204 On certain Tenses. they have come upon the truth from different points of view, will probably have seen some things in different lights. Besides in the present instance the article itself clearly shews that even those propositions in it which may already have received the assent of the learned, are by no means gene- rally notorious even to the diligent students of the ancient languages in England : and as the being aware of ones ignorance is always a help at least toward getting rid of it, a good purpose may be served by anything which re- minds us how much still remains to be done before even our simplest elementary knowledge of the Greek language can be raised to the level at which in these days it ought to be. After all that has been written, after all the subtilty and erudition that have been displayed by our own scholars as well as those of Germany in unravelling the perplexities of the ancient languages, the grammars which are taught in some of our principal public schools are still, with very slight changes, the same as they were some two hundred years ago. Hardly one obsolete and exploded errour has been expunged from them : hardly one of the observations by which light has since been thrown upon the analogies regulating either the forms or the combinations of words, has been incorporated in them : Busby and Lily are held to be infallible ; or at all events it must be deemed inde- corous that boys should know more than Busby and Lily could have taught them. Hence one of the first tasks that a lad, who has a taste for classical studies, has to go through on leaving school, is to unlearn a great part of what he has been learning there : and it is fortunate if this process do not convert his taste into a distaste. With such pecu- liar felicity too are those grammars constructed, so much care is taken to keep at a respectful distance from everything like a principle, such dead hedges are they of arbitrary rules broken down at every other step by a crowd of exceptions, that almost all those advantages are lost, which render the study of grammar better fitted perhaps than any other for training the youthful understanding to discern the latent operation of general laws in the concrete forms of things. But where the seed is cankered, it can never produce a strong and healthy plant: in order therefore to promote the growth
