“I allow it is a difficult language, Harry; and very ponderous and mechanical; but not necessarily dry or unpleasant.  The Romans, you know, were particularly fond of law in everything; and so they made a great many laws for their language; or rather, it grew so, because they were of that sort.  It was like their swords and armour generally, not very graceful, but very strong; —­ like their architecture too, Harry.  Nobody can ever understand what a people is, without knowing its language.  It is not only that we find all these stories about them in their language, but the language itself is more like them than anything else can be.  Besides, Harry, I don’t believe you know anything about Latin yet.”

“I know all the declensions and conjugations.”

“But don’t you think it must have been a very different thing to hear it spoken?”

“Yes, to be sure —­ and by such men.  But how ever could they speak it?”

“They spoke it just as you do English.  It was as natural to them.  But you cannot say you know anything about it, till you read what they wrote in it; till your ears delight in the sound of their poetry; —­”

“Poetry?”

“Yes; and beautiful letters; and wise lessons; and histories and plays.”

“Oh!  I should like you to teach me.  Will it be as hard to learn always as it is now?”

“Certainly not.  I am sure you will like it.”

“When will you begin me?”

“To-morrow.  And if you get on pretty well, we will begin our nest, too, in the afternoon.”

“Oh, how kind you are!  I will try very hard.”

“I am sure you will, Harry.”

Next morning, accordingly, Hugh did begin him, after a fashion of his own; namely, by giving him a short simple story to read, finding out all the words with him in the dictionary, and telling him what the terminations of the words signified; for he found that he had already forgotten a very great deal of what, according to Euphra, he had been thoroughly taught.  No one can remember what is entirely uninteresting to him.

Hugh was as precise about the grammar of a language as any Scotch Professor of Humanity, old Prosody not excepted; but he thought it time enough to begin to that, when some interest in the words themselves should have been awakened in the mind of his pupil.  He hated slovenliness as much as any one; but the question was, how best to arrive at thoroughness in the end, without losing the higher objects of study; and not how, at all risks, to commence teaching the lesson of thoroughness at once, and so waste on the shape of a pin-head the intellect which, properly directed, might arrive at the far more minute accuracies of a steam-engine.  The fault of Euphra in teaching Harry, had been that, with a certain kind of tyrannical accuracy, she had determined to have the thing done —­ not merely decently and in order, but prudishly and pedantically; so that she deprived progress