One cannot have moved much in the world without hearing complaints, both from parents and young persons, about the amount of time and brain spent in the learning of languages, and the little profit derived from this outlay. These complaints, no doubt, arise partly from the want of judgment on the part of the parents, and the want of capacity and inclination on the part of their young hopefuls: parents often acting thoughtlessly on the vulgar notion that far birds have fair feathers, and preferring what is foreign to what is native, and what lies at a great distance in time or space to what is near; and young persons being forced to submit themselves to a grammatical indoctrination in which they feel no interest, and from which they derive no benefit. But it is no less true that these complaints are due in no small measure to false methods of linguistic training generally, or to some cherished prejudices in favour of certain languages on the part of the teachers; and it becomes therefore, at the present day, a matter of great practical importance to inquire how far our traditional methods of teaching languages are in conformity with the method of Nature in her great art of thought-utterance, and how far they may justly be called on to submit themselves to a revision and a reconstitution.
