reason and judgment? That would depend altogether on the aim which the writer set before himself. There is plenty of room within the limits of the first declension and the first conjugation for the training of the mind in habits of accurate thought and expression; for instance, the sentences may be made as difficult in regard to order of words as you please. But I would urge that they can hardly be made too easy at the beginning. It is sometimes forgotten that mental training is not synonymous with the inculcation of a mass of grammatical forms which only burden the memory, and that the habit of reading with care and fluency is itself a mental discipline of the highest value. What the teacher of any language has to do is not to accustom his pupil to regard each sentence as a nut to crack or a pitfall to beware of; but rather to induce him by the art of “gentle persuasion” to look upon the foreign tongue as a friend to be approached on terms of easy familiarity. Difficulties will accumulate fast enough, and I submit with all deference that it is a mistake to convert the learning of any foreign language into an obstacle race, by deliberately throwing difficulties into the path of the learner. Latin, at any rate, is hard enough in itself. And a habit of thoughtlessness is surely the last thing that will be encouraged by a method such as that sketched above, by which learning is made a matter of observation from the first, and not of uninteliigent memorizing.
It goes without saying that the grammar to be taught in such a book should be limited to the necessary and normal. All that is in any way superfluous to the beginner should be rigorously excluded. But so soon as a general view of the whole field of regular accidence and the bare outlines of syntax has been attained by way of the Reader, the time has arrived for taking the pupil over the same ground again, as presented in the systematic form of the grammar. He is now in a position to understand what a grammar really isnot a collection of arbitrary rules, but a catalogue raisonné of the usages of a language based upon
