THE NEW METHOD.

Some hundred years ago, when the college was yet young, the requisition for entrance was "to read and converse in easy Greek and Latin," and although candidates for admission did not come up to the present ideal in classical knowledge, still it must be confessed that they made the crude attempt of a system soon to become universal. Until quite recently the method pursued in the study of languages has been a peculiar one, not to put it too strongly, a method employing the dictionary largely in translating the author's ancient and modern, and altogether ignoring the sound of a language. In fact it was a reasoning system, one that was largely made up of grammar and "trot" and that did not teach a man to distinguish the subtle differences in measure and order by his ear (an organ which seldom errs) but by complex rules, committed to memory with much labor and easily forgotten. In the English colleges of a few centuries ago, it was an ordinary circumstance to carry on a conversation in Latin, and the control which an average student had over the language was astonishing. When, for example, we remember the wonderful "knacd" the poet Addison had of reeling off good hexameter verse, a "knack" not his alone, but common to most of the then students of average ability, we may form some idea of the system pursued at that time. It is said that even in the present age in the northern countries of Europe, especially Denmark, if a foreigner is unable to converse in the modern languages, a limited conversation may be carried on in Latin, at least among the fairly educated population. The system of the English was to put a dead language into active use, conversing in it at all opportunities, and after learning enough grammar to enable them to fit in the cases, verbs, etc., to turn all their attention to rapid reading and translating. After so many years have elapsed the study of the classics under the old-new method has been given a great impetus and an interest which formerly was rapidly disappearing. It is a fallacy to suppose a man can learn much of a language, be it ancient or modern, by "digging out" a bad translation with a small dictionary and a poor "trot," or by filling his mind full of grammar which he neither cares about nor remembers. It has been acknowledged that the best way to learn any language is to hear it spoken and we know for a certainty that children (who learn most rapidly, especially if they are young) do not reason at all but pick it up by instinct as it were or by learning its rythm or swing. This is the new system which has been lately introduced and is now being pursued,-that of learning a language by sound. It has been most successful in learning the modern languages of German, French, Italian and Spanish; why not in Greek and Latin? The days of reasoning a language into hard, narrow rules and set ways of translating are over, and it will soon be possible for the average man of the world to take up his Homer or Cicero and read them with as much zest and as little trouble as he does the latest French novel or the most recent German pamphlet on philosophy.

M.