eeing several of these
methods at work are:--

1. That good teachers can make use of almost any method with excellent
results but that they generally evolve one of their own.

2. That if the teachers and the children take a great deal of trouble
the progress will be very remarkable, whatever method is employed, and
that without this both the classical and the "natural" methods can
accomplish very little.

3. That teachers with fixed ideas about children and about methods
arrest development.

4. That the self-instruction courses which "work out at a penny a
lesson" (the lesson lasts ten minutes and is especially recommended for
use in trams), and the gramophone with the most elaborate records, still
bear witness to the old doctrine that there is no royal road to the
learning of languages, and that it is not cheap in the end. In
proportion to the value we set upon perfect acquirement of them will be
our willingness to spend much labour upon foundations. By this road we
arrive again at the fundamentals of an educator's calling, love and
labour.

The value to the mind of acquiring languages is so great that all our
trouble is repaid. It is not utilitarian value: what is merely for
usefulness can be easily acquired, it has very little beauty. It is not
for the sake of that commonplace usefulness that we should care to spend
trouble upon permanent foundations in any tongue. The mind is satisfied
only by the genius of the language, its choicest forms, its
characteristic movement, and, most of all, the possession of its
literature from within, that is to say of the spirit as it speaks to its
own, and in which the language is most completely itself.

The special fitness of modern languages in a girl's education does not
appear on the surface, and it requires more than a superficial,
conversational knowledge to reap the fruit of their study. The social,
and at present the commercial values are obvious to every one, and of
these the commercial value is growing very loud in its assertions, and
appears very exacting in its demands. For this the quack methods promise
the short and easy way, and perhaps they are sufficient for it. A
knowledge sufficient for business correspondence is not what belongs to
a liberal education; it has a very limited range, hard, plain, brief
communications, supported on cast-iron frames, inelastic forms and
crudest courtesies, a mere formula for each particular case, and a small
vocabulary suited