the several authors are really under the influence of scriptural doctrine and practical piety, the writers of divinity, the object of their several works, whether to establish a favourite tenet, or advance the knowledge of truth, whether orthodox according to the verdict of Christians generally, or pointedly supporting, or covertly insinuating, doctrines generally accounted

erroneous.

It would perhaps be regarded as an omission, were I to dismiss the subject of reading without any reference to elocution. The acquirement is of great importance, and I would earnestly recommend that it should receive correspondent care. I am convinced, both by reason and experience, that the attainment of good elocution will never be effected by a system of measured pitches, accents, inflections, and cadences, which are first to be acquired in exact conformity to prescription, and then applied as rules direct. They all proceed on the plan of making a reader think of her voice and manner at the time she is reading, and thus diverting her attention from her subject; whereas excellence consists in the natural and unstudied adaptation of voice and manner to the topic.

Your first care in securing a good elocution will be to correct the faults, which sloth, familiarity with bad usage, &c. may have originated. In fact, your teaching, in this respect, is to be negative rather than positive throughout. You may aim at excellence, but not at acquired excellencies. To understand and be interested are the positive essentials of good reading. These will secure the adaptation of voice and manner to the character and style of the composition; perhaps not the best essentially, but the most natural to the reader,

and therefore unquestionably the best for her; and additionally, you do not need to enjoin more than clearness, force, and agreeableness of enunciation, free from indistinctness or embarrassment, and from the inelegance of vulgar or dialectic pronunciation.

LETTER IV.

LANGUAGE-COMPOSITION.

MY DEAR M, When your pupil's grammatical studies are pretty far advanced, and she has been practised in the frequent narration of incident, she may be expected to have acquired the power of expressing thought intelligibly, and may proceed to the practice of composition. Do not, however, expect originality in her first efforts. "Ex nihilo nil fit," and the unreasonable attempt to force it only brings disappointment to the teacher, and distress and perplexity to the learner. I would at first aim only at the rendering of thought into correct and appropriate language. Put the pupil into possession of the thoughts, either from some book or verbally, and require her to express them in her own words. Probably they, too, will be derived from the same source as the thought, as far as memory will serve. Do not mind this. Let them be correct and appropriate, and if not immediately copied, the exercise is as productive as you can reasonably expect.

The construction of single sentences is a good exercise of early effort in composition. Give a simple subject, attribute, and object, and require your pupils to express the sense, with any enlargement they can suggest; the application of epithets, or addition of accidental circumstances in keeping, or adjuncts of any other kind the subject will admit.

Or you may require the transference of poetic or oratorical into ordinary diction, or the highly metaphorical into the plain. Or you may select and read to them a passage vividly descriptive and picturesque, something that will arrest the imagination so forcibly, that the language will not be heeded, and require the written recapitulation of it. Your pupils will thus learn to recal and consider the ideas they have acquired, to gain familiar acquaintance with the stores of their own minds, to re-arrange them, selecting some on judgment of their adaptedness to a certain purpose, and even of their abstract truth and wisdom. This is but a step, and by no means a difficult one, from thought itself.

Composition, however, will be useful to your pupil chiefly as a statement of opinions professedly her own, or hers by adoption; and as giving you an opportunity to canvass them, to give her an insight into the character and value of her own sentiments, and to the tenure of which she holds them—to make her acquainted with her own mind. Let her never express an opinion or sentiment which shall pass unsifted. Inquire into the foundation of it, that if it have none, she may herself detect its baselessness; and that if it have a good one, she may recognise its value, and deposit it among her tested

stores.

The first attempts at independent composition should be on very easy subjects; those should be chosen on which the pupil is most likely to have abundant ideas, not those whose investigation is likely to be most beneficial to her. Do not task her powers heavily till she has proved them by exercise. Descriptive and historical subjects, judgment of the moral conduct of certain individuals under certain circumstances, or of the men

tal and moral qualifications required to fill certain offices, the uses and advantages, direct and indirect of a certain art, are appropriate.*

The intellect enlarges and confirms its processes by expression. Do you not find that your own conceptions assume vividness before your eye as you express them in writing? Do you not often detect vagueness and deficiency, when you attempt to form a thought for expression, where you did not suspect any want of completeness? Especially when you are framing thought for the instruction of another, and so view it as you know she will look upon it; do you not often perceive indistinctness where you would not otherwise have detected it? In this preparation for expression, this placing of thoughts in a medium through which other minds are to receive and judge them; what was deficient is supplied, what was errant is fixed, what was shadowy assumes form. Hence composition is a great engine of intellectual improvement.

When correctness and clearness of statement are attained, comes the cultivation of style. Quality of mind directs this, rather than the art of applying language. Rules may direct us, in giving to thought a substantial frame, but they cannot supply the creative energy by which that frame is made to beam with all the spirit and vigour of intellectual life. The same thought which, revolved in one mind undergoes no change, and comes out again in its ordinary plainness, in another mind is dissolved by the active agency of

* Since writing the above, I have been gratified to find confirmation of these remarks from the pen of Archbishop Whately, in his introduction to his Elements of Rhetoric, to which I would refer my readers.