human society. Modern extemporary language and 
 life are too near to our own to have this cultivating 
 influence to the same extent, and do not teach us to 
 see things in a true perspective ; they may be said to 
 broaden our lives, but they do not lengthen them. 
 Neither the Hindu nor the Chinese language and life 
 
 * would serve, because these are not our past. The 
 ancient life, by thus stimulating the historical imagi- 
 nation and carrying it out of the present, tends to 
 give balance of mind, checks sciolism of opinion and 
 crudeness of judgment, based on a narrow induction 
 of things which, as being close at hand, are apt to 
 assume undue importance. The true humanity of the 
 growing boy is thus deepened and strengthened. 
 
 I do not here speak of the larger culture which 
 Latin, as literature and as the embodiment of the 
 attitude of the Eoman mind to life and social polity, 
 gives to the university scholar who has mastered these. 
 The education of the people is not to be regulated in 
 the interest of either literary or linguistic or historical 
 experts. We have to think of boys and the school only. 
 All else can take care of itself. 
 
 It might be said, and has been said by certaif 
 utilitarians, that the study of the history of Eome and 
 
132 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 the reading of translations would do much that I 
 attribute to the study of the language of Kome. 
 But this is a mistake. By the perusal of the history, 
 and by the study of translations, much could be 
 done doubtless ; but the result would fall far short of 
 our aims. The true history of a country is the thought 
 and literature and art of that country ; and I know 
 very little of any people if I know it merely in its annals 
 of events, even if I also exhibit in bold and effective 
 relief its great characters (which is not always done). 
 I know a people only by living contact of mind with 
 mind, of humanity with humanity, and this is alone 
 < possible by contact with its language and literature. 
 This is to know its true history, its true significance 
 as a factor in the world's progress, because this alone 
 is to know its inner life by ourselves living with 
 it. If we may regard " Culture " as marking the 
 universal, as opposed to the national and parochial, 
 element in the educated mind, it will be found, if 
 genuine and not spurious, to have its roots in historical 
 sympathy. 
 
 The reasons for the study of Latin which have been 
 given might be very much amplified and elaborated ; 
 but I am not here defending against opponents the 
 importance of this special kind of linguistic instruction. 
 My sole object is, by bringing before you the reasons 
 why we learn Latin, to introduce you, in a rational 
 way, to the question liow we should teach and learn 
 Latin. Each one of the reasons which I have above 
 assigned has a direct bearing on method, because method 
 
IX.] REASONS FOR TEACHING LATIN. 133 
 
 is a way, a road to certain ends. Think, then, of these 
 ends, and try to inquire the road to them for your- 
 selves, and you will, so far as these ends at least are 
 concerned, have constructed for yourselves a method 
 of teaching Latin. 
 
 It will be observed that I have not included among 
 the reasons for teaching Latin the reading of the Latin 
 classics in after-life. I am speaking of the education 
 of the secondary school, not of the rare results of 
 university study. The " far-off interest of years " can 
 never be realised even by those boys who spend eight 
 or nine years on Latin and Greek ; even university 
 fellows are not understood to find their nightly recrea- 
 tion in ^Eschylus when they leave the common room. 
 Just as little would I be disposed to try to make you 
 believe at this time of day that Latin and Greek are 
 synonymous with a liberal education. On the con- 
 trary, a man of exclusive classical training is illiberally 
 educated, so illiberally educated that he does not even 
 know it. The cause of the ancient tongues is 'lost if 
 we rest it on untenable grounds. Nor would I urge 
 as an argument that classical men can alone write 
 English. This is contrary to fact. They are generally 
 poor writers of English, and that just in proportion 
 to their devotion to the ancient classics. There is, 
 however, a certain wholesome severity of intellect 
 about classically trained men in their treatment of all 
 subjects, whereas in the scientific man we find this 
 only in strictly scientific subjects. This result is a 
 great gain ; but it is just possible that it might 
 
134 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 be generated by an equally thorough training in 
 English, French, and German. There is little oppor- 
 tunity of trying the experiment; for young men 
 who wish to combine intellectual work with cash- 
 rewards must take to the paying subjects Greek 
 and Latin. In any case we know from experience 
 the great formative power of Latin. 
 
 This is not an essay on classical education. Were 
 I to criticise, in a hostile spirit, the claims of classical 
 and humanistic education, my first objection to it 
 would be that in the school the boasted education is 
 not classical, and not humanistic ; and my second 
 would be that it is anti-Hellenic. We do not attain 
 the Greek attitude of mind by dissecting Greek, 
 any more than we attain to the spirit of Christ 
 by virtue of our knowledge of Xew Testament philo- 
 logy. Do you imagine, for a moment, that if the 
 Athenians had discovered Sanskrit, they would have 
 trained their boys on the Yedic hymns and the 
 Mahabharata ? Can you think of a Pericles or a 
 Plato burying the nine Muses out of sight, and care- 
 fully eschewing music, art, national literature, and 
 history, and guarding their boys from such frivolous 
 society by involving them in Sanskrit and Zend and 
 putting all the money on tJiese? 1 In the manner of our 
 devotion to Latin and Greek we are conspicuously 
 un-Greek. To have a frank open eye for all that is 
 
 1 This expression has been ignorantly objected to. It is surely 
 well known that in Great Britain the surest way to the material 
 rewards of the universities is by distinction in Latin and Greek. 
 
IX.] KEASONS FOR TEACHING LATIN. 135 
 
 beautiful, to give a hospitable reception to all that 
 presents itself as knowledge, to train in past heroisms 
 and in present civic duties, this is to be Hellenic. 
 The Athenian gave boys material which nourished j 
 and enlarged the mind. But I forego these polemical 
 temptations and turn to my immediate subject, the 
 method of teaching Latin. 
 
LECTURE X. 
 
 METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. ^ 
 
 IN teaching Latin we have to keep the reasons for 
 teaching it always in mind. They yield rules and 
 directions for procedure which, to a considerable extent, 
 are peculiar to the teaching of Latin. But we have 
 also to keep in niind that the majority of our pupils 
 must leave us for the business of life before they have 
 acquired, even fairly well, the language or languages 
 we teach them. Consequently, the rule which is applic- 
 able to every subject is specially applicable here viz. 
 that our method be such as to give to every pupil the, full 
 benefit of the training and discipline which the language 
 is presumed to afford and which the pupil's age admits 
 of, at whatever point he may cease to study it. Herein lies 
 one of the claims which all method permanently makes 
 on the teacher that it secures this admirable result. 
 Each day's lesson justifies itself. 
 
 It has been often said of late, that it is useless to 
 teach boys Latin if they cannot look forward to a 
 prolonged curriculum. My experience leads me to 
 dissent from this emphatically. In three years Latin, 
 
 IQfl / 
 
 136 
 
LECT. X.] METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. 137 
 
 well-taught, and not begun prematurely, can give an 
 amount of genuine discipline and solid instruction 
 in words and syntax forms which is invaluable. It 
 places a boy, as it were, by one bound on a higher 
 intellectual plane than his fellows. 
 
 Those of you who remember the first lecture of this 
 course, will see that the functions of Language as an 
 instrument of education, as giving food and training, 
 "as giving discipline, and as giving cultivation of the 
 aesthetic perceptions, are all included in the reasons 
 assigned for teaching Latin ; and, in due degree, any 
 other foreign tongue. 
 
 I might here introduce all the rules of method as 
 deduced from the facts of psychology, 1 and apply them 
 to the teaching of Latin. I content myself with the 
 more important. 
 
 1. Teach one thing on the basis of another ivhich is 
 already known ; for the mind advances to new knowledge 
 on the basis of what it already knows. Knowledge is an 
 organic growth, not a mechanical one. 
 
 The old knowledge out of which the new language 
 must grow is the knowledge of the vernacular. 
 
 As regards vocables, this is clear enough. Musa and 
 dominus have no meaning to anybody except in so far 
 as a " song " or " muse," or a " lord," are already known. 
 We must know the " thing," whatever it may be, in our 
 own tongue, before we seek to know it in another. 
 
 1 See Institutes of Education. 
 
138 -TEACHING FOKEIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 If the new is to grow out of the old, Latin grammar, 
 no less than Latin vocables, ought to grow out of 
 English grammar. A boy should be able to parse 
 fairly well, and be familiar with the relations of clauses 
 in English sentences, before he begins Lathi. 
 
 A certain type of classical teacher, now nearly out- 
 worn, tell us, " There is no English grammar, properly 
 speaking ; " " Boys never learn English grammar 
 thoroughly till they know Latin grammar;" "Boys, in 
 fact, cannot do it." In brief, English grammar is Latin 
 grammar ; for I suppose that is what it all amounts to. 
 Even to deny this is now, I hope, an anachronism. 
 That the boy who knows German will thereby know 
 English grammar better than the boy who does not 
 know German, is true ; still more certain is it that the 
 boy who knows Latin will know English grammar better 
 than the boy who does not know Latin. Everybody 
 will admit this ; but it is an absurd inference that the 
 knowledge of English grammar depends on a knowledge 
 of German or Latin. All that it means at bottom is, 
 to use the words of Goethe, " A man who knows only 
 his own language does not know even that." 
 
 Enough on this point. Let us stand by the rule : 
 The new should grow out of the old. A boy, there- 
 fore, should not be introduced to Latin at all until he 
 has a firm hold of English accidence, parsing, and 
 general analysis. We should find boys in this way 
 make much more rapid, certainly surer, and always 
 more intelligent, progress with Latin. "What they did 
 would have meaning and interest. 
 
X.] METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. ^ 139 
 
 In connection with this, let me say that the arrange- 
 ment of tenses and moods in the conjugation of English 
 verbs should, as much as possible, correspond with that 
 adopted in the Latin grammar. Latin might, perhaps, 
 meet the English here half-way ; for example, the 
 subjunctive mood might be called " Potential and 
 Subjunctive." In this way it would be seen clearly 
 that it was used both for the English Potential, " I 
 may be," and the English Subjunctive, " If I be ; " and 
 so forth. 1 
 
 In syntax a good deal more in the way of preparing 
 for Latin can be done than is generally admitted. 
 Thorough English parsing, in which the relations of 
 the predicative verb to subject and object, etc., are 
 fully brought out, w T ould do very much to promote a 
 clearer and quicker comprehension of Latin syntax as 
 being not something altogether alien to English, but 
 only different. Eemember, too, that if we .forfeit the 
 discipline obtained by contrasting English and Latin, 
 we imperil the teaching of Latin altogether, for we 
 thus abolish one of its chief uses for boys. 
 
