other hand, he will cultivate with assiduity the talents which he has been so largely gifted with-if he will throw aside clap-trap, and study the effect which may be produced by sincerity, simplicity, and earnestness if he will trust more to nature, and less to the effect of meretricious art,- we venture to affirm that Mr. Irving, besides effecting incomparably more good as a religious orator in his own day, may hereafter rank among the most distinguished ornaments of our national literature.

ART. IV. Chrestomathia: being a Collection of Papers explanatory of the Design of an Institution proposed to be set on foot under the Name of the Chrestomathia Day School, or Chrestomathia School, for the Extension of the New System of Instruction to the higher Branches of Learning. For the Use of the middling and higher Ranks in Life. By Jeremy Bentham, Esq. Payne and Foss,

1816.

Public Education: a Plan for the Government and liberal Instruction of Boys in large Numbers; drawn from Experience. 1822. THE object of education is twofold; to point out those objects

in nature which are most important to be known, and those principles in conduct which are most proper to be observed; to teach what it is most useful to know, and what it is most conducive to happiness to do: hence, education is intellectual and moral. There exists a vast treasure of facts which the observation and experience of mankind have accumulated: it is the business of education to communicate a knowledge of these facts; and it is in the power of an able teacher to communicate in an hour what it required the labour of years to acquire; to show at once results which were not obtained without the most complicated and skilful processes; and to exhibit those results free from the obscurity, imperfection, and error, in which they were at first involved, and for the removal of which the calm and persevering attention of the most powerful minds was necessary. It has often been said, that the brevity of man's life, in consequence of which he is removed from the scene of observation and experiment as soon as his faculties are developed, and he has acquired so much elementary knowledge as would enable him to pursue his investigation with advantage, must for ever keep the human mind in a state of infancy; and it would be so, did the minds that quit the scene leave behind them no trace of their progress, no results of their labour; but they do not thus utterly perish. Education feeds the infancy of succeeding minds with the fruits produced by the strength of the maturity of those that preceded: whence the for

mer not only acquire an earlier and greater vigour, but start forward in their career from the point at which their predecessors stopped, with the acuteness of the youthful sense, and the ardour inspired by the feeling of the freshness and energy of their powers. Thus, by means of education, that law which would otherwise have been fatal to the improvement of the human mind in knowledge and virtue, becomes the very source whence it is supplied with inexhaustible vigour.

But education has not hitherto accomplished the wonders it is capable of producing. The mode' adopted in working the machine has deprived it in an incalculable measure of its power. We are but beginning to see the stupendous results which benevolence, enlightened by science, may obtain from it. We perfectly agree with the author of Public Education, " that it is one thing to have learned, and another to be able to teach; that it is possible to possess vast stores of knowledge without being able to impart them, even to the willing and anxious pupil; and that to fix the volatile, stimulate the sluggish, and overcome the obstinate, demands an acquaintance with the human mind not quite innate, nor likely to be gained without some experience." It was not possible indeed that a proper method of instruction should have been adopted, until the arts and sciences had been brought to a tolerable degree of perfection, and a very considerable progress had been made in the knowledge of the human mind; because that method could have been the result only of a generalization of all the knowledge which was accumulated, or a deduction of general principles from particular facts, and adaptation of those principles to the principles of the human mind. Yet considering the progress actually made in art, in science, and even in the philosophy of the mind, the adoption of a scientific method of instruction has been later than could have been anticipated, and than can well be explained. Both in the selection of subjects to be taught, and in the mode of teaching them which has been perpetuated even to the present day, there is exemplified a most extraordinary ignorance of the very elements of rational instruction. Ingulphus, an Englishman, who flourished as an ecclesiastic and historian in the reign of Edward the Confessor, speaks of having been educated first at Westminster, and afterwards at Oxford. On this narrative, Mr. Harris remarks, that Westminster and Oxford seem to have been destined to the same then as now; that the scholar at Westminster was to begin, and at Oxford was to finish : "A plan of education," continues he, "which still exists, which is not easy to be mended, and which can plead so ancient and so uninterrupted a prescription." Now this "plan of education" consisted of little

purpose

more than teaching Latin and Greek: at least, whatever else was comprehended in it was made completely subservient to the acquisition of those languages, and the whole course was adapted only to the education of churchmen. When this plan was first instituted there was some reason for it. At that period the Greek and Latin languages contained all the knowledge which the observation and experience of mankind had yet accumulated. Of science, properly so called, nothing was known, and therefore nothing could be taught; at any rate, the little which existed was to be found in the ancient languages, and churchmen were the only persons in the community who had the least pretension to learning. But that this plan should be continued in the present age, when the Greek and Latin languages do not contain a thousandth part of the information which ought to be communicated, whether the importance of that information be estimated by its extent or value, is sufficiently extraordinary. Yet hitherto there has been no medium between studying language as the principal object of education, and as part of a course calculated only for the cultivation of the learned professions, and receiving no education at all. No plan of instruction has been adopted for those who are to be engaged in the active business of life. A gentleman who might happen to have no desire to be a scholar, must have gone without any instruction whatever; and the merchant to whom it might not be convenient to wade through "tremendous Lilly," has been doomed to enter the counting-house with little further acquaintance with the treasures of knowledge than could be acquired by "poring into the mysteries of long division with a dirty slate before him and the frustrum of a pencil in his fingers, heaping one set of figures upon the ghosts of their predecessors." It is no less true than lamentable, that hitherto the education proper for civil and active life has been neglected; that nothing has been done to enable those who are actually to conduct the affairs of the world, to carry them on in a manner worthy of the age and country in which they live, by communicating to them the knowledge and the spirit of their age and country; that there has been no access for any man to the temple of science but through the gate of language, and that the only key to it have been the Westminster and Eton grammars.

