PREFACE.

O

NE of the most gratifying tokens of progress in the present age is the deep interest that both scholars and people are manifesting in the study of our noble English, originating, it has been well suggested, in an intelligent comprehension of what is good and what is great in national history, national institutions, national character. We have seen this study transferred from the nursery to the college curriculum, while there is an ever increasing class of persons so heterodox as to believe that one may be fairly educated without knowing even Shakespeare's 'small Latin and less Greek,' and to advocate that English, which hitherto has sat with exceeding humility in the lower seats of the synagogue, should be bidden, universally, to come up higher. I may avow,' says President Eliot, of Harvard, 'as the result of my reading and observation in the matter of education, that I recognize but one mental acquisition as an essential part of a lady or a gentleman—namely, an accurate and a refined use of the mother-tongue.' Without in the least, however, disparaging the immense value of classical and modern Continental literature as an instrument of general culture, all who appreciate knowledge by the standard of practical as well as of liberal utility, must be pleased

with the growing demand for English instruction in English schools.

Involved in this revolution of sentiment is a revolution of method and of object. The end formerly proposed was correctness in speaking and writing, enforced deductively by mechanical forms, abstract definitions, set rules. This view is fast yielding to the sounder one, that the purposes of language-study are various, that not the least of these is reflective-power; that mere correctness is only one, and a subordinate one, which, while it must be promoted by the endeavor to conform to laws, is attained chiefly by daily hearing, reading, and imitating wellframed sentences; that a true knowledge of English is to be acquired by observing its use and action in different. centuries, by a direct acquaintance with its literature, not through the medium of precept or the dissecting-room of the grammarian.

The custom of teaching grammar formally to very young children is hence characterized as impolitic, irrational, fruitless. Inverting the order of nature, it puts the abstract before the concrete, denies to the mind the knowledge it craves, and crams it with the knowledge it cannot digest. 'It may without hesitation be affirmed,' says M. Marcel, 'that grammar is not the stepping-stone, but the finishing instrument.' Language lessons are proper to the empirical stage, but grammar, which generalizes the facts thus presented, and all whose rules come by long observation and comparison, belongs to the rational. A language is spoken and written centuries before its usages are systematized, and it has never been

observed that either individuals or nations normally start with science.

Another error, which has been a long-standing cause of the unfruitfulness so often seen in English teaching, is the attempt to bring the facts and idioms of the language into conformity with the rules of Latin. But what have they now in common? Once, indeed, our English was inflected; but not till long after it began to cast itself into its present simple mould was a constructive grammar given it-then a grammar whose rules and nomenclature were taken from the Latin, with which it had scarcely any formal affinity, to which it bore no formal likeness, and from which, though it has borrowed words, it has borrowed no principles. 'Parts of speech' are recognized in the one, as of old, by the inflection test; in the other, no longer thus, but by the junction of ideas.

This adoption of formalism where form was not, has led to the predominance of rule-teaching and memorystuffing. To teach deductively, to give the result of inquiry without the inquiry which conducts to it, is enervating and repellant. The excitement of the student's self-activity is, most irrationally, subordinated to the impartation of knowledge. On the contrary, to reach conclusions by the observation of individual instances, to introduce the mind to principles through the medium of examples, and so to lead from the particular to the general, is invigorating and pleasurable. The student is regarded scientifically, not as a receptacle to be filled, but as an organism to be developed. Vividness and permanency of impression are guaranteed. Knowledge is

turned into faculty. Principles do not lie in the memory as dead or insulated statements, but enter organically into the fund of thinking. 'Between a mind of rules and a mind of principles,' says Spencer, 'there exists a difference such as that between a confused heap of materials and the same materials organized into a complete whole.'

Accordingly, the present work has been elaborated in the light of our earliest literature and its history onward. In science a phenomenon is explained by its antecedent phenomena. A tree is explained, not by its full-leaved glory, but by the states and forms through which it has successively advanced. Our English strikes its roots deep into the death-kingdoms of the past. 'Old English,' says Mr. Skeat, ‘is the right key to the understanding of modern English, and those who will not use this key will never open the lock with all their fumbling.' Nor is it to be viewed in itself alone, but in its connections with cognate Aryan tongues-especially with German, Dutch, Danish, Icelandic, Romance. Classical illustrations may be helpful by parallelism or by contrast. Only thus can the grand truths which underlie and give significance to the particulars, be recognized. The historical is the one royal road to a clear vision of the fruitful and liberating ideas that English has a continuity of life; that its character is composite; that its course has been a process of evolution; that words contain the imagination and feelings of bygone ages in fossil form; that a living language is ever changing; that grammar is a record of habits of expression as determined by the preponderant practice of leading writers, yet, that the example of no writer, however emi