or once a quarter,, should be attended to daily. It should be put on the same footing as reading and spelling. It should begin long before the study of Grammar, and should continue year after year as a part of the daily routine in school, until the study is finally merged in that of Rhetoric. A teacher who will persistently give his class a course of exercises of this kind, graduating the exercises to the growing capacity of the scholars, will find no more difficulty in teaching Composition than a parent finds in teaching his children to walk. Scholars by such a course of exercises acquire insensibly and almost without conscious effort the ability to express their ideas with clearness, force, and elegance, and this ability, as before remarked, gives increased value to every other acquisition. The present work is a book of exercises, rather than a textbook. These exercises, however, are throughout based upon a scheme of thought, a text, so to speak, which was in the author's mind, and by which the scholar is led on systematically, and in due logical order, from the simplest and most elementary forms of expression to those which are complex and ornamental. The exercises thus lead by natural and easy steps to the study of Grammar and Rhetoric, and are believed to be the best possible introduction to those important branches. The scholar who has been trained to write with grammatical and rhetorical correctness will find no difficulty in studying the theory of Grammar and Rhetoric; for here, as everywhere in the educational process, PRACTICE BEFORE THEORY is the dictate equally of common sense and of sound philosophy. STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, 1870.} Trenton, N. J., Dec., 1870. J. S. H. |