Passages of English, more or less unsuited for children and often selected without method, are part of existing school-drill. This might be supplemented by attention to elocution, and practice in committing to memory, exercises that children are peculiarly apt for. Such exercises have the advantage of keeping the pupil occupied with the words of his own language, and storing him with a fund of expression.
Looking out the meanings is also a valuable exercise in greater or less present practice. In the hands of a skilful teacher this might lead to a wide command of synonymes. The highest form of this exercise would be the precise discrimination of synonymes. The want of some such early training is very marked in current literature. It is strange that men should know, or at least have spent much of their school-time in learning, the conjectured shades of meaning in Latin or Greek words, while they ride rough-shod over the delicacies of their own vocabulary.
Again, if Philology is to be studied, apart from Comparative Philology, it might be expected that boys should be taught the origin and changes in form and meaning of words they use daily, rather than crammed with the history of words they never use in after-life, and never view with any thing but a pedantic interest at the best.
A beginning might be made in philology at an early stage. The sources of words are determined by simple rules: it would be an easy task for beginners to apply these rules in referring words to their source, to decide whether words were taken from Latin, or Saxon, or Norman-French. A good exercise would be to Saxonize a whole Latinized paragraph, and inversely.
In discussing other studies in English I shall make a distinction between analytical processes and synthetical processes. Both occur in dealing with what usage permits—the province of Grammar—and also in dealing with what, within the compass of permissible usage, is best suited for its purpose—the province of Rhetoric. Analysis is otherwise known as construing, or parsing; synthesis, as constructing, or composing.
In the meagre share of our school-time now allotted to the teaching of English, very little is done toward the practice of these operations. This is all the more to be deplored, because the analysis of sentences and the principles of composition are not taught in connection with Latin or Greek. It is a great waste of energy to learn meanings and shades of meaning of so many vocables destined to total neglect as soon as they have been learned: the evil is aggravated when so much lumber is acquired without reference to principles applicable to all verbal compositions.
The grammatical analysis of sentences has lately been introduced into our schools. But the complaint is made that boys, though they soon learn to repeat glibly enough the hard terms used in that process, often fail to understand them. Now, what is the cause of this? It is due to two causes, both arising from the consumption of so much time
