406 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



The true claim of English grammar, to form part and parcel of 

 an English education, stands or falls with the value of the philological 

 knowledge to which grammatical studies may serve as an introduc- 

 tion, and with the value of scientific grammar, as a disciplinal study. 

 I have no fear of being supposed to undervalue its importance in this 

 respect. Indeed, in assuming that it is very great, I also assume 

 that wherever grammar is studied as grammar, the language which 

 the grammar so studied should represent, must be the mother tongue 

 of the student, whatever that mother tongue may be. This study is 

 the study of a theory ; and for this reason it should be complicated 

 as little as possible by points of practice. For this reason a man's 

 mother tongue is the best medium for the elements of scientific 

 philology, simply because it is the one which he knows best in prac- 

 tice. 



It thus appears that to secure the disciplinary uses of 

 grammatical study, not even a foreign language is neces- 

 sary, much less a dead one. 



When it is remembered that the Hebrew language had 

 no grammar till a thousand years after Christ ; that the 

 masterpieces of Greek literature were produced before 

 Aristotle first laid the grammatical foundations of that 

 language ; that the Romans acquired the Greek without 

 grammatical aid, by reading and conversation ; that the 

 most eminent scholars of the middle ages and later, Alfred, 

 Abelard, Beauclerc, Roger Bacon, Chaucer, Dante, Pe- 

 trarch, Lipsius, Buddeus, and the Scaligers Latin scholars, 

 who have never since been surpassed, learned this lan- 

 guage without the assistance of grammar ; that Lilly's 

 grammar, in doggerel Latin verse, was thrust upon the 

 English schools by royal edict of Henry VIII, against the 

 vehement protest of men like Ascham, and that the de- 

 cline of eminent Latinists in that country was coincident 

 with the general establishment of this method of teaching ; 

 that Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio gave to the world 

 their immortal works two hundred years before the appear- 

 ance of the first Italian Grammar ; that Shakespeare, Mil- 



