and, which is of infinitely greater importance, more conducive to habits of diligence, acuteness, and accuracy in study, that he should be able to discover the meanings of words for himself, than that he should be taught to rely on the ipse dixit of a lexicographer, synonymist, or commentator. The following Essay, being at once an analysis of the second chapter of Scheller's Præcepta Styli Bene Latini, and an attempt to supply some deficiencies in that excellent compendium, aims at cultivating this power in the reader. Should it induce any one to refer to the original, (to which references are made for whatever has been borrowed from it,) and betray him into a careful perusal of that work, a service of no inconsiderable value will have been rendered him, at the expence of only a small portion of his time. And let me hope, if the less advanced student is convinced of the existence of the impediments I have noticed in the path of scholarship, he will give a few of surmounting them here offered him. He will afterwards decide whether he will encounter the labour of applying this method to some portion of his daily studies. Whatever be his decision, let him not lay the flattering unction to his love of ease, that such studies are undeserving his attention. Studies which cultivate acuteness, strength, precision, and arrangement in the mind; studies which open the stores of ancient literature, and render the poets, historians, orators, and philosophers of antiquity familiar to our memories; studies which give us the full use of language as an organ of expression and thought, offer the very fittest initiatory discipline for the mind. It may indeed suit the views of certain captious objectors, to estimate the value of classical education by the knowledge, or rather the ignorance, of those who have not passed the portal of learning, who are struggling with grammatical and verbal difficulties, when they ought to be taking a wide range of the literature of Greece works of modern writers. To use the language of logicians, it may suit them to represent that evil a proprium, which in truth is merely an accident of classical education, nay, an accident, which, unless I am much mistaken, is not only separable, but easily separable, from the system which it disgraces. I have attempted, at the commencement of the following Essay, to point out the origin of the evil, together with its remedy, I trust, in such a manner as may avoid giving offence to the able and conscientious conductors of early education. The importance, especially at this time, when the lower orders are making so rapid an intellectual progress, of giving every possible impulse to the education of the higher orders, and of removing every impediment in the way of their acquiring that knowledge which is power, can hardly be overestimated. It is essential, not to the well-being only, but to the very existence of society, that those who are superior in situation should be superior also in moral power. Knowledge and virtue the definition of the great philosopher, an union of well-directed intellectual and moral energies constitutes the only power which can safely be relied on. These therefore are the objects of education. That grammar and language afford an excellent initiatory discipline for the exercise of the former, I feel as fully persuaded, as that they are merely initiatory, the porch, if I may so express myself, through which our Patrician youth should proceed to a knowledge of history, logic, rhetoric, morals, and politics, and that any impediment which delays them so long at this portal as to cause their failing to attain these ulterior objects, is at all times, but more especially at this time, to be deprecated. CONTENTS. PREFACE. The object of this Work. Indefiniteness of Dictionaries. vii. Consequent danger to SECTION I. The importance of philological studies. To acquire a copia verborum is the first and most important |