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, — so long as he is that kind of boy or man, no power on earth, or above it, can teach him to write.

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

notwithstanding their inferiority they are on the whole
above the level at which their institution of learning will
send them away.
First divisions as a rule write well, no
matter what they studied; it is the illiterate, reinforced by
the lazy and the bad, who hang on the ragged edge.
English English worthy of the name is to be taught, if
it is to be taught at all, not because it teaches expression,
but because it aids development; because the boy who
devotes part of his time to the study of English classics is
better educated, more mature or well rounded, than the boy
who has given all his time to the study of Latin and Greek
classics and mathematics.

alecion

A separate entrance requirement in English as a test of the candidate's ability to write may, by diverting our attention from the real issue, work positive harm. As a partial recognition of the importance of the ability it is a step in the right direction; but in so far as it implies that this ability is to be tested only by a single examination and developed by a particular line of study, it is altogether misleading. Inability to write is an impeachment of a school, not necessarily of a single master.) It is inconceiv-an able that a boy should be able to handle an involved periodic sentence on his Cæsar paper, if he be required, that is, genuinely to translate it, and not merely to give an inaccurate paraphrase, misnamed "free" translation, in which the display of a more or less loose knowledge of the vocabulary enables him to disguise his inability to comprehend the thought and construction — and then go to pieces when put to a fair test when asked to write about a subject he understands — on his English paper. The pupil who learns to arrange his algebraic solution so that the eye may take in at a glance his process and results, whose demonstrations. in geometry train him to be methodical, logical, and exact, is preparing for his English examination while he is master

ing his mathematics. The truth is as has already in effect been said that the demand for better training in writing English in the preparatory schools is simply a demand for better preparation, for minds better disciplined and more fully developed. The logical conclusion is that the test of this must be applied, not in one subject, but in all. If the English test requires a maturity a year beyond that required in other subjects the candidate will not be kept out another year; he will get in over the ruins of the barrier that the defeated English examiner attempted to defend.

Preparatory school English is in danger of seeking unassisted to accomplish too much. Its scope is so broad, the instruments which it puts into the hands of the skillful teacher are so various, that it may be made the means of disciplining almost any faculty of the mind. Through the opportunities which it affords for linguistic, rhetorical, and literary training, its study might almost answer for a universal education. But that it must not attempt. It must limit its field; it must seek out as its peculiar province that part of education which is comparatively neglected by the older studies, and which it is peculiarly qualified to accomplish.

It is to be hoped that it will not long continue to be held in popular opinion responsible for all the shortcomings of schoolboys and college students in the matter of written expression. Every preparatory school teacher must teach. that—is teaching it all the time, whether efficiently or otherwise. Every written examination is an exercise in it; every translation influences it. Even the conventions and proprieties of written expression the violation of which constitutes illiteracy must be enforced in all departments if much is to be accomplished. A boy must not be permitted to misspell and ignore punctuation and use bad grammar with one instructor any more than with another.