Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/92

 company with one more so; or when a performer in a concert is embarrassed between the rival claims of the ear, the eye, and the fingers, in executing a part not familiar to him: or, to name an instance precisely in point, when an adult has made just that degree of acquaintance with a new language which exempts him from the necessity of incessantly breaking off from his book, to consult his lexicon; so that he pursues, or endeavours to pursue, the sense of the writer at the ordinary pace at which the eye traverses a printed page. In this case, he finds that the rate of progress to which the eye is habituated, and which it does not readily slacken, greatly exceeds that at which the mind can get through the complicated process of recollecting the meaning of single words, and of analyzing the construction of sentences. There is therefore a perpetual jarâ€”a want of synchronous movement, and a sense of distress, and a strain, which quickly exhaust the power of attention; or, if persisted in, impair the brain.

Those who have made acquirements later than in youth, will remember to have found the second stage of their familiarity with a new language more trying to the mind than the first; or, in other words, they will have been able to spend some hours, with less bodily and mental damage, in conning a book, word by word, in a language barely under-stood, than in attempting to read off an author of whose language they have deemed themselves nearly masters. In reading word by word, the several mental operations are held to time by the mere interruption ; but in reading paragraphs continuously, the eye outstrips the memory, and the mind is wrenched.

Now a child, just after he has become so far familiar with written language as to be able to enunciate sentences without hesitation, is yet far from having acquired an instantaneous recollectionperhaps no knowledge at all, of a large proportion of the words he meets with, and