Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/247

 defined alliance with the most significant terms. There is, in such a process, a double, and an intimately blended training of the mind, the effect of which is in an equal degree to enrich, and to empower it. The practice of translation from another language, when the time comes for attempting it, and if passages are selected with judgment, may be resorted to with the best effect, as related to our immediate purpose. The learner, when qualified to do so, should take a floridly descriptive passage, such as may be found in Buffon, or Fenelon, and render it into English, in two versions; then into Latin; and if not proficient enough in Greek to carry the same passage forward into that language, our purpose, in some good measure, will be secured by his merely looking out the epithetsadjectives and verbs, which would be best embodied in such a translation.

I well know that the teacher of language whose habits of mind fix his attention upon grammatical and synthetical proficiency, and who feels as if Horace himself were to re-vise every exercise, will distaste methods such as those which I venture to recommend; decrying them as impertinent, or as likely to withdraw the learner’s regards from the momentous matters of syntax and quantity. Be it so: I am intent upon the invigoration of the elementary faculties of the mind; and with this view, holding in abeyance the objections of scrupulous scholarship, avail myself of such means as seem adapted to my purposea purpose I humbly deem important. And in this place I must express the opinion that, in teaching languages, the process would be greatly facilitated by confining the learner’s attention, in the first instance, or so far as could conveniently be done, to the descriptive portion of each; this being the class of words most readily taken up by the mind. I grant however that a method of this sort demands some preparations to be made for carrying it into effect, in the way both