CHAPTER IX.

GRAMMAR, ENGLISH AND LATIN.

THE The first lesson in HE first punishment I remember having received was for a failure to get a English grammar. I recollect, with a half painful, half amusing distinctness, all the little incidents of the dreadful scene; how I found myself standing in an upper chamber of a gloomy brick house, book in hand, it was a thin volume, with a tea-green paper cover and a red roan back, before an awful being, who put questions to me, which, for all that I could understand of them, might as well have been couched in Coptic or in Sanskrit; how, when asked about governing, I answered, "I don't know," and when about agreeing, "I can't tell," until at last, in despair, I said nothing, and choked down my tears, wondering, in a dazed, dumb fashion, whether all this was part and parcel of that total depravity of the human heart of which I heard so much; how then the being-to whom I apply no harsh epithet, for, poor man, he thought he was doing God service-said to me, in a terrible voice, "You are a stupid, idle boy, sir, and have neglected your task. I shall punish you. Hold out your hand." I put it out half way, like a machine with

a hitch in its gearing. "Farther, sir." I advanced it an inch or two, when he seized the tips of my fingers, bent them back so as to throw the palm well up, and then, with a mahogany rule, much bevelled on one side, and having a large, malignant ink-spot near the end, an instrument which seemed to me to weigh about forty pounds, and to be a fit implement for a part of that eternal torture to which I had been led to believe that I, for my inborn depravity, was doomed, he proceeded to reduce my little hand, only just well in gristle, as nearly to a jelly as was thought, on the whole, to be beneficial to a small boy at that stage of the world's progress.

The carefully-filed and still preserved receipts of a methodically managed household enable me to tell the age at which I was thus awakened to the sweet and alluring beauties of English grammar. I was just five and a half years old when one Alfred Ely—may his soul rest in peace! — thus gently guided my uncertain and reluctant steps into the paths of humane learning. Fortunately, my father, when outside the pale of religious dogma, was a man of sound sense and a tender heart; and as there was nothing about English accidence either in the Decalogue or the Common Prayer-Book, he sent a message to the schoolmaster, which caused that to be my last lesson in what is called the grammar of my mother tongue. I was soon after removed to a school the excellence of which I have only within a few years fully appreciated, although, as a boy, I knew that there I was happy, and felt

as if I were not quite stupid, idle, and depraved.* Thereafter I studied English, indeed, but only in the works of its great masters, and unconsciously in the speech of daily companions, who spoke it with remarkable but spontaneous excellence.

My kind and courteous readers will pardon, I hope, this reminiscence, in which I have indulged myself only because in some of the comments, private as well as public, which have been made upon these chapters in their original form, I have seen myself called a grammarian. God forbid that I should be anything of the sort! That I am unversed in the rules of English grammar (so called), I am not ashamed to confess; for special ignorance is no reproach when unaccompanied with presumption. And that in which I confess that I have no skill, I have not undertaken to teach. That task I leave to those who are capable of the subject, and who feel its necessity.

If grammar is what it has been defined as being, the science which has for its object the laws which regulate language, the remarks just made cannot be justified; for, in that sense, grammar is as much concerned with words by themselves, with their signification and their origin, and with their rightful use in those regards, as with their relations to each other in the sentence; and it is in that sense but another name for the science of language — phi

Let me mention with respect and love, which have grown with my years, the names of my two teachers, Theodore Eames and Samuel Putnam, to whom I owe all that I could be taught at school before I left them for college. I know that should any one of my fellow-pupils chance to see these lines, he will declare with me that the boy who could remain even a year under their hands without profit in mind, morals, and manners, must indeed have given himself up to original sin.

lology. But, notwithstanding that definition, and its acceptance by some grammarians and some compilers of dictionaries, such is not the sense in which the word grammar is generally used. Nor can the position which I have taken be maintained, if grammar is regarded as the science of the rightful or reasonable expression of thought by language; for grammar extended to these wide limits would include logic and rhetoric. But grammar, in its usual sense, is the art of speaking and writing a language correctly; in which definition, the word correctly means, in accordance with laws founded upon the relations, not of thoughts, but of words, and determined by verbal forms. It is this formal, constructive grammar which seems to me almost if not entirely superfluous in regard to the English language. Long ago, before any attempt had been made to write its grammar, that language had worked itself nearly free from those verbal forms which control the construction of the sentence, and therefore free in the same degree from the needs and the control of formal, constructive grammar. And, notably, it was not until English had cast itself firmly and sharply into its present simple mould that scholars undertook to furnish it with a grammar, the nomenclature and the rules of which they took from a language the Latin - with which it had no formal affinity, to which it had no formal likeness, and by the laws of which it could not be bound, except so far as they were the universal laws of human thought. Allusions to grammar and to its importance as a part of education abound in our early literature. In a rhyming ex

hortation to a child, written in the fifteenth century,

these lines occur:

"My lefe chyld I kownsel ye

To furme thi vj tens, thou awyse ye;
And have mind of thy clensoune
Both of nowne and of pronowne,
And ilk case in plurele

How thai sal end, awyse the wele;
And thi participyls forgete thou nowth,
And thi comparisons be yn thi thowth;
Thynk of the revele of the relatyfe;
And then schalle thou the better thryfe;
And how a verbe schalle be furmede,
Take gode hede that thou be not stunnede;
The ablatyfe case thou hafe in mynd,

That he be saved in hys kynd;

Take gode hede qwat he wylle do.

And how a nowne substantyfe

Wylle corde with a verbe and a relatyfe,
Posculo, posco, peto.

Reliquiæ Antiquæ, II. 14.

But, as appears on its face, this exhortation refers not to English, but to Latin grammar, which was the only grammar taught or thought of at the time when it was written. That was the day of the establishing and endowing of grammar schools in England; but the grammar taught in them was the Latin, and afterward a little of the Greek. Chaucer and Wycliffe had written, but in English grammar schools no man thought of teaching English. When, at last, it dawned upon the pedagogues that English was a language, or rather, in their significant phrase, a vulgar tongue, and they set themselves to giving rules for the art of writing and speaking it correctly, they attempted to form these rules upon the models furnished by the Latin language. And what wonder? for those were the only rules they