plained with care and
patience, the whole of the declensions, pronouns, conjugations, the
list of prepositions and conjunctions, interjections, some adverbs,
the concords, and common rules of syntax, may be comprised with
sufficient repetitions in about two or three hundred lessons of ten
minutes each; that is to say, ten minutes application of the scholar
in the presence of the teacher. A young boy should never be set to
learn a lesson by heart when alone. Forty hours! Is this tedious? If
you are afraid of losing time, begin a few months earlier; but begin
when you will, forty hours is surely no great waste of time: the
whole, or even half of this short time, is not spent in the labour of
getting jargon by rote; each day some slight advance is made in the
knowledge of words, and in the knowledge of their combinations. What
we insist upon is, that _nothing should be done to disgust the pupil_:
steady perseverance, with uniform gentleness, will induce habit, and
nothing should ever interrupt the regular return of the daily lesson.
If absence, business, illness, or any other cause, prevent the
attendance of the teacher, a substitute must be appointed; the idea of
relaxation on Sunday, or a holyday, should never be permitted. In most
public seminaries above one third, in some nearly one half, of the
year is permitted to idleness: it is the comparison between severe
labour and dissipation, that renders learning hateful.

Johnson is made to say by one of his female biographers,[3] that no
child loves the person who teaches him Latin; yet the author of this
chapter would not take all the doctor's fame, and all the lady's wit
and riches, in exchange for the hourly, unfeigned, unremitting
friendship, which he enjoys with a son who had no other master than
his father. So far from being laborious or troublesome, he has found
it an agreeable employment to instruct his children in grammar and the
learned languages. In the midst of a variety of other occupations,
half an hour every morning for many years, during the time of
dressing, has been allotted to the instruction of boys of different
ages in languages, and no other time has been spent in this
employment. Were it asserted that these boys made _a reasonable
progress_, the expression would convey no distinct meaning to the
reader; we shall, therefore, mention an experiment tried this morning,
November 8th, 1796, to ascertain the progress of one of these pupils.
Without previous