 It follows from what has been said, that quite the 
 earliest age for beginning Latin should be the second 
 year of the upper-primary period, viz. the thirteenth 
 year, save in exceptional cases. 
 
 2. The real, or concrete, should precede the abstract, as 
 
 1 Parallel Grammars recently published by Sonnenschein & Co. try 
 to give effect to this idea. They are very instructive, and are well 
 spoken of. 
 
140 TEACHING FOREIGN "LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 this order accords with the natural growth and operation 
 of mind. 
 
 As regards vocables, for example ; a certain number 
 of these should be supplied in connection with every 
 declension and conjugation as the paradigm of each is 
 acquired ; but they should, in the first instance, be re- 
 stricted to things of sense ; e.g. the names of the more 
 common animals should be given, and in connection 
 with these, the parts of the animal. You give taurus 
 and vacca ; give next cornu, pes, os, cauda, and so forth. 
 Then bring in those adjectives which are fitly and 
 usually applied to these things, viz. forms, colours, etc. 
 Thereby also you fulfil a further rule of method which 
 requires that you " associate teachings." A boy will 
 remember with ease all the Latin words you can use 
 in speaking of a cow, if you have a picture of a cow 
 before him and keep to its external characters. No 
 Latin words should be given in the earliest stages, 
 except those which denote things already familiar. 
 Do not be afraid of interesting your boys too much in 
 their work. 
 
 3. " Teach generalisations as generalisations" 
 That is to say, we must base all generalisation on 
 the particular and concrete, which alone gives the 
 general and abstract any meaning. Rules of syntax 
 are generalisations, and they are to be constructed out 
 of the initiatory reading lessons by the pupil with the 
 help of the master. As the pupil gradually acquires 
 them, he will write them down as formulated for him 
 
X.] METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. 141 
 
 by the teacher on the blackboard, and enter them 
 at home in a grammar note-book. Here again the 
 association with concrete instances helps the memory. 
 And still again (for all sound rules of method help 
 each other), you evoke the will of the pupil, and by 
 giving him a sense of power in construction, you elicit 
 intellectual interest. 
 
 It is said that if the boys are told to learn the 
 generalisations by heart at once, and apply them as 
 occasion arises, they will learn them sooner. But this 
 old-fashioned notion is simply not true. Very few 
 ever learn them at all so as to see their true bearing 
 on the concrete. By the inductive method they must 
 see this ; their memory, also, as I have said, is helped 
 by the rationality of the connection and by association 
 with particulars, and they thus cannot help learning 
 more quickly. Besides, quickness of acquisition is not 
 everything : the course of instruction must be solid 
 and sure, as well as quick. 
 
 Then there is the question of intellectual training 
 and discipline, one of our chief reasons for teaching 
 Latin at all. The inductive method gives these in 
 addition to all its other advantages. Is it to be 
 supposed that the method of teaching any subject 
 which is the most educative, is the most ineffective ? 
 This would be a strange contradiction in nature. Let 
 the teacher always remember that he is teaching a 
 mind, and not this or that subject to a mind. I 
 would repeat here what I said in speaking of English 
 grammar : it is by constant examples met with in 
 
142 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 reading, not by rule or precept or laboured exposition, 
 that boys realise the generalisations of grammar. 
 
 It is not, of course, meant that a boy is to wait till 
 he sees a very large number of " instances " before 
 he completes his induction. He is not a grammatical 
 investigator, save in a boy sense. The rules of the art 
 of education provide for this as well as for other 
 things. The boy, if his will is to be evoked, must be 
 self -instructing ; but the teacher is to be his " guide 
 and co-operator," and so lead him to a result which, 
 left to himself alone, he would never reach. This is 
 what teaching means. 
 
 When Latin is properly taught, every lesson is an 
 inductive investigation : every translation, if taught in 
 the same spirit, is a fresh problem demanding the 
 analytico-synthetic operation of intellect. 
 
 4. Turn to Use. 
 
 We never truly know even a word or form, much 
 less a linguistic rule, until we have used them. " By 
 playing on the lyre we become lyre-players," says 
 Aristotle. Every acquisition in the shape of words 
 or generalisations, accordingly, must be turned to use, 
 from the very beginniiig, for the making of Latin. No 
 lesson in Latin is a complete lesson which does not 
 embrace this. Oral composition, and composition by 
 the help of the blackboard, must be a part of every 
 lesson from the first. Give the boy est and sunt and 
 Twwi, and you can begin before the end of the first 
 week. Masters, who wisely do this, are yet apt 
 
X.] METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. 143 
 
 to trust too much to books. Now books, especially 
 good ones, are very useful in their own way and 
 place. But teachers will never understand teaching 
 till they learn to regard books as merely subsidiary, 
 and as necessary evils. No man certainly has a 
 right to teach any subject whatsoever until he is 
 independent of books. It must all be in him. He 
 must be saturated with his subject. Such teaching as 
 I refer to is more laborious for the teacher, and, as 
 a matter of course, we have his indolence finding 
 arguments against it. One thing is certain, that such 
 teaching attains its end ; that the other way, which, 
 under more or less of disguise, is the rote-way, has 
 utterly failed, requires no evidence. Circumspice. 
 Prize pigs from Belfast are unsatisfactory evidence 
 that all, or even the majority of, the pigs in Ireland 
 take on fat. So with a few university scholarship 
 hunters : what of all the other boys ? See Eeports of 
 Commissions. 
 
 The boy, remember, has learnt, or is daily learn- 
 ing, the more common Latin vocables, under each 
 declension and conjugation, which have reference to 
 things of the sensible world and of ordinary life, and 
 these can at once be utilised. The making of Latin 
 will advance with the growing knowledge and growing 
 intelligence of the boy, just as English does or ought 
 to do. All the vocables acquired should be turned to 
 use by being thrown into living connection one with 
 another, and not be left in columnar isolation. If our 
 aim were simply to fit boys to make acquaintance with 
 
144 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 Latin literature in the original, it would, perhaps, be 
 difficult to maintain the imperativeness of this early 
 necessity of Latin composition ; but this is not our 
 sole, or even our chief, aim. Even professed scholars 
 do not, as a rule, read Latin literature, after they have 
 graduated, except as business. These early exercises 
 should be oral in the first instance, and embrace 
 gradually some of the common concerns of life. If a 
 proper selection of vocables to be learned by heart is 
 given (in accordance with Eule 2), and if a few verbs 
 are early thrown in, this practice of oral composition 
 is quite feasible. Only simple sentences are to be 
 attempted, to begin with. In training to synthetic 
 and imitative composition in the vernacular, I pointed 
 out the importance of requiring the boy to answer 
 questions in complete sentences, and this rule might, 
 perhaps, be attended to in Latin also with advantage. 
 Let me add : teach nothing in the grammar that is 
 useless. It is a mistake to suppose that a thing is of 
 educational importance in proportion to its remoteness 
 from " use." 
 
 5. Present to Sense. The eye should be appealed to 
 whenever practicable. 
 
 One is almost ashamed to go on quoting Horace's 
 "Segnius irritant," etc. (A. P. 180). 
 
 Strange that men should have been so slow in 
 applying a precept so obvious. A Latin class without 
 the use of a blackboard, on which every new word and 
 sentence and rule may be written distinctly, is an 
 
X.] METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. 145 
 
 anachronism. You have not taught anything capable 
 of being presented to the eye until you have taught it 
 through the eye, as well as through the ear. Were it 
 possible to smell it and taste . it and touch it, you 
 should also teach it through the nose, the mouth, and 
 the skin. The senses thus establish their own associa- 
 tions, and aid memory. 
 
 Before leaving this rule of method, I would, by way 
 of subsidiary suggestion, say that it would be well 
 were the Latin declensions and conjugations exhibited 
 in black letters on wall-maps, so as to catch the eye, 
 and taught in school from these mapa, after they 
 have been first constructively worked out on the black- 
 board by the boys under the master's guidance. In 
 exercising the boys in elementary composition, oral or 
 written, and in parsing, an indication of any error 
 made, by simply pointing with the rod to such a wall- 
 map, would be very efficacious. The correction of the 
 error would be thus associated with locality, and with 
 the eye, as well as the ear. 
 
 In reading Caesar, or any other historian, graphic 
 maps of the country should be constantly present and 
 constantly referred to. In battles, the master should 
 draw on the blackboard the position of the opposing 
 forces. In other reading, antiquities should be repre- 
 sented by drawings and photographs wherever possible 
 not by words. 
 
 In conclusion, nothing' new should be taught which 
 is not presented to the eye on the board. How short- 
 sighted is it of a master to give for the first time 
 10 
 
146 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 scindo, and merely tell the conjugation of it; and yet 
 how universal the practice ! 
 
 6. Step ty step : step after step. The teacher of 
 Latin should set down in his school diary (which 
 should be a kind of appendix to his Instruction-plan of 
 the school) the curriculum through which he means to 
 carry the boy, and the definite amount to be taught in 
 successive months, terms, and years. Little, and that 
 little well, should be his motto. Any other mode of 
 procedure is loose and vague, and there is a want of 
 genuine earnestness about it. 
 
 7. Evoke the Will. 
 
 In order that any subject of instruction, or any 
 part of a subject, may be really grasped, the boy must 
 bring his own will to bear on it, with a view to 
 apprehension and comprehension. He must not sit 
 passively and have things placed before him by his 
 teacher. You have to pump out of him, not to pump 
 into him. The teacher is the caterer, guide, and co- 
 operator ; but that is all. His duty is simply to 
 direct the pupil what to do in due order and succes- 
 sion, and to get the pupil to do it. Apply this to the 
 getting-up of prescribed lessons : 
 
 The master having, after due thought as the guide 
 of his pupil, " set the lesson," the boys should be 
 required to attack it in the schoolroom under his 
 guidance. The present practice of converting schools 
 into repetition halls, where the work done elsewhere is 
 
X.] METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. 147 
 
 merely " said over," the master relieving himself of all 
 true effort to educate, and indeed even to instruct, by 
 letting boys pit themselves one against another for 
 places, while he merely keeps the game going, is not 
 education not even instruction. The true work is 
 done elsewhere, if it is done at all. As caterer and 
 co-operator, I say, the master should put the next 
 lesson before the boys, and, supposing it be a new 
 declension or conjugation, get the boys to follow him 
 as he writes it down on the board, requiring them 
 to find out for themselves, and to point out, its 
 resemblances to, and differences from, what has been 
 already acquired. Those resemblances and differences 
 being thus worked out, should be written down in 
 bold characters by the master on the board. A few 
 minutes spent asking questions on what is thus 
 written down, secures that instruction in the lesson 
 has been given and how ? By the boys to them- 
 selves with the co-operation of the master, and 
 organically because the new is learned through 
 similarity and difference with the old. The boys 
 have had an intellectual exercise, and the result is 
 intelligent perception. This, observe, is discipline so 
 far as it goes, and if the boy left school for good that 
 very day, he would yet carry with him something 
 better than knowledge. It is only now, after the 
 above process, that memory comes into requisition ; 
 and the boy should be expected to prepare overnight 
 nothing save what has been first done and understood 
 in the school. 
 
