narratives or anecdote, such as are useful for students who are making their first essays in acquiring a Latin Prose style. There are some excellent collections of passages for Latin Prose in existence, but I know none which contains a sufficient number of easy passages, to bridge over the gulf between isolated sentences and passages difficult in thought as well as in style. For some of the passages in Part III. I have to thank my friend the Rev. C. Darnell of Cargilfield, whose remarkable power of teaching Latin Prose to boys is known to all who have examined his pupils. Part IV. consists of more difficult passages, all of them, it is, thought, passages of literary excellence, and which have approved themselves as suitable for translation into Latin. They have been arranged in subdivisions, in accordance with the character of their contents. A few of these passages have appeared in other collections. It is not my intention to publish a Key to this collection: indeed, my main object in compiling it has been that there may be at least one Latin Prose book in existence which has no Key. My experience as a teacher is that nothing is so injurious to sound scholarship, nothing so much baffles the efforts of the teacher, and retards the progress of the learner, as the use of keys and translations, especially by those who are not far enough advanced to know how to make a right use of them. To an advanced scholar, who can appreciate, if he cannot produce, what is good, nothing is more stimulating than to have put before him as a model a finished version by a good scholar; but for a student who has not yet reached this stage it is more useful to have his own exercise taken as a basis, so far as it has any merit at all, and to be shown how it can be corrected, shaped, and smoothed into something like good Latin. In cases where a teacher requires a fair copy of every exercise, as a regular part of the class-work, it is essential that each pupil should produce his own exercise corrected and put into shape, rather than his teacher's exercise. In this case, what is true of more general subjects is true also of the teaching of Latin Prose: nothing is more encouraging to a teacher than to see a pupil applying to his own work the principles he has endeavoured to explain to him: nothing is more distasteful than to have his own ideas served up to him in his own words. To put before a student a version which bears no relation to his own, and which is separated by a gulf impassable from his own best efforts, is to render him a doubtful service, and to foster the too common idea that a "Fair Copy" is to be looked upon as an answer to a riddle which can be rightly answered in only one way. A scholar cannot learn too soon that there are many ways in which a passage can be well rendered, or too soon accustom himself to move freely among a choice of phrases. For a similar reason I have given no Vocabulary. I object entirely to the system now so popular amongst schoolmasters of making everything so easy to a learner that it is impossible for him to go wrong. If a student has a Vocabulary which gives him the exact word or phrase to use, he has no thought, no choice, to exercise, and the act leaves no impression on his memory. The whole merit of a vocabulary, as of an analysis of any book, consists in its having been drawn up by the student himself. A learner cannot begin too soon to construct a vocabulary, and to select his phrases, out of his own reading; if he is supplied with the very words or phrases which he needs ready-made, : the whole good of the process is at an end. The art of compiling for boys school editions in which every possible fragment of information which can be extracted from the subject is tabulated, formulated, analysed, and presented in its most concise shape to the learner, is being now carried to a very high pitch of perfection. Small portions of authors, parts even of one book, are published separately, each with a Vocabulary, with Notes, with an Introduction, even a Grammar of its own. Boys no longer go through, as best they can, the healthy process of discovering for themselves how to get up their author, but everything is done for them they have no longer to study books, but to get up all that can be said about books, or tortured out of them, by their instructors and annotators. Nothing soon will be left for teachers but to make boys learn by heart, in quantities suited to their capacity, small doses of this concentrated essence of information. But my experience is that this process has already done much harm to education. Boys of fourteen years of age, especially those prepared for Scholarship examinations, are by expeditious methods stuffed so full of formulæ and compressed knowledge, that they can pass examinations which some years ago would have been thought creditable for boys of sixteen; but from what I have seen, I doubt very much whether the scholarship, the extent of reading, and the general width and robust. ness of intelligence which boys of nineteen carry away with them from our great public schools to the universities, are at the present moment so great as they were before the early-forcing system was introduced. In Scotland our deficiencies are of another kind; but to those who are familiar with English classical education, and who have taught in a Scottish University, nothing is more surprising than to see the freshness and vigour with which students who have had little or no advantages of early training, apply themselves to the higher scholarship, and to note the "leaps and bounds" which mark their progress—a progress which is mainly due to the fact that they have had to fight out their own difficulties for themselves In the sentences in Parts I. and II., I have purposely avoided introducing students to a large vocabulary, as is done in some exercise books. My object is not to make the learner acquainted with a large number of words-a work which I hold he must do for himself,—but to fix his attention upon the constructions. The subjects of the sentences revolve within a comparatively small circle of ideas; but they all have to do with the principal phases of Roman life, public or private, with the phraseology of which it is essential that a student should have some acquaintance. Such technical phrases as occur will be found given in full in Ramsay's Manual of Antiquities. My best thanks are due to the Dean of Westminster, Professor Butcher, and Mr. Arthur Sidgwick, who have kindly supplied me with some English passages of special excellence, included in Part IV. G. G. R. UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW, December, 1883. |