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BOSTON, U.S.A., AND LONDON
GINN & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS
The Athenæum Press
1897

Lc 7.353.5

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PREFACE.

THERE can be no question that the teaching of Latin in this country has been greatly improved within the last twenty-five years, and that this improvement is most marked in the elementary instruction. It would seem almost barbarous now to thrust the Latin grammar into the hands of a beginner and oblige him to spend a good part of a year learning and reciting rules and exceptions before so much as seeing a paragraph of Latin text. But that pretty accurately describes the method of the best teaching of Latin less than three decades ago.

But improvement has not been equally marked in the second stage. It might even be maintained that there has been retrogression. Following the first year or half year of wooden and wearisome grammatical drill, the learner used to enter upon some months of comparatively easy and interesting reading, "Anecdotes of Eminent Men," "Mythology," Fables," Roman History," antiquis temporibus Saturnus in Italiam venisse dicitur, and the rest. Who that was in the Latin rudiments thirty years or more ago does not remember with pleasure the happy sense of progress and power that came

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with the mastery of the simple Latin texts contained in the old "Readers"?

It may not be easy to say certainly why the fashion changed, but change it did. Latin Readers came to be discarded. Schoolmasters grew suspicious of the unconscious influence on their pupils of inferior or late Latin. Nothing but Simon pure Latin of the golden age was safe! Nepos was below the mark, and accordingly his "Lives" fell into disfavor.

Against the Latin of Caesar, however, there could be no objection, and the "De Bello Gallico" came into very general use as the first Latin reading book. Its unfitness for that place in a Latin curriculum seems now obvious enough, and probably was always more or less clearly felt and seen. Out of this feeling grew, many years ago, Dr. Woodford's Epitome of Caesar, that is, Caesar simplified. But as thousands of boys and girls have annually suffered partial or utter shipwreck on the Gallic War, it has been thought the difficulty might be overcome by first Latin books designed especially as stepping-stones to Caesar. The experiment does not seem to have succeeded. If it has, it has been at the expense of devoting about half the period of the Latin college preparatory course to a single military history.

There are unmistakable signs, which it is not necessary to enumerate, that schoolmasters are returning to the earlier practice, which should never have been abandoned, of reading with their pupils, after they have acquired a knowledge of forms and simple constructions, or even concurrently with that acquisition, some easy and intel

ligible Latin that would prepare them to study and understand a classic author. The colleges recommend it; common sense demands it.

Opinions will differ, as circumstances of schools differ, as to how much of such ad interim reading can be made profitable; but I am persuaded that the whole of The New Gradatim or Via Latina is not too much.

Whether two books of the "Gallic War" or more are read, it is best to begin with the second. It has a dramatic interest; it is the shortest book and the easiest.

It should not be made the stamping-ground of overmuch syntax. Syntactical instruction, as I have said elsewhere,1 should fall largely upon exercises in writing Latin. In this edition I have accordingly inserted in the Notes comparatively few grammatical references. But a special effort has been made, both through a great number of comparisons in the Notes and by the Latin synonyms at the foot of the text pages, to make the learner familiar with Caesar's diction.

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The Vocabulary, too, if rightly used, will afford the means of comparing different meanings of the same word. To illustrate by the first word that comes to hand. A boy commonly soon learns that facio means make. the last day of his school course it is the only meaning that comes readily to his mind. You may, perhaps, get out of him that it means do; to go beyond that would be hopeless. He has probably never compared the meanings of the word in two different passages. 1 See Introduction to Moulton's Preparatory Latin Composi tion, pp. xii, xiii.

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