17.  It has unfortunately become fashionable to inveigh against the necessary labour of learning by heart the essential principles of grammar, as a useless and intolerable drudgery.  And this notion, with the vain hope of effecting the same purpose in an easier way, is giving countenance to modes of teaching well calculated to make superficial scholars.  When those principles are properly defined, disposed, and exemplified, the labour of learning them is far less than has been represented; and the habits of application induced by such a method of studying grammar, are of the utmost importance to the learner.  Experience shows, that the task may be achieved during the years of childhood; and that, by an early habit of study, the memory is so improved, as to render those exercises easy and familiar, which, at a later period, would be found very difficult and irksome.  Upon this plan, and perhaps upon every other, some words will be learned before the ideas represented by them are fully comprehended, or the things spoken of are fully understood.  But this seems necessarily to arise from the order of nature in the development of the mental faculties; and an acquisition cannot be lightly esteemed, which has signally augmented and improved that faculty on which the pupil’s future progress in knowledge depends.

18.  The memory, indeed, should never be cultivated at the expense of the understanding; as is the case, when the former is tasked with ill-devised lessons by which the latter is misled and bewildered.  But truth, whether fully comprehended or not, has no perplexing inconsistencies.  And it is manifest that that which does not in some respect surpass the understanding, can never enlighten it—­can never awaken the spirit of inquiry or satisfy research.  How often have men of observation profited by the remembrance of words which, at the time they heard them, they did not “perfectly understand!” We never study any thing of which we imagine our knowledge to be perfect.  To learn, and, to understand, are, with respect to any science or art, one and the same thing.  With respect to difficult or unintelligible phraseology alone, are they different.  He who by study has once stored his memory with the sound and appropriate language of any important doctrine, can never, without some folly or conceit akin to madness, repent of the acquisition.  Milton, in his academy, professed to teach things rather than words; and many others have made plausible profession of the same thing since.  But it does not appear, that even in the hands of Milton, the attempt was crowned with any remarkable success.  See Dr. Barrow’s Essays, p. 85.