148 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 So with translation : the master, having heard a 
 few read the lesson of the previous day and having 
 done the parsing carefully (or as much of it as there 
 is time for), should state generally the substance of 
 the next chapter, and turn the boys on to the learn- 
 ing of it under his guidance and co-operation- 
 sentence by sentence. After a pause, he calls for 
 translation, and if there be considerable difficulties, he 
 points out the leading clause of the sentence, and 
 gives such other limited assistance as he considers 
 necessary. The passage being thus worked out in 
 co-operation, the master should then require the boys 
 to bring a written translation on the following day. 
 While the other boys look on, this written translation 
 should be read by one or two of the cleverer boys, who 
 might then collect the other exercises and correct 
 them. This being done and it ought not to take 
 more than fifteen minutes there should be oral con- 
 struing of the passage. The teacher should then make 
 the boys parse one sentence in full detail, repeating, 
 word for word, every rule hitherto learned, confining 
 himself in this exercise to the worse half of his class. 
 The verbs of the rest of the lesson having been con- 
 jugated, he will proceed to the preparation of the 
 next lesson, in co-operation with his pupils. 
 
 By thus making out the lesson along with the 
 master, with a view to the working of it out by him- 
 self at night with the help of a dictionary, the boy 
 more truly does his share in the learning than by the 
 present plan, according to which a few boys prepare 
 
X.] METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. 149 
 
 their work independently, but the great majority are 
 dependent either on tutors or on cribs, or on copying 
 down the master's reading of the next lesson (which, 
 of course, is a crib), or on their neighbours. 
 
 If you do not think the above a good plan, and 
 are of opinion that boys really instruct themselves 
 best by getting their lessons to prepare without any 
 previous assistance, and by using the school simply as 
 a repetition and testing place, you will at least see the 
 importance of causing the boy to write out his trans- 
 lations daily. By so doing he cannot shirk his work : 
 he truly must apply his mind to the bit of Latin before 
 him in order to reproduce it in written language ; and 
 so far he instructs himself. You may say, How can I 
 know in that case that a boy instructs himself ? He 
 may have a tutor, or use a crib, in his own home. To 
 which the answer is : For the former you are not 
 responsible, and the latter you can find out with per- 
 fect ease. You test him by the oral construing which 
 follows the reading of the written translations, and, 
 further, you have simply occasionally to require the 
 written exercise to be done in the school under your 
 own eye. In any case a test will be applied at your 
 regular written class examinations, which should be 
 fortnightly. Masters talk against cribs, but if they 
 do not purposely wink at the use of them, they are 
 at least indifferent about it. It is very easy for them 
 to detect the practice, if they choose to try. So much 
 for daily written translations, which should be clearly 
 and carefully done. If you think the lesson too long 
 
150 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 to be written out, you can give the most important 
 part of it. 
 
 Consider, further, the bearing of this practice on 
 another of our reasons for teaching Latin its utility 
 in giving a comprehension of English. These written 
 translations are English composition exercises of the 
 very best kind, because they are regulated, as to their 
 form, by a language whose syntactical construction is 
 close and logical, and because the matter of the com- 
 position is supplied, as it ought to be. 
 
 Finally, with a view to instruction in shades of 
 meaning and exact and literary reproduction, as dis- 
 tinguished from close construing, you should conclude 
 the lesson by reading a translation made by yourself 
 in your best style, taking advantage of the best cribs 
 in doing this. 
 
 8. " Be exact and thorough" for all knowledge as it is 
 acquired must be exact, if it is to afford a sound basis for 
 further organic building-lip of the subject in the mind of 
 the pupil. 
 
 Note the importance of this, not only as making 
 progress possible, but in view of one of our reasons for 
 teaching Latin that it is a formal discipline of intel- 
 lect. How can there be any discipline where there is 
 no exactness and thoroughness ? This is all-important. 
 And yet how loosely Latin is taught ! That lax trans- 
 lation which boys make in a class, trusting to some 
 sudden inspiration, or to a prompter, or to the master, 
 is a training in inexactness, and is positively hurtful 
 
X.] METHOD OF TEACHING LATIX. 151 
 
 both to the intelligence and the moral nature of a boy. 
 With a view to exactness, observe again the advantages 
 of much writing. A boy in writing out his lesson 
 ascertains his own ignorance : in oral work he never 
 knows (save in a few exceptional cases) whether he 
 has accomplished his task or not. 
 
 This habit of writing also, let me add, gives a sense 
 of power and progress, and of independent activity. 
 Thus it is that one good rule of method supports 
 every other rule, and is supported by them in turn. 
 Observe again, for example, how this rule of writing 
 out with a view to exactness gives effect to the rule, 
 " Present to Sense." In the written exercise, the boy 
 creates for himself a thing to look at, and does it with 
 an intentness and application which insures its being 
 retained : for he recognises his Latin through a. fresh 
 sense (as it were) the sense of touch in the manual 
 act of writing. Still once more, note how a sound 
 rule of method tells in every direction : the habit of 
 writing extends the number of associations with the 
 work done, and so helps the memory. 
 
 Exactness in the knowledge of the day's translation 
 means that no boy shall leave it till he thoroughly 
 knows it. The thorough " lessoning " (to use Milton's 
 word) of one book is, to my mind, as essential to sound 
 progress as it is to discipline. 
 
 9. Confine your teaching to the leading outlines or 
 salient facts in the first instance, and gradually fill in 
 details. 
 
152 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 This rule is based on the psychological fact that 
 thus we perceive and conceive. 
 
 In Latin syntax, then, confine yourself to a few 
 rides at first, until they are sufficiently understood, 
 and then go on to others. The rules should be 
 grammatical, not logical. The boy has his own 
 grammar note-book, and enters them as they occur. 
 
 If this requirement of method apply to the ordinary 
 rules of syntax, how much more does it apply to 
 idioms, and exceptions, and irregularities ! And yet 
 the old practice (old, though not yet antiquated) was 
 to cram them all down together. With what result ? 
 
 10. Again I recur to the all-important rule, TURN 
 TO USE : this time in connection with more advanced 
 work the translation lesson of the day. 
 
 You have read a chapter of Nepos, or of Caesar, 
 having prepared it in the manner explained above. 
 You have parsed all the verbs, and also such portion 
 of the lesson in extreme detail as there is time for. 
 But you have not yet done with the chapter. What 
 is the significance of the chapter in view of the 
 reasons for teaching Latin, and the acquisition of the 
 Latin tongue ? It is clear to me that you have not 
 mecl the chapter until you have extracted from it (1) 
 all the vocables, (2) all the syntax, (3) all the making 
 of Latin, (4) all the English, which it will yield. 
 
 (1.) Vocables: I do not mean to say that you are 
 to build up on the foundation of the words occurring 
 in the lesson all their derivatives, but that you are 
 
X.] METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. 153 
 
 to build up all the more commonly used cognates and 
 derivatives. It is extraordinary what a mass of 
 vocables the first book of Caesar's " Gallic War " will 
 thus yield. These groups of cognates the boy will 
 enter either at the end of his grammar note-book, or 
 in a separate book. 
 
 (2.) So we proceed with syntax. The lesson must 
 deliver up to the boy all the syntax he has as yet 
 learned, and extend his knowledge. 
 
 (3.) So also we proceed with the making of Latin. 
 To-day we make Latin out of yesterday's chapter, in a 
 free and varied way. No exercise in Latin composition 
 excites the interest or supplies the discipline which re- 
 troversion of the English of past chapters into Latin 
 'does. On this, indeed, we mainly rely for Latin com- 
 position, using composition books as mere accessories 
 and helps. 
 
 (4.) The English that lies in the Latin has to be 
 taught. For great numbers of English words are only 
 now revealed to the pupil in their origins and primary 
 significance ; and thus one of the chief reasons for 
 our teaching Latin is satisfied. 
 
 I am well aware that some boys will be left 
 behind, however good the teaching; but they will 
 learn something at least, and they will be disciplined, 
 both intellectually and morally, by the thoroughness 
 and honesty of the work. I am also well aware that 
 there may not be always time to exhaust every 
 lesson. But have the right mode of procedure as 
 your aim : this is the essential thing. 
 
154 TEACHING FOREIGN 'LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 A single chapter of Caesar thus thoroughly and 
 exactly known, or " lessoned," is worth twenty loosely, 
 or even fairly, gone over. As a discipline you will at 
 once admit that this is so. But besides, as I have 
 already pointed out, every rule of sound method helps 
 the others, and the (so-called) practical outcome is 
 also thus best secured. With such thoroughness and 
 exactness as I demand, a boy would take a consider- 
 able time to get over the fifty-four chapters of Lib. I. 
 of, say, the " Gallic War." He would study only 
 twelve chapters per month ; but are five months, or 
 even six months, too much to devote to the first 
 book of Caesar, if at the end of that time a boy truly 
 knows it, and has constructed his own note-books out 
 of it ? He will have learned more, quite apart from 
 discipline, than by four books read as they are too 
 commonly read. To Latin, as to other studies, the 
 rule of Quintilian is applicable : " Cito scribendo non 
 fit ut bene scribatur, bene scribendo fit ut cito" (x. 3. 9). 
 
 (5.) Finally, you turn to use the knowledge the 
 boys have attained, by setting them down to write out 
 translations of " unseen " passages once a week. 
 
 11. Exercise the Memory. Revise. 
 
 All the above rules make remembrance easy, for 
 they presume understanding, they involve closeness of 
 application, and they give free play to association. 
 But all this is insufficient : there must be constant 
 revision if boys are to remember what they have 
 acquired. What a grown man will remember after 
 
X.] METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. 155 
 
 one telling, has to be told twenty times to a boy. 
 A day once a week should be set apart for revisal, 
 and a " grand " day once a month. When the pupil 
 begins Latin poetry, prescribe the learning by heart of 
 lines. Not too many. A few, well-learned this is 
 all that is needed. 
 
