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f grammar; and has been particularly urged against the ordinary technical method of teaching it, as if the whole of that laborious process were useless. It has led some men, even of the highest talents, to doubt the expediency of that method, under any circumstances, and either to discountenance the whole matter, or invent other schemes by which they hoped to be more successful. The utter futility of the old accidence has been inferred from it, and urged, even in some well-written books, with all the plausibility of a fair and legitimate deduction. The hardships of children, compelled to learn what they did not understand, have been bewailed in prefaces and reviews; incredible things boasted by literary jugglers, have been believed by men of sense; and the sympathies of nature, with accumulated prejudices, have been excited against that method of teaching grammar, which after all will be found in experience to be at once the easiest, the shortest, and the best. I mean, essentially, the ancient positive method, which aims directly at the inculcation of principles. 4. It has been already admitted, that definitions and rules committed to memory and not reduced to practice, will never enable any one to speak and write correctly. But it does not follow, that to study grammar by learning its principles, or to teach it technically by formal lessons, is of no real utility. Surely not. For the same admission must be made with respect to the definitions and rules of every practical science in the world; and the technology of grammar is even more essential to a true knowledge of the subject, than that of almost any other art. "To proceed upon principles at first," says Dr. Barrow, "is the most compendious method of attaining every branch of knowledge; and the truths impressed upon the mind in the years of childhood, are ever afterwards the most firmly remembered, and the most readily applied."--_Essays_, p. 84. Reading, as I have said, is a part of grammar; and it is a part which must of course precede what is commonly called in the schools the study of grammar. Any person who can read, can learn from a book such simple facts as are within his comprehension; and we have it on the authority of Dr. Adam, that, "The principles of grammar are the first abstract truths which a young mind can comprehend."--_Pref. to Lat. Gram._, p. 4. 5. It is manifest, that, with respect to this branch of knowledge, the duties of the teacher will vary
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