from passages which the offender does not understand is to be seriously deprecated. If it produces no other evil effect, it at least is a great loss of time, seeing that the hours so spent might have been devoted to learning something that would educate all the faculties.
It seems very important that the pupils should be directed to be careful to give their memory lessons according to the sense and feeling; in reciting poetry attention is to be paid to the quantities and, above all, to the caesuras; then the lines will sound like music. This is unquestionably the surest way of making good speakers, and is far superior as an elocutionary practice to any weekly or less frequent class of elocution. It is also for this reason of the utmost importance that the professor should read the authors well, and see that the pupils read according to the sense of the passage.
§ 3. Written Exercises.[1]
Themes, in the broadest sense, including imitation exercises and free essays, are of the greatest importance. They force the pupils to concentration of thought, and give them patience and facility in writ-
- ↑ In a recent article in the Fortnightly Review, November 1902 ("Are the Classics to Go?"), Professor Postgate, a distinguished English scholar, writes: "If the 'dead' languages and literatures are not to retire into the background, they must be taught as if they were alive" (p. 878). – "Translations from English into Latin or Greek is a most valuable training and necessary part of classical training; but it ought not to have superseded original composition. ... From the first, speaking and writing Latin should go hand in hand with reading" (pp. 879-880). Professor Postgate calls these "improved methods"; improved, surely, if he speaks of nearly all systems in vogue during the last century, not however in regard to the system of the Society of Jesus, which always practised this system, as will appear from the next pages.
