"Wax to receive and marble to retain"

runs the line--which the curious may discover to be a description of
the faithful lover, though it has become as firmly associated with the
child-mind as has Sterne's "tempering the wind to the shorn lamb" with
Holy Writ. And this idea of infantile receptivity and retentiveness is
held by an unthinking world, in spite of the universally accessible
fact that hardly one of us can remember anything that happened before
the age of five, and very little that happened before seven or eight,
and that children of five or six, removed into foreign surroundings,
will in a year or so--if special measures are not taken--reconstruct
their idiom, and absolutely forget every word of their mother-tongue.
This foreign nurse comes into the child's world, bringing with her
quite weird errors in the quantities, the accent and idiom of the
mother-tongue, and greatly increasing the difficulty and delay on the
road to thought and speech. And this attempt to acquire a foreign
language prematurely at the expense of the mother-tongue, to pick it up
cheaply by making the nurse an informal teacher of languages, entirely
ignores a fact upon which I would lay the utmost stress in this paper--
which, indeed, is the gist of this paper--that only a very small
minority of English or American people have more than half mastered the
splendid heritage of their native speech. To this neglected and most
significant limitation the amount of public attention given at present
is quite surprisingly small. [Footnote: My friend, Mr. L. Cope
Cornford, writes _apropos_ of this, and I think I cannot do better
than print what he says as a corrective to my own assertions: "All you
say on the importance of letting a child hear good English cleanly
accented is admirable; but we think you have perhaps overlooked the
importance of ear-training as such, which should begin by the time the