THREE years' use of this text-book in the class-room warrants us, perhaps, in making a suggestion or two.

1. If your pupils have been thoroughly exercised in the analysis and the construction of sentences, as taught in Reed & Kellogg's "Graded Lessons in English" and "Higher Lessons," or have done equivalent work in other grammars, pp. 21-57 of this book may be omitted. But if your pupils have not fairly mastered the English sentence, we counsel holding them to these pages.

2. The thorough understanding of the paragraph, the ability to form good, logical frameworks, and the habit of making these frameworks before the labor of composition is begun seem to us invaluable. The work on pp. 57-73, then, should not be slighted. But in Lessons 25 and 26 allow your pupils great freedom. It is not easy to tell which of the many possible groupings of the items and wordings of the general topic and of the sub-topics is the best. But see to it that each pupil can give a good reason for the particular grouping and wording he adopts.

3. See to it, also, that in the department called Qualities of Style, your pupils (1) understand the reason, or philosophy, of things, given in the long primer type; that (2) they recite the definitions exactly as laid down in the text or that they invent and give better ones; that (3) they learn the Roman and Arabic notation under which what is said is arranged; and that (4) they perform a large fraction, if not all, of the work enjoined in the Directions. The importance of doing what they have learned is good to do and have learned how to do cannot be overestimated Pass by those pairs of synonyms in Lessons 33-36, between the words of which sufficiently broad distinctions have not yet obtained-if in your judgment any such pairs are there to be found. Letters suggesting that the allusions in Lesson 49 are difficult have been received, but these allusions are taken from writings everywhere read. Make much, and in the way pointed out, of the extracts in Lessons 74 and 75. Such work will open the eyes of the pupils to the merits of different authors.

4. Ground your pupils thoroughly in rhythm, in the substitution of poetical feet, and in scansion, as taught in Lessons 79 and 80.

POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE, BROOKLYN, Dec. 10, 1883.

B. K.

WHAT RHETORIC IS.-We talk and we write to make known our thoughts, and we do it in sentences, the sentence being the universal and necessary form of oral and of written communication. In every sentence there are the words arranged in a certain order and addressed to the ear or to the eye; and there is that which these words express and impart, itself unheard and unseen, but reaching the mind of the hearer or reader through the words which he hears or sees. That which these words express we call a thought, and hence

A sentence is the verbal expression of a thought.

Now, rhetoric deals with the thought of the sentence and with the words which express it, and so its function is twofold. It teaches us how to find the thought, and how best to express it in words. In this, its twofold function, rhetoric works near neighbor to grammar and to logic. Grammar, as well as rhetoric, deals with the words of a sentence; and logic, as well as rhetoric, deals with thought; but the fields of the three, though lying side by side, are distinct.

needful, without attempting complete definitions, to say that grammar teaches us the offices of single words in the sentence, and of those groups of words called phrases and clauses, and shows us what forms the inflected words must have in their various relations. It teaches, also, how to construct correct sentences containing the parts of speech in their several relations. Logic deals with thought, but not with the thought in single and detached sentences. It does not decide whether this thought and that thought are true, but what conclusion follows from them if we assume them to be true. It teaches us to reason correctly, to make right inferences, to draw just conclusions.

In what rhetoric has to do with words, it begins its work where that of grammar ends. It teaches us how in the choice and arrangement of words to express the thought clearly or forcibly or gracefully-in a word, how to express it most happily for the special purpose in hand. And teaching us to find the thought with which we reason, its work with the thought ends where that of logic begins. Rhetoric, then, lies in between grammar and logic. The word side of its field touches the field of grammar, the thought side of it touches the field of logic,

and hence

Rhetoric is the study which teaches us how to invent thought, and how to express it most appropriately in words.

You have seen

WHAT THE WORD RHETORIC MEANS. what the thing is; look now at its name. The word rhetoric comes originally from a Greek verb which means to flow or to speak. Were we to name the study now, it is possible that we should take some word which means to write. But rhetoric was studied before writing became general, and ages and ages before printing was in

vented. Men spoke long before they wrote, because speaking was easy. The air, the lungs, and the organs of the throat and mouth were ready and waiting to be used.

Writing was at first impossible, and for a long while difficult after it became possible. There were needed (1) an alphabet, and (2) something upon which to write. Letters, characters which would represent to the eye the sounds which the voice addressed to the ear, had to be invented. And that this was not an easy task is shown by the fact that even to-day we have not in English a perfect alphabet; some of the twenty-six letters standing each for many sounds, some having no sounds belonging exclusively to them, and some combinations of letters being used to represent single sounds. That it was hard to find a suitable substance on which to write, a few words attest. From parchment we learn that the cleansed and dried skins of sheep, hares, goats, and calves were used, and from palimpsest, that removing the writing, so that the skin could be used again, became a business; from paper, that the thin, cohesive layers of the stem of the papyrus, an Egyptian plant, served as a material; from ostracism and petalism, that in voting at Athens to banish a citizen, a clay tile or a shell was used, and at Syracuse an olive-leaf; from style, that surfaces smeared with wax were prepared; from liber and library, that the bark of trees, and from book, that beechen tablets were resorted to.

Publication, then, among the Greeks and Romans, was by the voice-De Quincey says the voice of the actor, and that of the speaker on the bema, or platform. This must largely have determined (1) what kind of literature should be cultivated, and (2) the style in which this

which could be recited or spoken, and it was written so that it could be appreciated by the listener. To this noteworthy fact modern literature is signally indebted. Its lawgivers in Europe and America are those whose style was purified and perfected by the study of the great models which Athens and Rome furnished, or by the study of those writers who had made these their models. It is much for us that these models were themselves shaped by the necessity of oral communication. They were to be addressed to the ear and not to the eye; their meaning and merit caught by the hearer as the speaker hurried on from sentence to sentence. Such discourse must have had, and did have, the great. and essential qualities of style-simplicity, clearness, directness, and vigor. The writer who is accustomed to speaking, and who brings his sentences to this test, is the one most likely to learn the secret of expression, the art of "putting things." And this leads us to speak of

USAGE AS AUTHORITY IN RHETORIC.-There is no reason, in the nature of things, why an English noun in the nominative plural should always have its verb in the plural -the Greek noun in the neuter did not; or why English words should be spelled and accented and pronounced as they now are- they have not always been. The reason why these things are as they are is, that the people who use the language have agreed that they should be so, and not otherwise. The grammar and the dictionary of to-day are full of truths which have not always been truths, and will not always be; in other words, their truths are not, like those of mathematics, unchangeable. They are conventional, depend upon consent; are true as long as that consent is given; cease to be true when that consent is withdrawn.