intelligent parents and
judicious teachers may exercise over the studies, opinions, and habits of
youth a strong and salutary control; and it will seldom be found in
experience, that those who have been early taught to consider grammatical
learning as worthy and manly, will change their opinion in after life. But
the study of grammar is not so enticing that it may be disparaged in the
hearing of the young, without injury. What would be the natural effect of
the following sentence, which I quote from a late well-written religious
homily? "The pedagogue and his dunce may exercise their wits correctly
enough, in the way of grammatical analysis, on some splendid argument, or
burst of eloquence, or thrilling descant, or poetic rapture, to the strain
and soul of which not a fibre in their nature would yield a
vibration."--_New-York Observer_, Vol. ix, p. 73.

12. Would not the bright boy who heard this from the lips of his reverend
minister, be apt the next day to grow weary of the parsing lesson required
by his schoolmaster? And yet what truth is there in the passage? One can no
more judge of the fitness of language, without regard to the meaning
conveyed by it, than of the fitness of a suit of clothes, without knowing
for whom they were intended. The grand clew to the proper application of
all syntactical rules, is _the sense_; and as any composition is faulty
which does not rightly deliver the author's meaning, so every solution of a
word or sentence is necessarily erroneous, in which that meaning is not
carefully noticed and literally preserved. To parse rightly and fully, is
nothing else than to understand rightly and explain fully; and whatsoever
is well expressed, it is a shame either to misunderstand or to
misinterpret.

13. This study, when properly conducted and liberally pursued, has an
obvious tendency to dignify the whole character. How can he be a man of
refined literary taste, who cannot speak and write his native language
grammatically? And who will deny that every degree of improvement in
literary taste tends to brighten and embellish the whole intellectual
nature? The several powers of the mind are not so many distinct and
separable agents, which are usually brought into exercise one by one; and
even if they were, there might be found, in a judicious prosecution of this
study, a healthful employment for them all. The _imagination_, indeed, has
nothing to do with the elements of grammar; but in the exercise