want you
to be, but I am quite sure that Mathematics will help you to this, by
making you accurate and reasonable and attentive, without which qualities
you will be no use and very little comfort. If you work hard at
Mathematics while you are here, and gain these qualities, you have my free
leave to shut your Euclid for good on the day you leave school,--you will
have learnt his best lessons.

Is there any great mental good which you can gain by the study of
Languages, quite apart from the advantage of being able to read and speak
when you go abroad? Yes; it enlarges your mind to know the various ways in
which things are expressed by different nations. A person who knows no
language but his own is like a man who can only see with one eye. It opens
a whole new world of thought to realize that other nations have other
words.

Again, it makes you know your own language. Translation gives you choice
of words and trains you to appreciate delicate shades of meaning; this
helps you to appreciate Poetry, for one of the main beauties of great
poets, such as Milton and Tennyson, is their marvellous perception of
shades of difference, and the felicity with which they choose exactly the
right adjective!

It is said that barbarous tribes use a very small vocabulary; I sometimes
fear we may be going back to a savage state, when I think of the
vocabulary of a modern schoolgirl, and see how much ground is covered over
with these two narrow words, "awfully" and "jolly." Hannah More
complained, in her day, of the indiscriminate use of the word "nice."
"Formerly," she says, "a person was 'charming,' or 'accomplished,' or
'distinguished,' or 'well-bred,' or 'talented,' etc., and each word had
its own shade of meaning; now, every one is 'nice,' which saves much
thought." "Nice" held its position, for we find Miss Austen making Henry
Tilney laugh at the same misuse of the word. "Awfully" and "jolly" seem to
perform the same kind office for us which "nice" did for our
grandmothers,--they "save us much thought," and are used with a large
disregard of their inappropriateness; I have even been told by a girl that
the _Christian Year_ was "such an awfully jolly book"! Now, I am sure of
this: you will find excessive use of those two words always betokens an
empty, or rather an uncultivated, mind. I do not believe in any exception;
their votaries may have learning, but they have not digested it, they are
not thoughtful, they are "young (or old)