 Some would teach the accidence bit by bit, as it is 
 artificially introduced in a series of exercises, and so 
 postpone the daily reading of an author. They seem 
 to have a superstitious fear of calling on a boy to 
 learn by heart. The pupil should, of course, be 
 intelligently introduced to the accidence, declensions 
 and conjugations being compared, and the stems of 
 words being emphasised ; but when this has been 
 done he should be required to learn them off by heart, 
 and to give the Latin for the English almost as if he 
 were an automatic machine. If this is drudgery, 
 then let him drudge-: we all have to drudge ; but it 
 seems to me that boys rather like it. " Aussi long- 
 temps," says M. Breal, 1 " qu'on fera du Latin, il faudra 
 decliner des noms, conjuguer des verbes, apprendre des 
 regies de formation : 1'important est de le faire avec 
 intelligence." 
 
 12. Associate Teachings. Vocables in the earliest 
 stage are associated with things or images of things, 
 and, with as little delay as possible, with other wwds in 
 a sentence. The sentence must be the unit of the 
 language to the pupil. You associate also every new 
 1 De T 'enseignement des Langues Ancicnnes. 
 
156 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 teaching with a previous teaching, getting the pupil 
 to point out the likeness of the new to the old. This 
 connects itself with Eule 1. You associate also the 
 Latin with the English. 
 
 What has now to be said concerns the middle of 
 the third year and thereafter. 
 
 13. I would now touch on the ninth reason for 
 learning Latin, and deduce this rule : A pupil must be 
 so instructed that lie shall attain a grasp of the sweep, 
 characteristics, and genius of the language, and a general 
 acquaintance with the literature and history of the 
 Roman peo%)le. 
 
 In the earlier stages of study, little can be done 
 in this direction, it is true. More, however, than is 
 generally supposed may be accomplished. The slow, 
 exact, and critical way in which the regular Latin 
 lesson should be done may possibly weary boys. To 
 obviate this, and to give your pupils relief and some 
 acquaintance with Latin literature, and a larger com- 
 prehension of the sweep and character and capacity of 
 the language than they can otherwise get, there ought 
 to be cursive reading in every class above the second. 
 For example, while engaged closely and critically on 
 the first book of Caesar, the master might read with 
 the boys some such book as Eutropius or Cornelius 
 Nepos translating a sentence, calling on some one to 
 do it after him, and then hurrying on to the next 
 sentence. In this way the whole of Eutropius and 
 the Latin lives in Cornelius Nepos might be read 
 
X.] METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. 157 
 
 during the year in which the boys are working critic- 
 ally at Caesar and Ovid. In the following year, when 
 the boys are engaged on Sallust and Virgil, or some of 
 the simpler orations of Cicero, all the more interesting 
 portions of the eight books of the " Gallic War " might 
 be cursively read the substance of those portions 
 omitted being narrated by the master. While Livy, 
 again, is being studied, Curtius's " Life of Alexander 
 the Great " might be read in the same way. While 
 Horace is being critically and exactly studied, much of 
 Ovid might be cursively read. I would also encourage, 
 for cursive and private reading, editions with the Latin 
 on one side and the English on the other. In short, 
 every means should be taken to make the boy familiar 
 with a large mass of the language and literature which 
 he is studying. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to say under this rule, that 
 when a new book, say the twenty-second book of Livy, 
 or a book of Tacitus, is begun, it is necessary to give 
 wholeness and fulness and unity to a boy's conceptions, 
 if you are to engage his rational interest. Therefore, 
 give him an account (with a good map before him) of 
 the history of Eome or Greece, dwelling on the great 
 events that happened prior to the date at which they 
 begin to read. Let them know also about Livy and 
 Tacitus, and lead them to take a living interest in 
 their writings, not as so many word-puzzles constructed 
 two thousand years ago for schoolboys, with a view to 
 determine who is to be head boy of a class on a 
 certain day in the nineteenth century. Ample intro- 
 
158 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 ductions, more than once repeated, to the books read 
 critically, will be the certain means of interesting boys, 
 if anything will, in the Latin language through its 
 literature -and history. For the teacher, too, it is 
 valuable : it connects him through the humanities 
 with the hearts and intellects of his pupils, and 
 helps to establish his moral influence. If Latin be 
 not taught in this large spirit, even that admirable 
 tongue, with all its great educative advantages, will 
 not permanently hold its own against the intrusion 
 of science-teaching accompanied by modern languages. 
 By the end of the fourth year, your boys, if taught 
 in accordance with the above suggestions, will have 
 read, with much more exactness and thoroughness than 
 is now common, all the usual material, they will have 
 written or spoken a hundred Latin translations and 
 Latin prose exercises for one now written, have 
 thoroughly worked out the English relations of the 
 Latin tongue, and in the course of doing all this 
 have constructed their own syntactical grammar and 
 idiom book : nay, over and above, they will have read 
 cursively, or with the help of translations, the whole 
 of Eutropius, of Cornelius Nepos, of Caesar's " Gallic 
 War" (the passages omitted being orally narrated), 
 and all the more interesting legends of Ovid's " Meta- 
 morphoses ; " and although they may have read only 
 one book of the " ^Eneid " critically, you, the master, 
 will have found time to read to them the whole of 
 some good poetical translation. Compare this with 
 the miserable scraps and disconnected fragments which 
 
X.] METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. 159 
 
 at present constitute the Latin diet of boys. And yet 
 the men who from day to day give these scraps and 
 word-puzzles tell you that they do so in the name of 
 the Humanities. 
 
 You see, then, that while I advocate much more 
 verbal thoroughness and much more Latin composition 
 than is at present practised, in the interest at once of 
 discipline and acquisition, I also advocate much more 
 looseness and breadth. The mode of procedure sug- 
 gested is more intensive, and at the same time more 
 extensive. It is scarcely necessary to point out how 
 the exact and critical, as well as more extensive, read- 
 ing of Latin gives opportunities for complying with the 
 requirements involved in our third reason for studying 
 Latin the analysis of the shades of meaning between 
 words, and the finer turns of linguistic expression. 
 
 Doubtless those of you who have already taught 
 Latin will say that the carrying out of this system of 
 constant writing, and of Latin composition, would be 
 extremely difficult with a class exceeding thirty-five, 
 or composed of boys at different stages of progress. 
 To which the answer is, that classes should not be 
 composed of more than thirty -five, and that they should 
 not be at different stages of progress. Indeed, no class 
 should be larger than thirty. 
 
 If all this can be done to introduce boys into the 
 life and spirit and genius of the Eoman people, by the 
 end of their fourth year in Latin, presuming that 
 they begin in their twelfth or thirteenth year, I 
 need scarcely say that much more is to be expected 
 
160 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 when the study of Latin is prolonged two years beyond 
 this. 
 
 The exercises in the making of Latin should now 
 be more varied. Eetroversion should still be practised, 
 but the boys should also be required to reproduce the 
 substance of several chapters of the Latin author they 
 are reading ; and to prevent too much reliance on the 
 book, these exercises should be done as much as possible 
 in school. 
 
 By following the procedure above detailed, we 
 associate the study of a language with the realities 
 and humanities of which all literary language is the 
 vehicle, and bring ourselves into accord with our 
 eighth as well as our ninth reason for teaching Latin. 
 In continuing our course of instruction further, we 
 follow the same method, and are led into a still higher 
 sphere of the humanities, encountering our eighth 
 reason for teaching Latin, which yields us a rule of 
 method, as the other reasons do : viz. 
 
 14. So instruct in more advanced Latin as to culti- 
 vate the aesthetic and art perceptions of your pupils. 
 
 You read Horace and Virgil and Livy, we may 
 assume, and require written translations, if not of the 
 whole lesson read, of a part of it, and you maintain 
 your daily exercises in Latin composition, oral and 
 written, on the basis of the passages read. You also 
 continue your cursive reading, and encourage the boys 
 to continue it at home with the help of translations. 
 But this is not enough. When you have read an 
 
X.] METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. 161 
 
 eloquent passage in Cicero, or a fine passage in Virgil 
 or Horace, you should ask your boys to note its elo- 
 quence or its beauty. Their attention should be 
 directed to the art with which the thought is expressed. 
 To define literary art with exactness is impossible ; but, 
 in any case, we are safe in saying that it is the ade- 
 quate expression of an idea neither more nor less 
 than adequate in language worthy of the idea and 
 controlled by the feeling of the beautiful. And the 
 beautiful, whatever else it may be, is severe, is chaste, 
 is self -controlled, balanced, like a Greek statue ; and it 
 is all this because it is simplicity and harmony. State 
 the idea in your own words, or ask your pupils to do it in 
 their words, and then point out how nobly, and yet with 
 what chaste simplicity or eloquent rhythm, the orator 
 or poet has given expression to what in our limited 
 utterance is mean enough. The boys should con- 
 tinue, of course, to learn the finer pieces of poetry by 
 heart. 
 
 Then, when you have read a piece of Horace or 
 Virgil, pronounce to them, with fit elocution, the best 
 poetical translations in our own tongue. Dryden, 
 Conington, Martin, will, as a matter of course, be in 
 the library and schoolroom of every classical teacher. 
 I am almost disposed to say that no boy ever be- 
 came fully aware for the first time of the beauty, 
 the (so-called) "classical" flavour, of any piece of 
 Latin or Greek except through a good translation. 
 If he is an expert, he may doubtless by the time he 
 is five-and-twenty make this for himself ; but we are 
 ii 
 
162 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 speaking of schools and 999 out of a thousand Latin 
 and Greek pupils. If you want a boy of seventeen 
 or eighteen to feel the Greek of the Hippolytus, for 
 example, he must read with you Fitzgerald's trans- 
 lation. He will certainly not discover it by the help 
 of the dictionary. It is at this stage, also, that parallel 
 passages are in place. 
 
 In home exercises, elegant English renderings will 
 now be encouraged, and much, very much, educational 
 value attached to them. 
 
 Do not forget at this stage to deepen and broaden 
 the pupil's knowledge of the history and life of 
 Eome. Every lesson in Latin is a starting-point for 
 all that it suggests of Eoman life and civilisation. 
 Read to him translations of the best passages in the 
 Livian History ; present to his eyes maps of the 
 geography of the ancient world; exhibit photographs 
 of Eome, of its great buildings, of its works of art. 
 The room should be adorned with casts from the 
 British Museum. The whole atmosphere should be 
 classical. Remember, too, that in the most brilliant 
 period of Eoman literature with which you are now 
 dealing, it was Greece which was the mother of Eoman 
 arts. You are now on Grecian soil, and as boys have 
 by this time begun Greek and made some way in it, 
 you can improve on the Eoman lessor. 
 
