e ourselves migrating to some African climate, where
clothing for warmth is absolutely dispensed with. We should not on that
account adopt literal nudity--we should still desire to maintain those
other advantages. The artistic decoration of the person would continue
to be thought of; and, as no amount of painting and tattooing, with
strings of beads superadded, would answer to our ideal of personal
elegance, we should have recourse to some light filmy textures, such as
would allow the varieties of drapery, colours, and design, and show off
the poetry of motion; we should also indicate the personal differences
that we were accustomed to show by vesture. But now comes the point of
the moral; we should not maintain our close heavy fabrics, our
great-coats, shawls and cloaks. These would cease with the need for
them. Perhaps the first emigrants would keep up the prejudice for their
warm things, but not so their successors.

Well, then, suppose the extreme case of a foreign language that is
entirely and avowedly superseded as regards communication and
interpretation of thoughts, but still furnishing so many valuable aids
to mental improvement, that we keep it up for the sake of these. As we
are not to hear, speak, or read the language, we do not need absolutely
to know the meaning of every word: we may, perhaps, dispense with much
of the technicality of its grammar. The vocables and the grammar would
be kept up exactly so far as to serve the other purposes, and no
farther. The teacher would have in view the secondary uses alone.
Supposing the language related to our own by derivation of words, and
that this was what we put stress upon; then the derivation would always
be uppermost in the teacher's thoughts. If it were to illustrate
Universal Grammar and Philology, this would be brought out to the
neglect of translation.

[CLASSICAL TEACHER'S IDEAL.]

I have made an imaginary supposition to prepare the way for the real
case. The classical or language teacher, is assumed to be fully
conscious of the fact that the primary use of the languages is as good
as defunct; and that he is continued in office because of certain
clearly assigned secondary uses, but for which he would be superseded
entirely. Some of the secondary uses present to his mind, at all events
one of those that are put forward in argument, is that a foreign
language, and especially Latin, conduces to good composition in our own
language. And as we do compose in