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pupil in grammatical relations, and of tracing the origin of modern English phraseology. The writer of this article has frequently gone into country schools where they pretend to teach English grammar, and has heard both teachers and pupils talk about the agreement of adjectives and nouns, the government exercised by verbs and prepositions, none of which exist except to a very limited extent; and what is worst of all, when grammar is so taught, neither teachers nor pupils ever think, perhaps, what agreement and government really mean, so that a grammar lesson is made up of a set of meaningless, stereotyped expressions, whose idle repetitions leave the mind only the more vacant the more glibly they are gone over.

equivalent to these Latin forms is true enough; but the pupil, in so learning the English verb, gets no idea of its peculiar structure. English grammar was originally based on Latin grammar, and has been ever since treated, except by a few German scholars, who have taken it in hand, analogically-per aliud, instead of per se, as it should be. Dr. Wallis, whose Grammatica Linguæ Anglicana, published as early as 1653 is still worthy to be ranked among the very best English grammars that have yet been written either by English or American grammarians, was the first to see the error of this analogical treatment of English gramAlluding to his predecessors, Gill, Ben Jonson, and others, he remarks: "Omnes ad Latinæ linguæ normam hanc nostram Anglicanam nimium exigentes multa inutilia præcepta de Nominum casibus, Generibus, et Declinationibus, atque Verborum Temporibus, Modis et Conjugationibus, de Nominum item et Verborum Regimine, aliisque similibus tradiderunt quæ a lingua nostra sunt prorsus aliena, adeoque confusionem potius et obscuritatem pariunt, quam explicationi inserviunt." That is, "They all subject this our English tongue too much to the rule of the Latin, and deliver many useless precepts respecting the cases, genders and declensions of nouns, the tenses, moods and conjugations of verbs, the government of nouns and verbs, and other like things, which are altogether foreign to our tongue, and beget confusion and obscurity, rather than serve for explanation."

If his successors had profited, as they should have done, by what he has so succinctly set forth in this passage, we should have had English grammar, long ere this, placed on its own bottom, and the fact would have been recognized and acted upon that modern English is no proper medium for grammatical discipline; and, in the absence of the study of Latin and Greek, a resort would have been had to Anglo-Saxon, both as a means of exercising the young

The study of grammar, if properly pursued, ought to be one of the most interesting of all school studies, revealing, as it does, the working of the ingenious and subtle organ the mind employs for the expression of its myriad impressions, thoughts and sentiments. As generally pursued, it is the driest, most barren, and most repulsive; as repulsive as what is called "composition "— an exercise which is generally hated with a holy hatred by all young pupils upon whom it is imposed, as it too often is, before they have any ideas to compose.

For some years past, the curriculum of study in our schools and colleges has been verging more and more toward the natural sciences. The great strides that these have made within the memory of living men, and their important bearing upon every-day life and the progress of civilization and refinement, render it difficult to resist their tendency to displace many of the timehonoured means of mental discipline. There is now a large class of educators in England and America, who look upon the study of Latin and Greek, for example, as a sad waste of time, when there is such an accumulation of useful knowledge in the world. This study, they argue, was all very

well when there was little else to be learned; but that we should now sweep from our halls of learning the mediaval dust and cobwebs, and let in the wholesome and invigorating light of science. This sounds very plausible, even to those who regard education in its true character, as an out-drawing and a discipline of the mental faculties, irrespective of the special outward direction their exercise may take in after life; and to those who regard it as identical with the acquisition of useful knowledge-and they constitute a numerous class-as perfectly conclusive.

But if the old college curriculum must be departed from, the next best course to be pursued towards securing a similar, if not an equivalent, discipline, is to study our own language in its historical development. Any one who will take the trouble to examine all the more important and ambitious English grammars that have been written, must arrive at the inevitable conclusion that the English language cannot be studied, with any satisfactory results, on the basis of modern English. No man ever worked harder or more earnestly, "to do up" English grammar, than Goold Brown. He spent a third of a century on his "Grammar of English Grammars,” the 6th edition of which contains 1,102 pages 8vo., of closely printed matter, painstakingly sifted from 463 grammars and 85 other works. And with what result? A great cartload of a book which, so far as an adequate exposition of the construction of the English language is concerned, isn't worth the shelf-room it occupies in a library. And the secret of the failure may be stated in very few words: The author did the best, perhaps, condensation apart, that could be done, on the principle adopted, namely, of sifting nearly 500 grammars, all of which, with few exceptions, were based on the assumption that English grammar could be treated on the basis of the modern forms of the language. The modern English is, as we have already said, almost entirely stript of inflection; but its syntax, and what is peculiar in its phraseology, have grown out of a highly inflected tongue, the Anglo-Saxon, which, more than eight hundred years ago, was brought in conflict with the language of a conquering people, with which it struggled for more than four hundred years, and came out of the struggle victorious, indeed, but shorn of all its inflectional trappings. Yet all the residual forms of its phraseology were explainable and still are, only through the forms it had cast off before the struggle was ended. Take, for example, the familiar use of the definite article before

