��me ; and I was once very anxious about the next day, when this exercise was to be performed, in which I had failed till I was discouraged. My mother encouraged me, and I proceeded better. When I told her of my good escape, ' We often,' said she, dear mother ! l come off best, when we are most afraid.' She told me, that, on.ce when she asked me about forming verbs, I said, ' I did not form them in an ugly shape.' ' You could not,' said she, ' speak plain ; and I was proud that I had a boy who was forming verbs.' These little memorials sooth my mind. Of the parts of Corderius ' or ^Esop, which we learned to repeat, I have not the least recollection, except of a passage in one of the Morals, where it is said of some man, that, when he hated another, he made him rich ; this I repeated emphatically in my mother's hearing, who could never conceive that riches could bring any evil. She remarked it, as I expected.
I had the curiosity, two or three years ago, to look over Garretson's Exercises, Willymot's Particles 2 , and Walker's Exercises ; and found very few sentences that I should have recollected if I had found them in any other books. That which is read without pleasure is not often recollected nor infixed by conversation, and therefore in a great measure drops from the memory 3 . Thus it happens that those who are taken early from school, commonly lose all that they had learned.
When we learned As in Prcesenti, we parsed Propria qua Maribus by Hool's Terminations ; and, when we learned Syntaxis, we parsed As in Prcesenti ; and afterwards QZKZ Genus, by the same book ; sometimes, as I remember, proceeding in order of the rules, and sometimes, particularly in As in Prczsenti^ taking words as they occurred in the Index.
1 The ensign in T0m Janes (Bk.v'u, mot, a schoolmaster, was foolish c. 12) exclaimed : ' And there's Cor- enough to re-translate these Essays
derius, another d d son of a whore into English in the beginning of this
that hath got me many a flogging.' [the eighteenth] century.' Prior's
2 ' It is not commonly known,' M alone > p. 424.
writes Malone, ' that the translation 3 ' A man,' said Johnson, * ought of Bacon's Essays into Latin, which to read just as inclination leads him ; was published in 1619, was done by for what he reads as a task will do the famous John Selden. One Willy- him little good.' Life, i. 428.
The
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