honesty and good
life appear now rugged and difficult, tho they be indeed easy and
pleasant, they would then appear to all men both easy and pleasant,
tho they were rugged and difficult indeed.

II

A COMPLETE EDUCATION DEFINED[79]

And seeing every nation affords not experience and tradition enough
for all kind of learning, therefore we are chiefly taught the
languages of those people who have at any time been most industrious
after wisdom; so that language is but the instrument conveying to us
things useful to be known. And tho a linguist should pride himself to
have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet, if he have
not studied the solid things in them, as well as the words and
lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man, as any
yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only. Hence
appear the many mistakes which have made learning generally so
unpleasing and so unsuccessful: first, we do amiss to spend seven or
eight years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and
Greek, as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one
year.

And that which casts our proficiency therein so much behind, is our
time lost partly in too oft idle vacancies given both to schools and
universities; partly in a preposterous exaction, forcing the empty
wits of children to compose themes, verses, and orations, which are
the acts of ripest judgment, and the final work of a head filled by
long reading and observing, with elegant maxims and copious invention.
These are not matters to be wrung from poor striplings, like blood
out of the nose, or the plucking of untimely fruit; besides the ill
habit which they get of wretched barbarizing against the Latin and
Greek idiom, with their untutored Anglicisms, odious to be read, yet
not to be avoided without a well-continued and judicious conversing
among pure authors digested, which they scarce taste: whereas, if
after some preparatory grounds of speech by their certain forms got
into memory, they were led to the praxis thereof in some chosen short
book lessoned thoroughly to them, they might then forthwith proceed to
learn the substance of good things and arts in due order, which would
bring the whole language quickly into their power. This I take to be
the most rational and most profitable way of learning languages, and
whereby we may best hope to give account to God of our youth spent
herein.

And for the usua