Of one thing classical scholars are quite certain, that the study of Latin and Greek affords a certain kind of discipline such as no other study has yet been found to afford, and that, too, at an age when the mind is not prepared for much knowledge of any kind. The science of comparative philology, which is little more than half a century old, has already quite as great a claim upon educators as any of the more developed sciences, bearing, as it does, upon ethnology, and claiming the attention not of the scholar only, but also of the historian, the mental and moral philosopher, and the theologian; and which, "though it professes to treat of words only, teaches us that there is more in words than is dreamt of in our philoso phies."

For the study of this important science, there is no better preparation in early life than a thorough training in Latin and Greek, especially Greek; while the study of the development of the Greek verb affords of itself the best discipline to the young mind that has, perhaps, ever been devised. And then, as the foundation of a sound literary taste, the study of Latin and Greek may be said to be indispensable. Every Professor who has had any experience in conducting classes of young men in the critical reading of an English author, knows the great advantage enjoyed by those who have had a classical training over those who have not.

comparatives, as in the following sentence: "For neither if we eat, are we the better; neither if we eat not, are we the worse." How could the formation of the before better and worse be explained to a class of young pupils knowing nothing of Latin nor of any other inflected language? Its explanation would be attended with some difficulty. But a mere smattering of Latin on the part of the class would enable the teacher to make this use of the before comparatives perfectly plain, by showing its correspondence with eo, the ablative neuter of is, ea, id, in the same situation. But if the class were to begin with Anglo-Saxon grammar instead of modern English, a resort to Latin would be unnecessary; the would be at once recognized as the ablative the or thy of the Anglo-Saxon demonstrative adjective pronoun, se, seo, that, (corresponding with the Latin is, ea, id), representing, in its old pronominal character, the two propositions, "we eat," and "we eat not," and as an ablative of cause or means, qualifying or limiting, adverbially, better and worse. "For neither if we eat, are we the (that is) on that account, namely, that we eat) better; neither if we eat not, are we the (that is, on that account, namely, that we eat not) worse." Sometimes phrases occur in the most familiar, every-day English, which are totally unexplainable in any other way than by a resort to their original forms. Take, for example, the expression "a forty foot rope." No one would say a forty feet rope," and yet how is the apparent inconsistency of uniting the numeral "forty" with "foot" to be explained? Only by going back to the original Anglo-Saxon construction, which required nouns denoting measure, weight, value, &c., and also when used after large numerals, to be put in the genitive. The genitive plural of nouns and adjectives in Anglo-Saxon invariably ended in -a, which, in the gradual dropping off of inflections, dwindled into an obscure -e, and this was finally displaced by the predominant ending

66

-es or -s of the nominative and accusative plural (derived from Anglo-Saxon -as, of the 2nd declension), which became the common ending of all cases in the plural. But in the expression "forty foot," "foot" is the remains of the old genitive plural "fôta.” There is a small class of nouns in AngloSaxon, to which fôt, foot, belongs, that, instead of inflection, undergo a vowel change in the dative singular and in the nominative and accusative plural; e.g., fôt, foot, bôc, book, gôs, goose, tôth tooth, lûs, louse, mûs, mouse, etc.; dative singular and nominative and accusative plural, fêt, bêc, gês, têth, lês, mês, respectively. But in the genitive plural, the vowel of the nominative singular is always retained; fôta, of feet, bôca, of books, gosa, of geese, tôtha, of teeth, lûsa, of lice, mûsa, of mice. And this explains the apparently singular form of "foot," in the expression, "a forty foot rope," which is the genitive plural after "forty," with the ending dropt. The expression in Anglo-Saxon would be "râp feowertig fôta lâng," a rope forty of feet long, or "a forty of feet long rope, or, by an ellipsis of "long," a forty of feet (fôta] rope.

