Excerpt from An Elementary Greek Grammar

The present work is a revised and enlarged edition of the Greek Grammar published in 1879, which was itself a revised and enlarged edition of the Elementary Greek Grammar of only 235 pages published in 1870. I trust that no one will infer from this repeated increase in the size of the book that I attribute ever increasing importance to the study of formal grammar in school. On the con trary, the growth of the book has come from a more decided opinion that the amount of grammar which should be learned by rote is exceedingly small compared with that which every real student of the Classics must learn in a very dif ferent way. When it was thought that a pupil must first learn his Latin and Greek Grammars and then learn to read Latin and Greek, it was essential to reduce a school grammar to its least possible dimensions. Now when a more sensible system leaves most of the details of grammar to be learned by the study of special points which arise in reading or writing, the case is entirely different; and few good teachers or good students are any longer grateful for a small grammar, which must soon be discarded as the horizon widens and new questions press for an answer. The forms of a language and the essential principles of its construction must be learned in the old-fashioned way, when the memory is vigorous and retentive, but, these once mastered, the true time to teach each principle of grammar is the moment when the pupil meets with it in his studies, and no grammar which is not thus practically illustrated ever becomes a living reality to the student. But it is not enough for a learner merely to meet each con struction or form ln isolated instances; for he may do this repeatedly, and yet know little of the general principle which the single example partially illustrates. Men saw apples fall and the moon and planets roll ages before the.

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