 A boy who, after six years in Latin begun at the 
 age of about twelve, to which he has given an average 
 of eight school hours per week, has not read, either 
 in the original tongue (critically or cursively), or with 
 
X.] METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. 163 
 
 the help of translations, the whole of Caesar's " Gallic 
 War," Cornelius Nepos, Sallust, Virgil, Horace, seven 
 or eight orations of Cicero, all the best books of Livy, 
 all Tacitus, all that is best in the " Tristia," " Epistolse 
 ex Ponto," and " Metamorphoses " of Ovid, two or 
 three plays of Plautus and Terence, and selections 
 from Catullus, Tibullus, Martial, and Lucretius, has 
 failed to get the full benefit of a Latin course. 
 And need I add that the master who is incompetent 
 to extract from Latin study all its historical teaching 
 and all its aesthetic and moral culture, as well as its 
 logical discipline, is not a true builder of the Temple 
 of Education, but a mere hodman a carrier of bricks 
 and mortar, out of which others are to rear the stately 
 and beautiful edifice, if it is to be reared at all ? 
 
 The application of any one of the above rules 
 of method will touch the intelligence and evoke 
 the interest of boys : much more all of them taken 
 together. Do not be afraid to see your boys happy 
 and interested in their work. There is absolutely no 
 reason in the nature of things why the schoolroom 
 should be regarded by a boy as part of " that estate of 
 sin and misery whereinto men fell " through Adam. 
 
 NOTE. As to Latin verse-writing, I presume that 
 as an universally prescribed exercise, and consequent 
 engine of immorality, it is now gone out. But I 
 cannot agree with those who wholly condemn it. For 
 the highest stages of progress, for which alone, like 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY) 
 ^x^ 
 
164 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 elegant prose, it is suited, it does much, if pursued in 
 moderation, to enable a youth to realise the genius of 
 the ancients and to appreciate literary form. And 
 whenever boys spend more than four years at Latin, I 
 think nonsense verses and the retroversion of transla- 
 tions from Latin poets a valuable as well as interesting 
 exercise. 
 
 GREEK. 
 
 I might now go on to deal with Greek, but, if I did 
 so, I should simply have to repeat what I have said 
 about Latin. The only warning to be given is, that the 
 " old " out of which Greek instruction grows is Latin. 
 To bother boys, for example, with Greek syntax rules 
 which are the same as those in Latin, is superfluous. 
 It is differences and contrasts the teacher has now to 
 bring to view. This is an essential part of the disci- 
 pline which language gives, as well as the best way of 
 instructing. 
 
 It seems to me that Epic and Ionic dialects should 
 not be touched by the boy (still less learned in the 
 grammar) until an Attic foundation has been securely 
 laid. By that time the great mass of the boys will 
 be gone from school. Why teach Greek at all to boys 
 who cannot prosecute it beyond Anab. B. I. ? There 
 is much that might be more advantageously taught. 
 One would think that many classical masters regard 
 with an almost fanatical hostility English, French, 
 German, Physical Geography, Elementary Science, and 
 History. If Greek be taught, it is surely reasonable to 
 
X.] METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. 165 
 
 expect that boys of seventeen, who leave school without 
 proceeding to the university, should have a good know- 
 ledge of Greek history, have read Plutarch's " Lives " in 
 English, the whole of the " Iliad " and " Odyssey" in the 
 original (large portions cursively, others critically), the 
 whole of the " Anabasis," a portion of Arrian, the whole 
 of Herodotus in English if not in Greek (this writer 
 being used to lay the foundations of ancient universal 
 history), two or three Greek dramas in the original, 
 and most of the others in translations. Without this 
 breadth of treatment Greek cannot long keep hold of 
 our secondary schools. The instruction and discipline 
 which stop at Grammar can be obtained without the 
 heavy burden of Greek. Only for the few who go 
 forward for classical honours at our universities could 
 the retention of Greek be justified, if it be not taken 
 up in this large and humanistic sense. 
 
LECTUEE XL . 
 
 METHOD OF TEACHING MODERN LANGUAGES FRENCH. 
 
 IF French or German is to be seriously taught, the 
 minimum allowance of school time should be five 
 hours a week. 
 
 In teaching modern languages, the rules of method 
 are the same as in English and Latin. As we are 
 dealing with living speech, the ear must be con- 
 stantly exercised independently of the eye ; and what 
 in Latin is oral composition, takes the form of Con- 
 versation based chiefly on the daily lessons. Here 
 too, as in Latin and Greek, much cursive reading should 
 be done. Nor is there any reason why, at the proper 
 age, Moliere and other writers should not be read to 
 the pupils in English as a foretaste of the French. 
 
 It has been suggested to me that the rules of 
 method should be applied to the teaching of French ; 
 and, consequently, in this second edition, I shall 
 endeavour to give their application in outline, but 
 not in detail. Teachers who are dependent on detail 
 laid down by another will not be successful. 
 
 Rule 1 (p. 134). This means that English grammar 
 
 166 
 
LECT. XL] MODERN LANGUAGES. 167 
 
 must be known before French is begun. But it does 
 not mean that no French vocables or conversational 
 phrases are to be learned before English Grammar is 
 known, care being taken of the pronunciation at this 
 imitative stage of language-instruction. 
 
 EuU 2. The vocables learned should be the names 
 of things of sense the first which a child learns in 
 his own language. The process is simply a repetition 
 of the first stage of object-lessons in French instead of 
 English. You point to an object or a picture, and 
 give the French name for it. Always prefix the 
 article, e.g. the horse le (or uri) cheval, the woman la 
 (or une) femme. The memory associates the word with 
 the thing seen, as well with the English equivalent. 
 Thus the greater number of the nouns of child conversa- 
 tion, e.g. of the parts of the body, clothes, animals, etc., 
 may be acquired easily and pleasantly. Having done 
 this, then repeat these exercises with appropriate 
 adjectives (such as are used by the children in their 
 everyday English conversation). Plurals as well as 
 singulars may be given. Every word should be 
 written down on the board, that it may be seen as 
 well as heard. From time to time, by way of revision, 
 the pupils should be asked to spend twenty minutes 
 in writing on their slates all the words they can 
 remember. In doing this, they would naturally look 
 about them to see the things which they were to name 
 in French. This, too, is a pleasant exercise. The 
 completion of this part of the course (indeed, the 
 whole course itself) consists of object-lessons, just 
 
168 MODERN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 as these are given in English in the infant school. 
 Compare Kules for Infant school teaching (Lecture 
 
 in.). 
 
 Rule 4. As soon as practicable (perhaps from the 
 first), give est and sent and a or ont, and make short 
 sentences with the help of these words. Where 
 simple sentences are possible, compound sentences, 
 which are only simple sentences connected, are also 
 easy. Thus by means of the sentence, the associa- 
 tion, primarily one of things seen with the symbol, 
 becomes an association of rational connection in a 
 sentence. 
 
 Now may be introduced de and du } de la and des, 
 and the sentence - making may be slightly extended. 
 The conversational expressions of ordinary child con- 
 versation, almost always idiomatic, should be intro- 
 duced. 
 
 I should not think it worth while to do more until 
 English grammar is sufficiently well known. Much, 
 however, depends on the age of the pupils and the skill 
 of the master, as well as the time at his disposal. 
 
 Thus we give the pupil raw material ; we exercise 
 his ear and his tongue and pen from the first essential 
 in a modern tongue, in which our ultimate object is 
 speaking and writing, and not merely the language of 
 literature. 
 
 The one expression which is the key to the work of 
 this stage is Object-lesson, and the blackboard will be in 
 continual request. However easily a man may trans- 
 late from a foreign tongue, he never feels that he 
 
XL] MODERN LANGUAGES. 169 
 
 has a firm hold of it unless his knowledge rests on the 
 familiar, ordinary', and colloquial. 
 
 Rule 5. Present to Sense. The ear and eye (by the 
 help of the blackboard) are brought into use in con- 
 nection with every new word and sentence. The 
 muscular sense is brought into activity in slate-writing, 
 and in requiring the distinct vocalisation of the words 
 and sentences by all the class simultaneously and 
 (as far as possible) individually. 
 
 All this oral and blackboard instruction may be 
 going on during the half-year preceding the use of a 
 book. 
 
 Rule 5, and Step after Step. In the twelfth year, the 
 learning of the Accidence has to be begun. This 
 is essential to sound grammatical progress. It is best 
 done by means of the blackboard and wall-sheets 
 nothing being introduced but what is regular. 
 
 By bringing in the law of the association of contrast 
 and similarity, the learning of the inflexions of nouns, 
 pronouns, and verbs may be made interesting and 
 lively if the blackboard is first used, and the forms 
 built up on it by the pupil under the master's guidance. 
 When the pronouns and verbs are known, not a day 
 should pass without saying some of them over as a 
 kind of rote-exercise, until they can be said as quickly 
 as the pupils can speak. 
 
 Extended object-lessons will now include names of 
 ordinary acts familiar to the pupil " speak" " do," 
 " run," " think," etc., made into simple sentences. 
 
 An easy reading-book, beginning with a few simple 
 
170 MODERN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 sentences on matters of everyday experience, may 
 be introduced about the same time as the Accidence 
 is begun. The material of the book should pass 
 rapidly from simple sentences to very easy stories, 
 and, ere long, to such conversations as children might 
 be supposed to carry on with each other. The elementary 
 books used in French primary schools seem to me to 
 be at this stage the best reading books. 
 
 The use of the book is now and henceforth a 
 central part of the instruction ; but oral practice is 
 always essential in learning a living language. 
 In using the book, Eules 9, 10, and 11 ("Exactness 
 and thoroughness," the " teaching of the salient and 
 easy first," and persistent " turning to use," etc.) have 
 all to be applied as in the case of Latin. The book 
 is the centre round which the instruction turns, but 
 it is yet subordinate to the living oral instruction. 
 
 The lesson having been read, the teacher the 
 pupils having their books shut speaks the lesson 
 clause by clause, and has it translated a second and 
 third time in this way. 
 
 Meanwhile, yesterday's lesson has been handed in, 
 having been written as a home exercise, and the teacher 
 proceeds to read aloud the English of it, and call for 
 its retroversion into French. This having been done 
 orally, the pupils are sent to their seats to write out the 
 French, the English being put on the board. The best 
 scholar can then read aloud to the others from the 
 book, while the others correct their exercises, the 
 master glancing at a few as a check. The object is 
 
XI.] MODERN LANGUAGES. 171 
 
 to get the book into the memory as living material 
 which the children can use. 
 