But to explain the modern English verb to a class of young learners is attended with still greater difficulties-difficulties not real, but resulting from the attempt to study the language at the wrong end; and that part of the verb which is generally the least understood is the infinitive. What is the infinitive form of a verb? It is its name or nominative form, that form by which an act is designated. It is, in fact, an abstract noun, being the name given to an act conceived apart from an actor. Hence we find it used in all languages as a noun, in the character of a subject of a proposition, and of a complement of a predicate. When we turn to the parent language, we find that our modern infinitive is derived from an oblique case of the old infinitive. The old infinitive ended invariably in -an, as bindan, to bind, dûfan, to drive, standan, to stand,

ly, in their use of thee as a nominative
66 How does thee do?" But it is a case
exactly similar to that of you; thee was
in Saxon the dative and accusative singular
of thû, thou. The only difference is, that
the Quakers use as a nominative the singu
lar of the old dative and accusative, instead
of the plural, when addressing a single indi-
vidual.

&c., and was used as a nominative and as
an accusative. In addition to this, there
was a dative form, preceded always by tô-,
and ending in -anne, the final -e being the
dative ending of nouns of the 2nd declen-
sion, the final n of the nominative form
being doubled in accordance with the rule
that a single final consonant, preceded by a
single unaccented vowel, is doubled when a
vowel follows in the inflection; so that the
infinitive or abstract verb bindan, to bind,
was declined, nom., bindan, dat., tô-bin-
danne, acc., bindan. This dative form of
the infinitive, as the prefix tô- indicates, was
employed after adjectives to express the
drift of the feeling or quality which they
designated, and after verbs to express their
purpose, while the distinctive ending -en, of |
the early English infinitive, derived from the
Anglo-Saxon-an, was fading out (in Chaucer's
day, already it had generally dwindled down
to an obscure -e, which constituted a light
syllable in his verse when followed by a con-
sonant); this dative form was gradually
taking its place, and the prefix tô- was as
gradually losing its occupation as the
exponent of a relation, and becoming the
meaningless sign of the infinitive in the
place of the old ending. This prefix tô-
has become so inseparable from the infini-
tive, that it is difficult for the mere English
scholar to think of an infinitive apart from
it; so much so, that in the places where the
pure infinitive is still used, as after the so-
called auxiliaries do, did, will, would, shall,
should, may, might, can, could, must, &c.,
of which it is the direct complement, and
after a few verbs like see, bid, dare, let, &c.,
its true character is not always recognised.
The same thing has happened with nouns
and pronouns ; dative and accusative forms
have become name or nominative forms.
For example, the modern English pronoun
you was originally a dative and an accusative
plural, Anglo-Saxon eôw, the nominative be-
ing e, Anglo-Saxon ge. The Quakers are
often accused of speaking ungrammatical- | tain-

But while the old dative of the infinitive has become the name or nominative form, it still retains its dative force in many situations; as in house to let, he is to blame; eager to learn, wonderful to tell; they went to scoff and remained to pray. When the modern English infinitive is used as a nominative or an accusative, the prefix to cannot be parsed as an element of speech, as it is a meaningless sign of the infinitive; but when used as a dative, as in the above examples, and expressive of the drift of a feeling or quality, or the purpose of an act, the prefix has its old force. Now any attempt to explain our present infinitive to a class of beginners must, we are persuaded, result only in perplexity. And without a clear understanding of the infinitive, the analytic forms of the English verb cannot be understood; while to take those forms collectively, as is done by grammarians, gives the learner no idea of their structure. To learn from Goold Brown that "might have been loved" is the passive voice, potential mood, pluperfect tense, of the verb love, is of no use to the pupil as a grammatical exercise. grammatical parsing, every word should be treated as a distinct part of speech, if we would have a clear understanding of the structure of language; but in the case of the English composite tenses, this would not be possible, except by studying them historically.

We did not set out to write a treatise on the study of grammar. Our purpose has been to make a few suggestions as to how that study should be pursued ; and we main

Ist. That a thorough grammatical discipline in early life is the indispensable basis of a sound education.

2ndly. That the Latin and Greek languages are the best media through which that discipline can be secured.

3rdly. That the uninflected modern English is no proper medium for grammatical

discipline, and that in the absence of the study of Latin and Greek, resort must be had to the parent language, the Anglo-Saxon, both as a means of exercising the young pupil in grammatical relations, and of tracing the origin of modern English construction. and phraseology.

ON A DEAD FLY FOUND CRUSHED IN MY SCRAP-BOOK.

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