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Drawing and Vocal Music.

Music.

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It does not consist with my present plan to comment on the two other chief instruments of Sense-training Drawing which fall within the province of a school course. and Vocal Nor do I feel competent to offer any practical rules for the teaching of either Drawing or Vocal Music. But I have a strong conviction that both should form integral parts of every school course, and should be taught to every scholar. The claims of Music, both in training the voice and in giving cheerfulness to the school-life, are incontestable. And Drawing is not only in a practical sense indispensable to the skilled artisan, and capable of manifold useful applications by scholars of every class; but its indirect effect on the training of the perceptions, on taste, on clearness of vision and firmness of hand, is still more important as an element in a liberal education.

VIII. THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE.

THE study of language has held a high place in most systems Language of education. However far we go back in the long the stahistory of learning, we find that such subjects as ple of instruction. grammar and rhetoric, which concerned themselves with the right use and choice of words, have always formed, if not the chief, at any rate a prominent feature in the scheme of a liberal education. Indeed in the history of our own country and in the practice of our Universitics and public schools, linguistic studies have held a place so conspicuous, that they have well-nigh overshadowed all others.

for this.

So it may be well to ask ourselves at the outset, Why should The reasons we study language at all? On what reasons is the universal tradition in favor of philological and grammatical studies founded? Are those reasons valid? And if so, to what extent should they be accepted and acted on, having regard to the just claims of much new and useful knowledge of another kind? Speech we know is the one characteristic distinction of humanity. Every word which has been invented is the record of some fact or thought, and furnishes the means by which facts thought. or thoughts can be transmitted to others. In a sense, every new word represents a new conquest of civilization, a distinct addition to the intellectual resources of the world. To become acquainted with words, in their full significance, is to know much about the things they represent; and about the thoughts which other people have had respecting those things. The enlargement of our vocabulary, whether it be in English or any other language, means the enlargement of

Words the records of former

Extent and Variety of Vocabulary.

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our range of thought and the acquisition of new materials of knowledge.

And the in

struments of new thought.

Moreover, the words we use are not merely the exponents of notions and thoughts which have existed in the minds of others; they are the very instruments with which we think. We are unable to conceive of any regular consecutive thinking,-any advance from what is known to what is unknown-except by the agency of language. Whatever therefore gives precision and method to our use of words, gives precision to our thoughts. Language as it has been formed by nations, embodied in literature, and formulated into grammar, corresponds in its structure to the evolution of thought in man. Every grammatical rule is, in another form, a rule of logic; every idiom, a representation of some moral differentia or characteristic of the people who have used it; every subtle verbal distinction is a key to some logical distinction; every figure of speech, a symbol of some effort of the human imagination to overleap the boundary of the prosaic and the actual, and to pass into the infinite region beyond; every verbal ambiguity is both the effect and the cause of mental confusion. And so the study of language is the study of humanity; the forms of language represent the forms of human thought; the history of language is the history of our race and its development, and great command over the resources of language is only another name for great command over the ideas and conceptions which make up the wealth of our intellectual life.

Extent and

variety of vocabulary.

Mr. Max Müller estimates the total number of English words at 50,000; he points out that the speaking vocabulary of an ordinary English citizen, who reads his newspaper and books from Mudie's, does not extend beyond 3000 or 4000 words; that accurate thinkers and persons of wide knowledge probably use twice as many; that the Old Testament contains 5642 different words; that in all Milton's works you will find only about 8000; and that Shakespeare, who displayed a greater variety of expression

than probably any writer in any language, produced all his plays with 15,000 words. And at the same time he tells us that an uneducated English peasant lives and dies with a vocabulary which scarcely extends beyond 300 words. You cannot reflect on a statement like this, and on all that it implies, without feeling convinced that all investigations into the growth of language, its structure, its history, and the philosophy and reason of its grammatical rules, must have an important bearing on the culture of the understanding, and be very fruitful both of useful knowledge and of mental exercise. It is a shallow thing to say that what the human being wants is a knowledge of things, and not words. Words are things; they embody facts. He who studies them is studying much more than sounds and letters. He is gaining an insight into the heart and reality of the things they represent. Let a battlefield or a storm at sea be viewed by a painter, by a poet, by a sailor, and by an ordinary observer;-or say, by a Frenchman and an Englishman. It will be described differently by them all. But he who understands the language of them all, sees it, so to speak, with several pairs of eyes. And he is the richer, and his mind is the larger in consequence.

Some such reasons as these no doubt underlie the very general assumption that a sound and liberal education should pay special regard to the study of language. And we in England have to deal with this practical question in three distinct forms. We teach (1) the languages of Greece and Rome, which are familiarly called the classic languages; (2) some of the languages of modern Europe; and (3) our own vernacular speech. We shall do well to take this opportunity of noting the special reasons which justify each of these kinds of teaching. On examination we shall find that in each we have a very different object in view. There is, however, a sense in which all are alike valuable, and in which their study may be justified on the general grounds already indicated.

But as we all know, the linguistic and philological culture to which most value has been attached is that which is to be gained

Greek and Latin.

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in the study of Latin and Greek. We still call the man who is familiar with these languages a scholar par Latin and excellence, and are inclined to withhold the title Greek. from one who, however learned in other ways, has no acquaintance with what are called the classics. Now without denouncing this state of opinion as a superstition as some do, it may be well to ask ourselves what is the origin of it; and how it ever came to pass that the Latin and Greek languages were regarded as the staple of all learning; almost the only knowledge worth acquiring? Let us look back-to a period 300 years ago, the time when Lyly wrote his Grammar, when Ascham was teaching Lady Jane Grey and Queen Elizabeth to read Plato, and when the most important of our great grammar schools were founded. If you had in those days asked Erasmus or Sir Philip Sidney why Latin and Greek should hold this prominent, this almost exclusive rank, the reply would have been very easy. The books best worth reading in the world were written in those languages. If one wanted to see the best models of history, there were Thucydides and Livy; if he would know what dramatic art could be at its highest, he must read Sophocles and Euripides, or Plautus and Terence. If he would learn geometry, there was Euclid; rhetoric, he must read it in Quintillian or Aristotle; moral philosophy, in Plato or Cicero. "I expect ye," wrote Sir Matthew Hale to his grandchildren, "to be good proficients in the Latin tongue, that ye may be able to read, understand, and construe any Latin author, and to make true and handsome Latin; and though I would have you learn something of Greek, yet the Latin tongue is that which I most value, because all learning is ever made in that language." Modern literature was only just emerging into life, after the long darkness of the middle ages; and a certain flavor of barbarism and rudeness was held to belong to it. Chaucer and Dante had written, but it would not have occurred to any scholar of the sixteenth century to suppose that such books would repay critical analysis in the same sense as Homer or Ovid. Nearly all the literary wealth of the world, as it then

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