liminary grammar might be called the railroad method. The traveller by rail travels fast, but he sees little of the country through which he is whirled. The longest way round is often the shortest way home; and my experience has been that the time spent at the start without proceeding beyond the very elements of grammar is time well spent. A fair vocabulary is acquiredwithout effortin the course of reading; for the learning of new words, especially if they are chosen so as to present obvious similarities to English words, is a task eminently within the powers of the youthful mind; and all words met with in an interesting context arouse attention and impress themselves on the mind of their own accord. All the while the pupil is forming his feeling for the language and gradually becoming habituated to ordinary ways of saying ordinary things. He gradually loses that sense of strangeness which is the great barrier to anything like mastery.[1] It is surprising how much can be said in Latin without using more than a single declension of nouns and adjectives and a single conjugation of verbs.[2] The habit of reading very easy Latin, thus acquired at an early stage, will prove of the utmost value when the pupil approaches the study of a Latin author. Such a book as I have in mind should therefore do something to bridge over the formidable chasm which at present separates the reading of isolated sentences from the reading of an author.
All Latin authors as they stand, are far too difficult to serve as a basis of study for beginners: and they are also, I may add, not well adapted in respect of subject matter and
- ↑ One great advantage of this method, especially for learners who are able to cover the ground at a fair rate of progress, is that it lends itself to acquiring the “art of reading Latin” (as distinct from the art of construing it), to use Prof. W. G. Hale's phrasethe art of rapid reading.
- ↑ There are some 1,000 verbs of the first conjugation in Latin (including compounds).
