Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/731

Rh on Latin and Greek. Too little time is left for this analysis: none but teachers know the quantity of iteration and exemplification necessary to get an abstract notion into a boy's head. And there is no time at all for an exercise without which analysis can never be vividly understood, the opposite process of synthesis. Before a boy can be fully awakened to the gist of the terms of analysis, he must have applied them again and again to themes of his own composing, and there will be no time for such an exercise until there is an end of the classical supremacy.

The purification of the language from blunders is an urgent necessity. A good way of habituating the pupil to recognized usage would be to keep him working at collections of grammatical blunders. Were English made the systematic study that Latin has been, we should in this way effect, in the course of a generation or two, a great purification of our language. We have a good many collections of genuine idioms with examples of their violation; but we want a great many books of this kind—contributions from many workers in the same field. Latin is well provided for in this way. One cannot help regretting that so much time has been thrown away upon settling pure Latin usage that might have been spent so much more profitably in the purification of our own tongue.

So much for familiarizing the pupil with the parts of a sentence and correct grammatical usage. Practical teachers will recognize in what has been exhibited a wide field for school-study. Others will understand the amount of exercise involved, when they reflect upon the time now spent upon introductory exercises to Latin, of a much less extensive range than those I have indicated.

A knowledge of admissible forms of expression is more than Mr. Dasent seems to have found in several "good Latin scholars." But a youth that is master of this accomplishment is but indifferently equipped for recording and communicating his thoughts. Much imperfect expression passes current. A thing may be put a hundred ways, all conformable to grammar, yet one, and perhaps not many more than one, accords with the laws of good composition.

Can the principles of good composition be taught? Is rhetoric—the knowledge of good and bad in expression, viewed with reference to certain ends—a possible accomplishment for the school-boy? According to De Quincey, the end of rhetoric, as conceived by the ancients, was either ornament or fraud, figurative decoration or sophistry—a conception of rhetoric not so very rare in our day. The one end was served by the branches of rhetoric conversant with Tropes, Figures, and Emotional Qualities of Style; the other by the various maxims of Persuasive Art, consisting for the most part of shrewd devices for securing plausibility. I believe something more might be made of those branches of education than mere garnishing and trickery; still they are, perhaps, too advanced for the school-room. Be that as it