 If there is time, the master now turns the narrative 
 lesson into a subject of conversation. If the lesson be 
 a dialogue, he takes one part while his pupils take the 
 other. The pupils also carry on the dialogue with 
 one another. In a living language there should be 
 numerous dialogue lessons, until they pass into sus- 
 tained conversations extracted from recognised books 
 for the young. There are many such in French. Short 
 dramatic pieces should be treated in the same way. 
 
 The reading books will gradually increase in diffi- 
 culty ; and alongside the thorough " lessoning " of one 
 book there should always be found the rapid cursive 
 reading of another book given out in the school and 
 not taken home. 
 
 As to grammar and parsing : the rules common to 
 English and French are brought into play at once. 
 Gradually, the differences of the two languages are 
 pointed out as they reveal themselves in the reading- 
 book. These are illustrated on the board, and 
 transferred by the children to a note-book as a home- 
 lesson. 
 
 Rule 1 3 (Associate Teachings). Vocables are from the 
 first associated with things' seen. Thereafter with one 
 another in sentences. The sentence must always be 
 the unit, not a word by itself. Isolated lists of 
 words and phrases learned by heart are of little use. 
 The new is associated also with the old by comparing 
 the new form with that already known. 
 
172 MODERN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 In schools where Latin is taught, associate the 
 Latin, French, and English forms of the same word, 
 pointing out the differences of signification as well as 
 of form. 
 
 It will be noticed that, if the above course be 
 followed, every lesson is a lesson in composition, and 
 that the whole atmosphere of the schoolroom is a 
 French atmosphere. Formal composition exercises 
 to be written at home, or in school, in the form of 
 simple narrative, the re-telling of a French story in 
 such language as the pupil can command, and the 
 writing of letters, will, of course, have their due place ; 
 as also the learning by heart of simple French poetry. 
 All this, just as it is done in the good teaching of the 
 native tongue. 
 
 Bearing in mind the practical end of our teaching, 
 we should let no day pass, after the first year, without 
 reading aloud an " unseen," and calling for its oral 
 translation into English. 
 
 It is assumed that as soon as possible the teacher 
 asks questions in French, and takes for answer, not a 
 yes, or no, or any one word, but a complete sentence. 
 
 I omit much, but the reader can easily further 
 apply the suggestions under the head of English and 
 Latin to French. 
 
 4 
 
 In this way a boy who is fourteen complete should 
 have attained a good knowledge of French grammar, a 
 satisfactory acquaintance with ordinary idioms, facility 
 in reading at sight ordinary narrative in such French 
 
XL] MODERN LANGUAGES. 173 
 
 as that of Charles XII. and Telemaque, 1 a power of 
 taking a part in simple French conversation, and of 
 writing a simple letter in French. 
 
 To say more than I have said would be to sketch a 
 series of lessons in French extending over three or four 
 years, which the teacher might use in a mechanical 
 spirit. The result would be failure. Schoolmasters, 
 as I have elsewhere said, have to study Education 
 in its end, its processes, principles, and methods ; and 
 then leave themselves free to think out detail in 
 their general instruction - plan and in their daily 
 teaching. This independence and vitality in the 
 teacher are necessary to his success. Indeed, I ought 
 almost to apologise for illustrating the application of the 
 rules of method to French, as I have partially done. 
 
 To the study of French beyond the age of fourteen, 
 Eules 14 and 15 for Latin are applicable in the 
 strictest sense. 
 
 Conclusion. 
 
 My object in this course of lectures has been to 
 demonstrate that Language must always be the 
 governing subject in all education worthy of the 
 name. It is the essential condition of growth. It 
 provides a vehicle, ever growing with the growth of 
 mind, for the expression of the inner life, without 
 
 1 I name these simply for illustration. 
 
174 MODERN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 which expression the deeper emotions and the spiritual 
 suggestions of our complex nature are like the clouds 
 on a windy day, ever changing their fleeting forms, 
 and finally vanishing altogether. Only when shaped 
 into words do these feelings and emotions get for 
 themselves a body, and become to us a permanent 
 possession. They then react upon our lives, and 
 are the steps to higher things. By the assimi- 
 lation of the language of others, mind is fed, and 
 it is feeding that makes the evolution of mind in the 
 young possible. Again, language as a real and con- 
 crete subject not only feeds, but, if it is understood, 
 it trains : it trains the processes of intelligence with- 
 out strain or effort, and whether a boy will or not. 
 Further, I have endeavoured to point out the dis- 
 tinction between training and discipline, with a view 
 to your seeing that, while the study of language, as 
 vehicle of thought and feeling, trains, with grammar, 
 it disciplines ; thus its claims as an educational instru- 
 ment become almost irresistible. 
 
 But not only does language feed, train, and disci- 
 pline: it* also at all stages, if properly taught, cultivates 
 in us the beautiful and ideal through the forms of 
 literature as compared with which all other forms of 
 art are of secondary and only ancillary importance. 
 It is quite possible to teach literature, though it may 
 be undesirable to examine on it. An external exami- 
 nation with its percentages, though, in most subjects, 
 inevitable in these days, should not, I think, be 
 allowed to degrade those more delicate instruments 
 
XI.] MODERN LANGUAGES. 175 
 
 of school education which have to do with the 
 ideal in any form, whether it be literature or 
 religion. It is death to them. And yet, at the 
 university stage there is material enough for exami- 
 nation in the subject of English : (1) grammar ; (2) 
 philology and word-history ; (3) literary history ; (4) 
 explanation and criticism of a passage ; (5) essay 
 writing. 
 
 In speaking of the Method which is to be followed 
 in teaching language if it is to be an educational 
 instrument, I have given you rules, but I have not 
 sought to dwell on these unduly. Enough has been 
 done, however, to show how the teacher may elabo- 
 rate rules for himself, and so work from within. Let 
 him realise fully, and by much thought, the aim, 
 the purpose, the idea of his daily work. Let him 
 understand that he is using language in its various 
 aspects in order to enrich and form, as well as to 
 inform, the minds committed to him, and he will 
 quickly find a method of procedure which may or may 
 not embrace all the rules of Method which another 
 may advocate, but which, though occasionally erring, 
 will yet be better than a method imposed on him 
 from without, because it will be a living, and not a 
 mechanical, method. " The transmission of life from 
 the living through the living to the living is the 
 highest definition of education." l Method is a good 
 servant but a bad master. In a teacher, however, as 
 
 1 Thring, p. 27. 
 
176 MODERN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 in men of every other occupation and profession, a 
 man's originality is of little worth until he has first 
 learned all that can be taught him ; but when he has 
 once learned this, let him then live his own professional 
 life freely, for " it is the letter that killeth, but the 
 spirit giveth life." 
 
 My purpose in these lectures, I need hardly say, 
 has not been to depreciate science - teaching. On the 
 contrary, there ought to be found in every school a 
 graduated and organised system of realistic teaching 
 from the infant-school to the gates of the university 
 the method of the object-lesson being in this 
 department the key to all science method. We do not 
 need to be afraid of as much encyclopaedism as will 
 place an educated youth in a rational attitude to 
 nature. What God has thought it worth His while to 
 make, is probably worthy of man's attention without 
 derogating from his dignity, or insinuating an insult to 
 Greek. Still, the centre round which all education of 
 a man must revolve is, in my opinion, a humanistic 
 centre, and I have, therefore, in these lectures ventured 
 to re-state the case for Language, and say a word for 
 Words. 
 
 Many things which I have suggested may seem 
 small and trivial to some masters, but Quintilian says 
 that the man to whom anything in education seems 
 small is not a good teacher : in truth, are not the very 
 greatest things made out of a large number of small 
 ones, by which alone they become possible, just as the 
 
XL] MODERN LANGUAGES. 177 
 
 physical universe is made up of atoms ? And what we 
 educators aim at is a very big thing in its result, for 
 " in very deed, in the end," as excellent Ascham 
 simply says, " the good or ill bringing up of children 
 doth as much serve to the good or ill service of God, 
 our Prince, and our whole country, as any one thing 
 doth beside." 
 
 12 
 

SUPPLEMENT. 
 
SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 Remarks on School- Instruction in the Classical Languages 
 especially Latin as compared with Instruction 
 in SCIENCE. 1 
 
 IN considering this question, it is necessary to clear 
 away from the field of discussion all illusory imagina- 
 tions as to the larger proportion of boys who would 
 benefit by a secondary-school system based solely on 
 scientific training, as compared with the number which 
 might benefit by the discipline afforded through the 
 classical tongues if good methods were employed. 
 Severe and sustained intellectual work, having know- 
 ledge or other mental purposes exclusively in view, 
 is naturally distasteful to the great majority of boys. 
 We must not draw too large an inference from the 
 inquisitiveness and love of knowledge which charac- 
 terise childhood. The recipient stage of a child's life 
 should be gently and wisely dealt with, and this it is 
 the function of the primary school to do. But in the 
 middle school, receptivity has given place in the boy 
 
 1 I venture to reprint this essay here because of its relevancy to 
 the subject of this book, and because the volume in which it appeared 
 is out of print, and will never be republished. 
 
 181 
 
182 LANGUAGE F.' SCIENCE. 
 
 to force, which seeks not to accept impressions, but 
 rather to make them. To break in upon the spon- 
 taneous and healthy expression of this fresh boyish 
 energy with Latin prose composition, or classifications 
 of birds and beasts, or chemical equations, is, even 
 in the most favourable circumstances, to traverse the 
 natural and genial current of young life, and to call 
 for a painful and self-sacrificing exertion of will. 
 Most boys will be found to make this exertion, when 
 they do make it, not from love of the work itself, but 
 from emulation, or from the moral considerations of 
 respect for authority, of personal attachment, or a sense 
 of duty. Of this we may be sure, that when inborn 
 stupidity and rampant boyism have claimed their own, 
 the residue of real intellectual workers, where there is 
 no external motive to intellectual exertion, will always 
 be found numerically disappointing. Nor will the 
 substitution of pneumatics, physiology, and chemistry, 
 for Latin and Greek, draw out a larger amount of 
 talent than these do, or show better on the reckoning- 
 day, when stock is taken of the quantity and quality 
 of available knowledge and discipline really acquired. 
 That by means of better books and of methods based 
 on a knowledge of human nature, a much larger pro- 
 portion of boys might be drawn within the circle of 
 school-work, is undeniable ; but thife points to the 
 improvement of existing practice, not to the subversion 
 of the existing system of studies. 
 
