case--'Leave the poor child to his
daily reading: practice, under correct tuition, will give him
insensibly and without effort all that you would thus endeavour to
communicate through a most Herculean exertion.' Whom has it cost any
trouble to learn the accentuation of his own language? How has he
learned _that_? Simply by copying others--and so much without effort,
that the effort (and a very great effort) would have been _not_ to
copy them. In that way let him learn the quantity of Latin and Greek
penultimates. That Edmund Burke could violate the quantity of the word
'Vectigal' was owing to his tutor's ignorance, who had allowed him so
to read it; that Lord North, and every other Etonian in the house,
knew better--was owing not to any disproportionate effort of memory
directed to that particular word, as though they had committed to
memory a rule enjoining them to place the accent on the penultimate of
the word vectigal: their knowledge no more rested on such an
anticipation by express rules of their own experience, than Burke's
ignorance of the quantity on the want of such anticipation; the
anticipation was needless--coming from a tutor who knew the quantity,
and impossible--coming from a tutor who knew it not. At this moment a
little boy (three years old) is standing by our table, and repeatedly
using the word _mans_ for _men_: his sister (five years old), at his
age, made the very same mistake: but she is now correcting her
brother's grammar, which just at this moment he is stoutly
defending--conceiving his dignity involved in the assertion of his own
impeccability. Now whence came the little girl's error and its
correction? Following blindly the general analogy of the language, she
formed her plural by adding an _s_ to the singular: afterwards
everybody about her became a daily monitor--a living _Propria quae
maribus_, as she is in her turn to her brother, instructing her that
this particular word '_man_' swerved, as to this one particular point,
from the general analogy of the language. But the result is just as
inevitable from daily intercourse with Latin books, as to the parallel
anomalies in that language. In proportion as any case of anomaly could
escape the practical regulation of such an intercourse, just in that
proportion it must be a rare case, and less important to be known:
whatsoever the future experience will be most like to demand, the past
experience will be most likely to have furnished. All this w