t I am called on to write Latin at all, experience will have taught
me that _tango_ makes _tetigi_; or, supposing that I am required to
write Latin as one of the earliest means for gaining experience, even
in that case the very same dictionary which teaches me what is Latin
for '_touch_' teaches me what is the irregular preterite and supine of
_tango_. And thus the 'upshot' (to use a homely word) of the whole
business--is that an effort of memory, so great as to be capable
otherwise directed of mastering a science, and secondly (because
directed to an unnatural composition, viz. an arrangement of metre,
which is at once the rudest and the most elaborately artificial), so
disgusting as that no accession of knowledge could compensate the
injury thus done to the simplicity of the child's understanding, by
connecting pain and a sense of unintelligible mystery with his
earliest steps in knowledge,--all this hyperbolical apparatus and
machinery is worked for no one end or purpose that is not better
answered by a question to his tutor, by consulting his dictionary, or
by the _insensible_ progress of daily experience. Even this argument
derived from its utter uselessness does not however weigh so much with
us as the other argument derived from the want of common-sense,
involved in the wilful forestalling and artificial concentrating into
one long rosary of anomalies, what else the nature of the case has by
good luck dispersed over the whole territory of the Latin language. To
be consistent, a tutor should take the same proleptical course with
regard to the prosody of the Latin language: every Latin
hyperdissyllable is manifestly accentuated according to the following
law: if the penultimate be long, that syllable inevitably claims the
accent; if short, inevitably it rejects it--_i. e._ gives it to the
ante-penultimate. The determining syllable is therefore the
penultimate; and for the due reading of Latin the sole question is
about the quantity of the penultimate. According to the logic
therefore which could ever have introduced '_As in praesenti_,' the
tutor ought to make his pupils commit to memory every individual word
in which the quantity was not predetermined by a mechanical rule--(as
it is _e. g._ in the gen. plural _[=o]rum_, of the second declension,
the _[=e]runt_ of the third per. plurals of the preterite, &c., or the
cases where the vowel is long by position). But what man of sense
would forbear to cry out in such a