The evil of this unfortunate restriction in the range of subjects, great as it is, would be comparatively small, were it not for the method of teaching them which is still adopted, which has descended from the dark ages, and of which those execrable grammars afford a specimen. We do not apply to these grammars the word "execrable" without designing to excite against

them, in the mind of the reader, the deepest feelings of contempt and detestation which have ever been associated with that term. It is an utter disgrace to our age and country that these books should still be tolerated as the medium of initiation into the Latin language. We shall be much mistaken if we do not make it evident that the mischief produced by the ignorance or supineness of those who perpetuate the absurdity is most serious. Yet before we proceed, we are anxious to guard against being misunderstood. We are by no means unfriendly to the cultivation of classical literature; we think a comprehensive and unprejudiced consideration both of its intrinsic worth, and of its relative importance, will invariably terminate in the conviction, that it is of great value, especially as a means of exercising the intellectual faculties, and as conducive to the formation of a pure and correct taste to a gentleman it is highly ornamental; to a member of the learned professions it is indispensable: but we object altogether to the mode in which it is taught; we object still more to the space which it is allowed to occupy in the common course of instruction; and we object to its forming any part of the education of a very important class of the community, to whom, at least as it is at present communicated, experience proves it to be utterly useless.

Mr. Edgeworth, in imploring the assistance of some able and friendly hand to reform the present generation of grammars and school-books, asks, whether it be indispensably necessary that a boy as an initiatory lesson should learn by rote that "relative sentences are independent; i. e. no word in a relative sentence is governed either of verb or adjective that stands in another sentence, or depends upon any appurtenances of the relative; and that the English word that is always a relative when it may be turned into which in good sense, which must be tried by reading over the English sentence warily, and judging how the sentence will bear it; but when it cannot be altered salvo sensu, it is a conjunction." This, to be sure, is sufficiently appalling. What is the understanding of a child to make of such obscure and barbarous language, one principal object of studying which, be it remembered, is to enable him to form an elegant style? But what is this, compared to the absurdity of making a boy learn Latin in the Latin language itself! Of all the follies that ever entered into the mind of man, surely this is equalled by none. It is to require a perfect knowledge of an unknown language, in order to learn the rudiments of it. Let us see how this method operates when it is reduced to practice: let us take for an example the Eton grammar, which is generally considered the most simple and the

best arranged. In this grammar, as soon as the boy has got through his accidence, he is put to learn the following far-famed rule :—

"Propria, quæ maribus tribuuntur, mascula dicas:

Ut sunt divorum; Mars, Bacchus, Apollo: virorum ;

Ut, Cato, Virgilius."

It must be borne in mind, that as yet the child knows nothing of construing; in order to prepare him for this, he has been learning the declensions of nouns, the conjugation of verbs, and so on: he is now to be taught the genders of nouns; and to construe the very first rule which is to give him any information on this subject, he must possess a knowledge of the Latin language not to be obtained, as is universally acknowledged, in common schools in two or three years, and often not really acquired in six. The second rule is of the same description.

"Propria fæmineum referentia nomina sexum

Foemineo generi tribuuntur: sive dearum

Sunt; ut, Juno, Venus: mulierum; ceu, Anna, Philotis," &c. Can any thing be better calculated to confound the understanding of a child, and to place in his way at the very threshold insuperable difficulties? But it will be said, a translation of these rules is given. A translation is indeed given, and then the lesson to be learned is as follows: "Propria, proper names; quæ, which; tribuuntur, are attributed; maribus, to the male kind; dicas, you may call; mascula, masculine; ut, as; sunt, are; divorum, the names of the heathen gods; Mars, the god of war; Bacchus, the god of wine; Apollo, the god of wisdom; virorum, the names of men; ut, as; Cato, a noble Roman; Virgilius, the poet Virgil." And this is the apparatus adopted to teach the profound and mysterious truth, that males are of the masculine and females of the feminine gender. Can any thing be more easy than to teach a child these rules in the simplest words of his native tongue? By the method here adopted, not only is the construction of the rule the most intricate, and the words in which it is expressed the most varied, but to understand it in the least degree, requires such a previous acquaintance with the Latin syntax, which the scholar does not begin to learn till he has finished forty-seven pages in the same style, that it should seem expressly designed to impede his progress and to produce an utter disgust with his studies. "Totally incapable of analyzing or translating otherwise than by rote the first sentence of his initiatory lesson, he is led to rest in the use of his memory, and is unaccustomed to, and discouraged from the exercise of his understanding, even when in the prosecution of his studies he