caricature of the Latin method; we spend a certain amount of time
teaching children classificatory bosh about the eight sorts of
Nominative Case, a certain amount of time teaching them the
"derivation" of words they do not understand, glance shyly at Anglo-
Saxon and at Grimm's Law, indulge in a specific reminiscence of the
Latin method called parsing, supplement with a more modern development
called the analysis of sentences, give a course of exercises in
paraphrasing (for the most part the conversion of good English into
bad), and wind up with lessons in "Composition" that must be seen to be
believed. Essays are produced, and the teacher noses blindly through
the product for false concords, prepositions at the end of sentences,
and, if a person of peculiarly fine literary quality, for the word
"reliable" and the split infinitive. These various exercises are so
little parts of an articulate whole that they may be taken in almost
any order and any relative quantity. And in the result, if some pupil
should, by a happy knack of apprehension, win through this confusion to
a sense of literary quality, to the enterprise of even trying to write,
the thing is so rare and wonderful that almost inevitably he or she, in
a fine outburst of discovered genius, takes to the literary life. For
the rest, they will understand nothing but the flattest prose; they
will be deaf to everything but the crudest meanings; they will be the
easy victims of the boom, and terribly shy of a pen. They will revere
the dead Great and respect the new Academic, read the living quack,
miss and neglect the living promise, and become just a fresh volume of
that atmosphere of _azote_, in which our literature stifles.

Now the schoolmaster is not to blame for this any more than he is to
blame for sticking to Latin. It is no more possible for schoolmasters
and schoolmistresses, whose lives are encumbered with a voluminous mass
of low-grade mental toil and worries and reasonable and unreasonable