of the context, furnish a dictionary _pro hac
vice_. And afterwards, upon advancing to other books, where you are
obliged to forego such aids, and to swim without corks, you find
yourself already in possession of the particles for expressing
addition, succession, exception, inference--in short, of all the forms
by which transition or connection is effected (_if_, _but_, _and_,
_therefore_, _however_, _notwithstanding_), together with all those
adverbs for modifying or restraining the extent of a subject or a
predicate, which in all languages alike compose the essential
frame-work or _extra-linear_ machinery of human thought. The
filling-up--the _matter_ (in a scholastic sense)--may differ
infinitely; but the _form_, the periphery, the determining moulds
into which this matter is fused--all this is the same for ever: and so
wonderfully limited in its extent is this frame-work, so narrow and
rapidly revolving is the clock-work of connections among human
thoughts, that a dozen pages of almost any book suffice to exhaust all
the [Greek: epea pteroenta][20] which express them. To have mastered
these [Greek: epea pteroenta] is in effect to have mastered
seven-tenths, at the least, of any language; and the benefit of using
a New Testament, or the familiar parts of an Old Testament, in this
preliminary drill, is, that your own memory is thus made to operate as
a perpetual dictionary or nomenclator. I have heard Mr. Southey say
that, by carrying in his pocket a Dutch, Swedish, or other Testament,
on occasion of a long journey performed in '_muggy_' weather, and in
the inside of some venerable 'old heavy'--such as used to bestow their
tediousness upon our respectable fathers some thirty or forty years
ago--he had more than once turned to so valuable an account the
doziness or the dulness of his fellow-travellers, that whereas he had
'booked' himself at the coach-office utterly [Greek: analphabetos],
unacquainted with the first rudiments of the given language, he had
made his parting bows to his coach brethren (secretly returning thanks
to them for their stupidity), in a condition for grappling with any
common book in that dialect. One of the polyglot Old or New Testaments
published by Bagster, would be a perfect Encyclopaedia, or
_Panorganon_, for such a scheme of coach discipline, upon dull roads
and in dull company. As respects the German language in particular, I
shall give one caution from my own experience, to the self-instr