Mental Discipline in Education. 407 



ton, Dryden, Addison, Pope, Young, Thomson, Johnson, 

 Burns, and others, whose names will live as long as the Eng- 

 lish language, had not in their childhood learned any Eng- 

 lish grammar ; that Corneille, Moliere, La Fontaine, Pas- 

 cal, Bossuet, Boileau, and Racine, wrote their masterpieces 

 long before the publication of any French grammar ; that 

 men like Collet, Wolsey, Erasmus, Milton, Locke, Gibbon, 

 Condillac, Lemare, Abbe Sicard, Basil Hall, Home Tooke, 

 Adam Smith, and a host of others, have emphatically con- 

 demned the method of acquiring language through the 

 study of grammar ; that the most eminent masters of lan- 

 guage, Demosthenes, Seneca, Malherbe, Clarendon, Mon- 

 tesquieu, Fenelon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montaigne, Boileau, 

 Dante, Galileo, Franklin, Gibbon, Robertson, Pope, Burns, 

 Byron, and Moore, acknowledge that they attained their 

 excellences of style by the study and imitation of the best 

 models of writing ; and finally, that mere grammarians are 

 generally bad writers : when we recall facts like these, we 

 can begin to rate at something like their true value the 

 claims of the grammatical study of defunct forms of 

 speech for mental training. That there is a useful disci- 

 pline in the critical study of language, as in the critical 

 study of most other things, is not denied ; but that it has 

 either the transcendent importance usually assumed, or 

 that it cannot be substantially acquired by the mastery 

 of modern tongues, is what the advocates of the dead lan- 

 guages have failed to prove.* 



Let us now notice the discipline of mathematics, the 

 claims of which to an important place in a liberal scheme 

 of education are of course unquestionable. Dealing with 

 conceptions of quantity under various forms of expression, 



* For confirmation of the statements in this paragraph see Marcel on 

 Language, in two volumes. London: Chapman & Hall, 1853. It is not 

 creditable to American education that this able work has not been repub- 

 lished here. 