 There are, it seems to us, only two valid objections 
 to the prevalent practice of our public schools (1) 
 
LANGUAGE V. SCIENCE. 183 
 
 The almost entire exclusion from these schools of 
 elementary physics, history, and social economy, which, 
 if properly taught, can be made attractive as well as 
 instructive, promoting rather than retarding the magi- 
 stral classical and mathematical studies. (2) The 
 non-provision of a course of study for those pupils 
 who do not contemplate an university career, and 
 whose intellects, though repelled by linguistic sub- 
 jects, might possibly be reached by those consecutive 
 and methodical accounts of the external world which 
 we call Science. If the study of Latin and Greek, as 
 the leading subjects of middle-school work, renders 
 once for all inevitable the total exclusion of all in- 
 struction regarding external nature, national history, 
 literature, and economic science, the cause of the 
 classicists is, by the admission of this necessity, fatally 
 weakened. As a matter of fact, however, there is no 
 difficulty in prosecuting the study of at least one 
 ancient language, concurrently with those subjects 
 which every educated man may be reasonably expected 
 to know in their elementary principles and general 
 purport. This amount of (so-called) realistic scientific 
 knowledge is easy of attainment in secondary schools, 
 and as imperative as it is easy. Such subjects as 
 natural history are probably best treated by what 
 might be called the recreative method, i.e. recreation 
 with a plan in it. 
 
 It is only after we have assumed a certain amount 
 of realistic instruction to be given in public sec 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
184 LANGUAGE TV SCIENCE. 
 
 schools to all the pupils, and a separate educational 
 provision for those who are by nature disqualified 
 for linguistic discipline, that we properly approach the 
 question of Language versus Science as an educative 
 instrument ; and the question then becomes this : Is 
 physical science, as such, or are the classical tongues, 
 when taught with average ability (for it is only on 
 a mediocre teaching capacity that we ever can safely 
 rely in estimating the value of subjects of instruction), 
 more promotive of the formation of a good intellectual 
 habit ? 
 
 To state the question of a classical versus a scientific 
 education as a training in the knowledge of the life- 
 less signs of speech and their relations, versus a train- 
 ing in a knowledge of living Nature and its manifold 
 operations, is to misrepresent the point at issue. In 
 the university, and in the upper classes of the middle 
 school, the dispute is not between the claims of formal 
 and of real studies. Both studies present the realities 
 of knowledge to the mind of the student the one 
 the realities of man's nature, the other the realities 
 of physical nature. Again, both Latin and physical 
 science exercise and discipline the formal powers of 
 intellect, and both admit the student to an uncon- 
 scious knowledge of the operation and the laws of 
 intelligence. But that the purely formal discipline 
 of language (where we happen to have a highly 
 developed language to work with) is more delicate 
 and subtle, more deep and thorough, than that of 
 physics, is, we think, justly to be maintained. 
 
LANGUAGE F. SCIENCE. 185 
 
 Apart from formal discipline, the superiority claimed 
 for classical training over scientific consists in this, 
 that in the former we have the generalisations of the 
 wisest men on human life and human duty expressed 
 in the most artistic forms ; in the latter we have only 
 generalisations on the facts and sequences of the visible 
 world. The realities of moral experience, embodied 
 in forms historical and dramatic, as these are impressed 
 on the acquiring mind by the very effort applied in 
 deciphering a difficult language, are of more value, 
 both in themselves and as giving solidity and perma- 
 nent power to the mental fabric, than a knowledge of 
 the phenomena of heat and electricity. These moral 
 generalisations of the wise are, in truth, an unsys- 
 tematic philosophy of human nature, furnishing the 
 learner not only with the experience of the past, but 
 with instruction in the motives and purposes of life. 
 
 To become acquainted with the genius of the past 
 through the medium of translation, or when transfused 
 through modern literatures, is to sacrifice the benefits 
 which we derive from the study of thought which 
 has been produced in circumstances not only different 
 from, but even in some respects antagonistic to, our 
 own. It is to sacrifice also the artistic form in which 
 these thoughts are clothed forms which are the most 
 perfect in literature, and which the structure of the 
 ancient languages forces even upon the negligent 
 student. The peculiar value of the eesthetics of the 
 intellect and of morality, as distinguished from the 
 aesthetics of feeling and emotion, in promoting the 
 
186 LANGUAGE F. 'SCIENCE. 
 
 discipline and cultivation of mind, and above all of 
 the opening mind of youth, has not been (so far as I 
 know) adverted to by writers on education, though it 
 must have been experienced by all who have had the 
 benefits of a classical training. It is not simply an 
 aesthetic, but also an intellectual and moral cultiva- 
 tion, which flows from close contact with ideal and 
 artistic forms of utterance. 
 
 Such results in the growth of mind are, it is true, 
 neither ponderable nor commensurable quantities, but 
 they assuredly tend to produce a quality of mind 
 rarely to be attained in any other way, save by men 
 of native genius. Kichter has well said, and probably 
 without much exaggeration " The present ranks of 
 humanity would sink irrecoverably if youth did not 
 take its way through the silent temple of the mighty 
 past into the busy market-place of after-life." 
 
 But turning aside from classical education as a 
 whole, let us confine ourselves to Language in general 
 as an educational instrument : and let us consider the 
 contending claims of language and science closely in 
 their relation to the growth of intelligence. 
 
 As an intellectual discipline, language makes good 
 its claim to preference on the following among other 
 grounds : 
 
 1. Words stand for things real or notional. Now 
 it is only in so far as words denote the objects of 
 external perception that a training based on science 
 can be said to have advantage over linguistic training. 
 
LANGUAGE F. SCIENCE. 187 
 
 Even in this case, however, language is defined for 
 the pupil only within the narrow limits of the depart- 
 ment, or fragment of departments, which it is possible 
 within a given time to teach ; whereas linguistic train- 
 ing, by teaching the value of words, as such, to what- 
 ever department of human knowledge they may 
 belong, educates the intellect to precision in the use 
 of them generally. So true is this, that men trained 
 only in a special department of science, and whose 
 education is limited by it, fail to use the language 
 even of their own department with that accuracy and 
 consistency of signification which would alone satisfy 
 a mind trained on language or philosophy. In the 
 only sense, then, in which physical science, to the 
 extent to which it can be taught to boys, can affect to 
 do the work of linguistic training, it does not succeed. 
 Even if it succeeded, how small the ground it would 
 cover ! The language of a single department of 
 science or fragments of a few sciences, which, more- 
 over, in so far as they are fragmentary, fail to yield 
 true discipline, would represent the whole range of 
 the vocabulary taught. All those words which are 
 daily in our mouths as denoting the realities which 
 are constantly influencing our lives in all social and 
 moral relations, would be left outside the range of the 
 scientific teaching. It would be superfluous here to 
 dwell either on the pre-eminent importance of this 
 aspect of man's daily existence, or on the immense 
 value of a right understanding of words, and a wise 
 use of them. Every successive inquirer into human 
 
188 LANGUAGE F.> SCIENCE. 
 
 nature has descanted on the error, misunderstanding, 
 and consequent misery into which an abuse of words 
 is constantly betraying mankind. It seems to me 
 that if a linguistic training had no other result than 
 to teach us that words were our servants and not 
 our masters, and that we must question, define, weigh, 
 and estimate them, it would require little other 
 defence of its claim to the traditionary prominence 
 in the secondary school which it happily inherits. 
 
 2. When we pass from the consideration of the 
 discipline of language in teaching us the exact use 
 of single terms, to the employment of these in the 
 expression of our thoughts under the necessary opera- 
 tion of mental laws, we find in language a just, though 
 imperfect, reflection of intellectual processes. In this 
 view the study of language is the informal study of 
 the laws of thought. We may assume that few 
 will be prepared to require from boys that reflective 
 grasp of intellectual laws, that effort after a conscious 
 realisation of abstract processes, which is implied in 
 any study of logic or psychology worthy of the name. 
 At the same time, all will recognise the paramount 
 importance of exercising the formal powers of mind, 
 and, by a careful method, giving practice in the art, 
 while avoiding the scientific terminology and formulae 
 of logic. Now it is precisely in this relation that the 
 distinctive characteristic of language-training reveals 
 itself. For language being the body of thought, the 
 student of it is studying concrete mind. While deal- 
 ing with objective things with vocables, which are 
 
LANGUAGE F. SCIENCE. 189 
 
 audible and visible, and which, therefore, do not evade 
 his grasp he is at the same time unconsciously 
 tracing the operations of intellect in others, and learn- 
 ing the right use of his own faculties ; in other words, 
 he is a student of logic, in the widest sense of that 
 term, without being aware of it. 
 
 What I have said applies to Language in general, 
 including the vernacular language above all. But the 
 vernacular cannot be thoroughly known without the 
 aid of another, and, above all, an ancient tongue ; and 
 for English-speaking people that tongue must be Latin. 
 Let us look at this language as specially fitted to give 
 the discipline to which I have referred above. 
 
 In the first place, the word - inflections in a 
 Latin sentence lead the pupil to the clear perception 
 of the concord and partial identity in thought of 
 subject and attribute, whether the attributive appears 
 as an adjective or a predicative verb. The distinct 
 forms by which inflected languages indicate this mental 
 concord must necessarily give the pupil a clearer 
 notion of what a judgment and an affirmation really 
 are. We do not here speak of the use which might 
 be made of this part of linguistic discipline by a 
 teacher who was himself conscious of the course of 
 logic which his instructions in language were scarcely 
 veiling, but of the inevitable discipline which the 
 average boy receives from the average teacher. And 
 it is not only in simple sentences that the pupil is 
 thus exercised in the concord of thought as expressed 
 
190 LANGUAGE F.' SCIENCE. 
 
 in attribution, but he is also led by the help of the 
 same mutual good understanding among the inflections 
 to trace a connection between clauses, and to detect 
 the fact that complete assertions, no less than indi- 
 vidual words, may be attributive of each other. The 
 tracing out and perception of this unity of the organism 
 of thought as expressed in a series of related affirma- 
 tions is a valuable intellectual exercise. 
 
