PREFATORY NOTE. To Professors Albert S. Cook, of Yale University, and George Lyman Kittredge, of Harvard, the thanks of the editor are due for their kindness in reading the notes to this little text-book while in proof, and for the aid of some timely suggestions and corrections. INTRODUCTION. Two questions confront at the outset the editor who attempts the preparation of a text-book, namely: What is the object of the pursuit of this study? and, By what means may that object be best attained? English as a requirement for admission to college aims at two things. The first of these is that the pupil shall learn to write good English. The papers submitted at a college entrance examination soon reveal that among these aspirants for scholastic honors and the certificate of a liberal education there is at least a goodly sprinkling of youths whose work may almost be called illiterate. It is not merely feeble in thought and crude in expression; it is misspelled, unpunctuated, slovenly and illegible, and at times downright ungrammatical. No college instructor needs committees and reports to inform him of the presence of such men; but the newspapers and the outside world have lately been awakened to the actual condition of affairs, and the publication of self-condemning samples of undergraduate composition has aided powerfully in the agitation for more attention to English in the colleges and preparatory course. Boys who cannot spell nor write respectably, whose sentences do not parse, and whose written application for a position in a business office would be rejected on its own evidence of the unfitness of the applicant, had better, it is said, spend a little less time in the study of Greek and Latin, and a little more in learning not to violate the ordinary conventionalities and proprieties of expression in their own mother tongue. But it is easy to say that boys are to be taught to write good English; to teach them that desirable art is a very different matter. For there is no better single test of the intellectual development and capacity of boy or man than his ability to write. If he writes well it is because he thinks well; he can no more write better than he thinks than water can rise above its source. He may, it is true, for a time write worse than he thinks; that is the loss by friction. But let him once conquer the difficulty of an unfamiliar avenue of expression and his writing measures him. If his thought is clear and vigorous, his vocabulary—indication of the range of his intellectual field — varied and under his control, his mind orderly and capable of grasping complex relations, then his style will be good; if, in addition, his imagination is quick and his feeling fine, he will add a higher quality of expression; while if his observation is imperfect, his memory weak, his ideas hazy, his mental processes slow and uncertain, and his grasp feeble, long as he is that kind of boy or man, no power on earth, or above it, can teach him to write. SO If it is true that good writing means good thinking, if command and power of expression are simply the manifestation of command and power of thought, then the ability to write is the result of all education rather than something to be taught by itself. The justification of the introduction of English into the preparatory school is not at all that by its study boys may learn to write; nor is it a sufficient criticism of the old order of things to say that some college men are illiterate because they were not made to study English at school and pass an examination in English before entering college. If they write badly it is because their whole education was bad, and as a result their present mental development is inferior. If, notwithstanding that fact, they got into college and stay there, the explanation is that |