ecollection,
that all this is addressed to a child of eight years old: an allusion
to the prince's little chair, completely rouses us from our reverie.

"As your little chair is made in the same form as mine, which is
higher, so the system of ideas is fundamentally the same amongst
savage and civilized nations; it differs only in degrees of extension,
as after one and the same model, seats of different heights have been
made."[123]

Such mistakes as these, in a work intended for a child, are so
obvious, that they could not have escaped the penetration of a great
man, had he known as much of the practice as he did of the theory of
the art of teaching.

To analyze a thought, and to show the construction of language, M.
Condillac, in this volume on grammar, has chosen for an example a
passage from an _Eloge_ on Peter Corneille, pronounced before the
French academy by Racine, on the reception of Thomas Corneille, who
succeeded to Peter. It is in the French style of academical panegyric,
a representation of the chaotic state in which Corneille found the
French theatre, and of the light and order which he diffused through
the dramatic world by his creative genius. A subject less interesting,
or more unintelligible to a child, could scarcely have been selected.
The lecture on the anatomy of Racine's thought, lasts through fifteen
pages; according to all the rules of art, the dissection is ably
performed, but most children will turn from the operation with
disgust.

The Abbe Condillac's treatise on the art of writing, immediately
succeeds to his grammar. The examples in this volume are much better
chosen; they are interesting to all readers; those especially from
madame de Sevigne's letters, which are drawn from familiar language
and domestic life. The enumeration of the figures of speech, and the
classification of the flowers of rhetoric, are judiciously suppressed;
the catalogue of the different sorts of _turns_, phrases proper for
maxims and principles, turns proper for sentiment, ingenious turns and
quaint turns, stiff turns and easy turns, might, perhaps, have been
somewhat abridged. The observations on the effect of unity in the
whole design, and in all the subordinate parts of a work, though they
may not be new, are ably stated; and the remark, that the utmost
propriety of language, and the strongest effect of eloquence and
reasoning, result from the greatest possible attention to the
connection of our ideas, is im