 We pass over the clearness which must be given 
 to the pupil's perception of time and of government 
 (so-called) by the resembling, yet differing, terminations 
 of verbs and nouns, to point out the training in 
 syllogistic logic which he necessarily receives when 
 he enters on the analysis of an involved complex 
 sentence. The varying inflections of the words before 
 him necessarily lead him to the discrimination of an 
 assertion from its grounds, and of a conclusion from 
 its causes, motives, or purposes. The forms set apart 
 to denote these qualities of propositions compel his 
 attention, detain it, and thus fix the distinctions in his 
 mind. Again, those qualities of propositions which we 
 express by the words hypothesis and probability, and 
 even so fine a distinction as that between probability 
 and possibility, are forced upon the understanding of 
 the learner, however unconscious the teacher may be 
 of the full meaning and value of the instrument he is 
 using, and however ignorant the pupil may be of the 
 logical generalisations of propositions and the names by 
 which these generalisations are known. What higher 
 discipline of intellect can be proposed for a boy whom 
 
LANGUAGE F. SCIENCE. 191 
 
 we desire to discipline severely, but whose self-con- 
 sciousness we do not yet wish to evoke, or to force 
 into activity, than to lay before him a mass of words, 
 apparently dead and disjointed signs, and to require 
 that, from a steady consideration of these, the living 
 organism of speech shall be built up an organism 
 into which all the formal elements of intellect run, 
 and which calls for the discrimination, not only of the 
 various relations in thought of the propositions before 
 him, but of the precise force of many and various 
 vocables, possessing, it may be, a wide and various 
 connotation ? 
 
 Nay, I would go further, and maintain that for the 
 production of a purely scientific habit of intellect we 
 shall best employ some years of boyhood in the study 
 of an ancient synthetic language, and preferably of 
 Latin. For such a study exercises the intelligence 
 at once subtly and profoundly ; it penetrates all the 
 recesses of fallacy, and thereby habituates the mind to 
 the search for exactness and truth the highest of all 
 qualifications for scientific investigation. While the 
 study of an ancient tongue necessarily widens the 
 conceptions, it also helps to elevate the intelligence 
 above the dominion of words and phrases. This or 
 that department of science is no longer the master of 
 the scientific investigator, but his servant. It is seen 
 in its true proportions as only a part of the general 
 truth of life. Comprehension and grasp are thus 
 given, and the man who after linguistic training 
 becomes the thorough master of any one science, is 
 
192 LANGUAGE V. SCIENCE. 
 
 truly a master of it, because he sees it in its true 
 proportions and in its relations to the vast realm of 
 knowledge. Setting aside men of genius, is not the 
 man of one science, or even two, about the narrowest 
 and most hopelessly barren of educated men ? 
 
 The study of Latin, then, by giving comprehension 
 of mind and power of intellect, is the best of all pre- 
 parations for even the scientific man ; and further, it 
 gives greater acuteness of discrimination a most 
 important attribute of the highest scientific minds. 
 In short, we may say that the formal study of 
 language, and, above all, of Latin, is the most admirable 
 of all exercises in the analysis and synthesis which 
 constitute the whole method of science. 
 
 3. To the contention that the intellectual discipline 
 of which we speak can be equally well obtained from 
 subjects more immediately useful than an ancient 
 tongue, such as the natural sciences, I would say : 
 
 The instruction of boys, in all subjects in which the 
 formal is, from the nature of the case, of primary 
 importance, must be essentially dogmatic. It may be 
 safely said that up to the age of sixteen even a lucid 
 statement of principles is received by all but a few 
 boys as dogma : to suppose anything else is to deceive 
 ourselves. Though they may be occasionally startled 
 into the conscious perception of rational relations 
 under the influence of a teacher of original mind, 
 they do not, and cannot, in any adequate sense, realise 
 the reasoning process by which scientific conclusions 
 are reached. They are not trained in the method 
 
LANGUAGE V. SCIENCE. 193 
 
 of science. Hence, while in the study of natural 
 science, or any branch of it, they are doubtless taught 
 not only facts, but classifications and laws, and causes 
 in relation to their effects, these are not in the majority 
 of cases elaborated by the pupil himself. The teaching 
 of them, accordingly, is apt to degenerate into a state- 
 ment of fact, and the learning of them into an act of 
 memory. 
 
 It is to be at once conceded, that were pupils led 
 by an intelligent and rarely -endowed master in an 
 inquiry into nature, with a view to re-establish, for 
 themselves, results already known, a training would 
 by this means be given unequalled as a discipline ; 
 but such a method of instruction is on a large scale 
 quite impracticable, and, even if practicable, it would 
 be premature in its demands on a boy's powers. 
 Those educationalists, who are not mere theorists, feel 
 the necessity of finding an instrument which does not 
 overstrain boys, and which can work fairly well in 
 the hands of no very cunning workmen. Where 
 natural science is that instrument, the method which 
 looks so well in theory must degenerate in actual 
 practice into the most ordinary and vulgar cram. 
 Differences, generalisations, laws, and causes will not 
 be truly apprehended as such, but will be arranged 
 in the pupil's mind by virtue of association alone, 
 however glibly they may be enunciated at call in 
 their proper places and sequences. It is only the 
 select few, even of those who fairly master the subject 
 taught, that are fully conscious of the reasoning pro- 
 
194 LANGUAGE F. SCIENCE. 
 
 cess involved, and do not simply trust to faithful 
 memory and association. It is no doubt true that, a 
 few years later, the boy who has been well taught in 
 one or two departments of science may reflect on the 
 results of that teaching, and in this way these results 
 may fructify into a kind of retrospective discipline; 
 the relation of cause and effect, differences, likenesses, 
 and the elements and grounds of generalisations, may 
 be then apprehended, and the intellectual ends of 
 education be thus attained. But even the production 
 of this winter-fruit assumes particularly good teaching, 
 a good memory, and habits of mind which are naturally 
 more than usually reflective. 
 
 In Latin, on the contrary, the intellectual processes 
 of differentiation, generalisation, and reasoning are not 
 only much more fully, delicately, and variously repre- 
 sented than in physics, but they have the signal 
 advantage of not being offered to the learner as 
 scientific results which are capable of being tabulated 
 and acquired by the memory as so many co-ordinated 
 facts. They have in every successive sentence to be 
 sought out and brought to light anew, and this as the 
 very condition of making a single progressive step. 
 The boy's daily task is the constructing of a living 
 organism out of a seemingly chaotic aggregation of 
 dead symbols, and in the construction of this he brings 
 into play all his intellectual faculties whether he will 
 or not. The discipline is thus obtained independently 
 of the teacher, and independently of the purpose of the 
 pupil also. 
 
LANGUAGE V. SCIENCE. 195 
 
 Of no other instrument of discipline can this be 
 said except geometry, and the kind of cultivation 
 which it gives is of too narrow a kind to admit of its 
 ever being more than the accessory of other educa- 
 tional instruments. The precision of the definitions in 
 geometry, the necessity of constantly referring to them, 
 and the purity of the exercise in syllogistic reasoning 
 which it affords, are of great benefit to the young 
 mind. But alone, and unsupported by the higher 
 linguistic training, geometry would be an unsatis- 
 factory and barren discipline. The subject-matter of 
 the reasoning is confined within too narrow limits, and 
 the landmarks of the ratiocinative process are too 
 clearly defined, to admit of its ever affording by itself 
 a liberal culture. Both the subject and the discipline 
 which it gives, are too monotonous and inflexible. 
 
 In the study of Latin the boy either does the 
 work before him or he does not : if he does it, he 
 cannot, if he would, avoid obtaining the discipline 
 which the work affords ; whereas, in elementary 
 science, the ready memory facilitates the acquisition 
 of a semblance of knowledge which may pass muster, 
 but which does not yield thorough discipline. We 
 shall, perhaps, be told that boys can and do under- 
 stand science teaching ; but when we examine closely 
 we find that the objectors do not really mean strict 
 science at all, but only nature-knowledge, and this we 
 have already said ought, as a matter of course, to have 
 its place in every secondary school. 
 
 Accordingly, as in the training to a perception of 
 
196 LANGUAGE F: SCIENCE. 
 
 the force of vocables, so also in the disciplining of the 
 formal and intellectual powers, there seem to be 
 sufficient grounds for maintaining that science, as it 
 can be alone taught to boys between twelve and sixteen 
 years of age, is a feeble educative instrument as com- 
 pared with a language like Latin. 
 
 The kind of discipline above claimed as the almost 
 exclusive property of language in the field of secondary 
 instruction, cannot be so surely obtained through the 
 modern tongues, except in those cases (on which it 
 w r ould be vain to calculate) in which the rare excel- 
 lence and general philological cultivation of the master 
 supplement the inherent defects of his instruments. 
 It is the contrast of the Latin tongue to our native 
 mode of casting thought, no less than its own per- 
 fection of structure, that makes it so valuable as a dis- 
 cipline. The conspicuous devices, moreover, whereby 
 grammatical, and therefore thought, relations are 
 indicated, reveal, even to the careless pupil of the 
 most ordinary teacher, the logical structure of all 
 language. The organism of thought is more com- 
 pletely exhibited, the relation of its elements is 
 more delicately indicated, and the unity of the whole 
 is more conspicuously made visible in a classical 
 tongue than in any other. 1 
 
 If nature-knowledge and mathematics and modern 
 
 1 The larger literary and sesthetic arguments in favour, of basing 
 secondary education on the classical tongues are not here discussed. 
 Our object has been simply to show the nature of the intellectual 
 operations which language on the one hand, and science on the other, 
 calls into play in boys between twelve and sixteen. 
 
LANGUAGE V. SCIENCE. 197 
 
 languages, including our own language, are all admitted 
 to a place in our secondary schools, I grant that it 
 is impossible to preserve to both Latin and Greek 
 their present practical monopoly. The ship must 
 be lightened or it will never reach its port. Greek, 
 in short, must, to our loss, cease to be a neces- 
 sary subject in secondary schools. It must be a 
 special subject to be taken by those who choose. 
 I do not believe in what are called " modern sides " 
 in classical schools. Education at the secondary stage 
 is an unity, as it is in the primary stage. It is 
 only after sixteen or seventeen that the process of 
 specialisation can be allowed to show itself. To 
 exclude Latin, however, as well as Greek from the 
 obligatory curriculum, would be an educational calamity. 
 Being the storehouse of a large portion of our own 
 .tongue, it yields in quite a peculiar degree an exercise 
 in the history and force of words. In studying Latin 
 we are studying our native, if not strictly our mother, 
 tongue, and it is impossible to acquire a command of 
 modern English if we are ignorant of one of its 
 sources. When we remember that Latin is the 
 basis of the Romance languages, and smooths the 
 way to an acquaintance with these, we add the con- 
 sideration of utility to an already adequate ground of 
 preference. 
 
 Y^~^ 
 
 (UNIVERSITY 
 
 \. r 
 
MORRISON AND GIBB, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 BERKELEY 
 
 Return to desk from which borrowed. 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 JAN 24 1948 
 
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