Experimentalist relies on, viz. the proportioning
the difficulties to the capacity of the learner, the pleasure of
success, and the communication of clear, vivid, and accurate
conceptions, are treated with good sense--but not with any great
originality: the last indeed (to speak scholastically) contains the
other three _eminenter_: for he, who has once arrived at clear
conceptions in relation to the various objects of his study, will not
fail to generate for himself the pleasure of success; and so of the
rest. But the power of communicating 'accurate conceptions' involves
so many other powers, that it is in strictness but another name for
the faculty of teaching in general. We fully agree with the
Experimentalist (at p. 118), that the tutor would do well 'to provide
himself with the various weights commonly spoken of, and the measures
of content and of length; to portion off upon his play-ground a
land-chain, a rood,' &c. to furnish 'maps' tracing 'the routes of
armies;' 'plates exhibiting the costumes' of different nations: and
more especially we agree with him (at p. 135) that in teaching the
classics the tutor should have at hand 'plates or drawings of ships,
temples, houses, altars, domestic and sacred utensils, robes, and of
every object of which they are likely to read.' 'It is,' as he says,
'impossible to calculate the injury which the minds of children suffer
from the habit of receiving imperfect ideas:' and it is discreditable
in the highest degree to the majority of good classical scholars that
they have no accurate knowledge of the Roman calendar, and no
knowledge at all of the classical coinage, &c.: not one out of every
twenty scholars can state the relation of the _sestertius_ to the
_denarius_, of the Roman _denarius_ to the Attic _drachma_, or express
any of them in English money. All such defects are weighty: but they
are not adequate illustrations of the injury which arises from
inaccurate ideas in its most important shape. It is a subject however
which we have here no room to enlarge upon.

[Footnote 40: Indeed an Etonian must in consistency condemn either the
Latin or the Greek grammar of Eton. For, where is the Greek '_Propria
quae maribus_'--'_Quae genus_'--and '_As in praesenti_'? Either the Greek
grammar is defective, or the Latin redundant. We are surprised that it
has never struck the patrons of these three beautiful Idylls, that all
the anomalies of the Greek language are left to be collected