se, good reader: the first professes to teach the
irregularities of nouns as to gender (_i. e._ which nouns having a
masculine termination are yet feminine, &c.), the second to teach the
irregularities of nouns as to number (_i. e._ which want the singular,
which the plural), the third to teach the irregularities of verbs (_i. e._
their deviations from the generic forms of the preterite and the
supine): this is what they _profess_ to teach. Suppose then their
professions realised, what is the result? Why that you have
laboriously anticipated a case of anomaly which, if it do actually
occur, could not possibly cost more trouble to explain at the time of
its occurrence than you are thus premising. This is as if a man should
sit down to cull all the difficult cases of action which could ever
occur to him in his relations of son, father, citizen, neighbour,
public functionary, &c. under the plea that he would thus have got
over the labour of discussion before the case itself arrived.
Supposing that this could be accomplished, what would it effect but to
cancel a benevolent arrangement of providence by which the
difficulties of life are distributed with tolerable equality
throughout its whole course, and obstinately to accumulate them all
upon a particular period. Sufficient for the day is its own evil:
dispatch your business as it arises, and every day clears itself: but
suffer a few months of unaudited accounts, or of unanswered letters,
to accumulate; and a mountain of arrears is before you which years
seem insufficient to get rid of. This sort of accumulation arises in
the shape of _arrears_: but any accumulation of trouble out of its
proper place,--_i. e._ of a distributed trouble into a state of
convergement,--no matter whether in the shape of needless anticipation
or needless procrastination, has equally the practical effect of
converting a light trouble (or none at all) into a heavy and hateful
one. The daily experience of books, actual intercourse with Latin
authors, is sufficient to teach all the irregularities of that
language: just as the daily experience of an English child leads him
without trouble into all the anomalies of his own language. And, to
return to the question which we put--'What was our profit from all
this loathsome labour?' In this way it was, viz. in the way of actual
experience that we, the reviewer of this book, did actually in the end
come to the knowledge of those irregularities which the thr