july — sept. 1857.] The Study of Living Languages. £15 



twentieths of the time so employed ; a large portion lose the 

 whole, breaking down before they have acquired any useful know- 

 ledge at all ; probably scarcely one in ten acquires a tolerably cor- 

 rect and free use of it, and scarcely one at all such a knowledge 

 as to make them really effective translators, an office of the high- 

 est possible importance, because the transference of English litera» 

 ture, for the great mass of the inhabitants of the earth, must pre- 

 cede the formation of a national literature among each tribe. 



At present it may safely be said that no system whatever is fol- 

 lowed in studying such living languages for colloquial purposes. 

 Let any one individual of the thousands who are at this moment 

 so employed, be asked, whose system of study do you prefer, or 

 have you any of your own, and upon what grounds do you decide 

 upon this, or that point, and his answer would generally be such 

 as to show that he had no clear, definite, well-digested ideas on 

 the subject. Without the least previous investigation of the sub- 

 ject, without spending one single day in reading a treatise on it, 

 or considering it in his own mind, he usually blindly takes in hand 

 a matter upon which he will perhaps employ one or several years ; 

 taking at a venture as it were, any books or teachers that he may 

 happen to fall in with, or any ideas he may happen to have got 

 into his own head, he knows not how or whence ; without any 

 solid grounds for concluding whether the mode he is pursuing will 

 lead to an economical or an enormously wasteful expenditure of 

 time, and, what is of more importance, whether he is laying the 

 foundation of a real, correct, and effective knowledge of the lan- 

 guage, or establishing himself in a totally false use of it, which, 

 when become habitual, will never be corrected. 



Matters are in respect of this study of languages just as they 

 were in respect of road making before the time of Mr. McAdam. 

 Every man thought he was born a road maker, and those holding 

 the charge of roads did almost anything to them and called it re- 

 pairs. It was a most common thing for instance to throw a thick 

 layer of loose rounded gravel on the road, which at first caused al- 

 most the greatest possible resistance to the carriages and by de- 

 grees was converted into mud, but never afforded any thing ap- 



