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