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will bo helpful, whilst Maltzner's may be appealed to for more copious materials. As a guide to the importance and method of making grammar a practical part of composition, the teacher will find nothing better than the second part of Hodgson's Errors in the Dse of English. As difficult and as necessary a part of composition is the accurate and idiomatic use of words. And what seems to make it still more difficult is the great scope of the vocabulary of our tongue; there arc so many words which express almost the same meaning that even.the most practised writer is puzzled to choose between them; and yet they have each their peculiar and distinctive use. But it is really only in the narrower pale of the older and bettor-established words that this bewilderment of choice occurs; the newer words—which indeed constitute the larger majority— have most of them definite and single meanings wdiich do not tend to overlap. A list of a few hundred words would include all the important synonyms in English. And, in order to acquire the correct use of these, pupil's should be daily exercised in distinguishing words that seem to be alike, in forming sentences and paragraphs that bring in each correctly, in inserting the right words in blanks left in sentences, and in pointing out words that are inaccurately used and substituting the right ones. One of the most useful and comprehensive books for this is the oldest—Crabbe's English Synonyms, a new edition of which has lately been published; another more recent but scarcely so good manual is C. J. Smith's Synonyms discriminated. An excellent collection of errors which recent writers have made in the use of synonyms is to be found in the first part of Hodgson's Errors in the Use of English. But nothing—not even such practice as this—can take the place of reading widely and critically the best prose writers of our own generation; earlier writers are too full of solecisms, archaisms, and violations of what are now counted the elementary principles of the art. These two divisions of the subject will not carry the student far ; they will only lead in the end to idiomatic use of the word. How to form the sentence so as to be unambiguous, simple, and orderly is as important. The partially-inflected character of the English language leaves traps open at every turn in the construction of sentences. The pronoun alone puzzles the most practised writers to keep unambiguous of reference ; whilst the use of relatives and connectives needs the nicest discrimination. Our best authors often fall by their inapt or too frequent use into perfect labyrinths of sentences. And the teacher has not to go far to seek specimens for his pupils to break up and strip of intricacy and obscurity. Clarendon's History of the Rebellion and Alison's History of Europe he will find inexhaustible mines of bad English for his purposes; there Jspeeimens are ready to his hand far more varied in their badness than he can hope to manufacture. Thence he should draw sentences to be corrected But, as a preparation for such work, Abbott's little book, "How to write clearly," will supply a good guide, although many of the sentences in it are left still faulty after the corrections which the author recommends are made. The pupils should be made to write out the rules which are violated by each fault, and to give as far as they can the reasons for the rule; they should write good versions; and some of these the teachers should take up and criticise, or get the class to criticise, and at last dictate a final, version himself. The third and fourth parts of Hodgson's Errors in the Use of English will give valuable aid in this department, supplying as it does numerous examples of errors from writers of the day. Nichol's Primer of English Composition and Abbott and Seeley's English Lessons for English People will also give good hints on this as on the other departments of composition. To this method of teaching by correction of faulty work some have objected that it may habituate the pupils to the errors. But how are they to know the faults they are to guard against unless they see them pointed out and are taught to avoid them? It is as if one should object to the sailor learning where the rocks and shoals are lest he should get into the habit of running on them. But it would be well to supplement the method by others : the easiest would be to teach the pupils to pick out the best sentences of the authors they read, and to make them analyse the sources of their excellences as far as these can be analysed, and to make them commit the passages to memory. Another and more useful would be to break up a well-constructed long sentence into sentences, each consisting of a single clause, and to lay these before the pupils to tarn back into a single sentence. Thus they will learn to write a long sentence without falling into intricacy or ambiguity. But by far the most difficult of all the stages of composition to master is continuous and sequent writing. No rules can be laid down for the paragraph or for the manipulation of ideas ; only practice under good tuition can develop the capacity for these. Themes should bo given on which essays have to be planned or outlined, in order to bring out the power of logical sequence and the faculty of order in composition ; the various parts of the essay—the introduction, the body, and the conclusion—should be each divided into main sections, and under each of these the subordinate ideas arranged, each of which would make a paragraph. This planning should also be applied to essays which the pupils themselves have written or are to write, in order that the weak, padded, or inconsequent parts may be made manifest. But, as a rule, teachers paralyse the faculty of composition by giving themes so jejune or commonplace that the pupils have no ideas on them, or can get them only at the expense of all their mental energy. "Virtue," "Punctuality," " All that glitters is not gold," and similar subjects arc so threadbare that it would take the greatest genius to find anything fresh in them. The pupils should be supplied with plenty of the ideas required, or have themes set them connected with.the books wdiich they are reading at the time, and in which they are interested. Perhaps the best thing to do is to give out an interesting novel or play (like Westward Ho ! or a tragedy of Shakespeare's) to be read at leisure at home; then to get an account of the plot or a description of character after character. When this is done a dozen different subjects.will suggest themselves to the pupils in connection with the book—the key to some one of the scenes, the morality of the book, the art of its construction, the light it throws on the nature and opinions of its author or on his time, a compai'ison between it and some other similar book which they have read. By this means they will have such abundant material that they can spend all their energies oil the form and style.