KEY TO READING, DESIGNED TO ASSIST PARENTS AND TEACHERS TO SUPERINTEND LESSONS FOR YOUTH, WITH PLEASURE AND ADVANTAGE TO THEMSELVES TO WHICH ARE ADDED, AN IMAGINARY GRAMMATICAL PICTURE, AND A SKETCH OF MNEMONICS. BY JOHN SMITH, LECTURER ON EARLY EDUCATION, &c. "Light is not more pleasant to the eye than knowledge to the mind Second Edition. LONDON: W. SIMEKIN AND R. MARSHALL, STATIONERS HALL COURT. LIVERPOOL: E. AND J. SMITH, MERCURY OFFICE. 260. g. 69. ADDRESS. I cannot permit a Second Edition of this little work to be put to press without recording my grateful acknowledgments to those numerous parents and teachers who have, as it were, run away with the First Edition before it had been made known beyond the limits of a comparatively small, but certainly enlightened, district. Their encouragement has induced me to add to the value of the work by inserting the Grammatical Picture, and to make the present Edition known in the metropolis. May it be as kindly received there as its predecessor has been here! Liverpool, Nov. 1830. J. S. KEY TO READING, &c. THERE is so much amusement, and so much instruction, to be derived both by the young and the old from a proper mode of reading and conversing, either at school or at home, that I feel satisfied there need never be an hour passed away unprofitably by parents and children, or teachers and pupils, when they are respectively together, if the mode alluded to be once properly understood, and its practice commenced with willingness of mind. I have two practical proofs of the correctness of this opinion. In my own family, whenever it is likely that I shall have a leisure evening at home, my children, who are from seven to thirteen years of age, eagerly seize the opportunity of requesting that they may have an exercise in reading with me; and frequently they ask permission to invite some of their school-fellows to join them. I never refuse to grant these favours, and am consequently sometimes surrounded by a goodly parlour class of my own and my neighbours' children, who, with myself, spend as happy an hour as can well be imagined; for, besides our attention being kept B |