tongues, and the shams are appreciated, and the truth perceived by those who have studied other languages.

Then too, the Latin may be studied much more easily and profitably than by the old mode of learning all the forms, rules, exceptions and anomalies, in a series of lessons to be committed by rote from the text-book. We would, indeed, have the whole of the Latin grammar acquired; but the syntax, the irregularities and the rare forms are more effectively learned in reading Latin than in studying the grammar; for in the former mode they are learned in connection with their occurrence, are therefore understood, are emphasized by example, and adhere to the memory. Let the pupil learn the regular paradigms of nouns, adjectives, and verbs, and then let him commence reading easy Latin, paying close attention to the construction of every word and the syntax of every sentence. Thus let the principles and the details of the grammar force themselves upon his attention and into his memory, while he is acquiring the vocabulary of the language. We have repeatedly tried and fully tested this method in teaching Hebrew, which from its unlikeness to any other language with which the learner has been acquainted presents peculiar difficulties. After teaching the pupil the sounds of the letters and the force of the vowelpoints, and making him learn the paradigm of the regular verb, we have set him to reading the first chapter of Deuteronomy, analyzing every word as he went along, directing his attention to the principles of the grammar in their bearing on each word, and to every anomaly of structure as it came to view, so that all that could be learned concerning or taught by each single sentence or clause was fully understood before he was suffered to pass on to the next. By the time that one chapter has been read, the pupil has obtained a much better knowledge of the grammar than if he had recited the whole word-for-word. We are confident that this method applied to the Latin will so simplify and expedite the study, as to bring a very serviceable course of Latin reading within the ordinary term of schoolattendance, without displacing anything that ought to be retained. Moreover, the young person, initiated into this noble tongue without the arid study of mere words that have to be relearned over and over again before they will stay learned, will love it,

will take a lively interest in its structure, and will acquire for his own diction or written style something of its marvellous terseness, directness, and energy; while its multiform relations to his native tongue will constantly excite and reward his curiosity, and will open to him in almost every English sentence depths of meaning which the merely English reader does not begin to sound.

Let no one scorn the Latin as an element in general culture, because it is a dead tongue. Because dead, it is all the more living,—not, like a modern language, dying daily, in perpetual decay and renovation, but endowed with an unchanging vitality, -living in a power of expression which no other language has approached,-living in poets, orators, and historians that will never be obsolete till the civilization of which they have been essential factors shall become effete,-living in the numberless fresh scions that spring from it as fast as there are new ideas to be embodied, new departments of science to receive their nomenclature, new processes and products of art to be put into speech and writing.

One word more. We would speak of the study of language and of individual words as emphatically a religious study. The old controversy as to the formal origin of language, whether human or divine, is as worthless as it is indeterminable; for if human, it is none the less divine,—what God effects through the powers with which he has endowed man is no less his work than the heavens and the earth are. But we are constantly impressed by the vestiges of the Divine Providence in the structure of language. The Eternal Spirit, always working with and in man, has sowed language full of His own perfect wisdom, in words fraught with "doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness." The devout naturalist, astronomer, physiologist, feels that he is constantly tracing out the thoughts of God in the universe. This is equally the work of the philologist, only on the higher plane of the spiritual creation.

ARTICLE VIII-A REMINISCENCE OF THE STACKPOLE HOUSE.

ONE who has watched for half a century, with any degree of care, what has gone on about him, will easily be persuaded, that no tale compacted of the imagination can equal the simple realities of life. Not only, according to the old proverb, is "truth stranger than fiction," but it is vastly more entertaining. It is possessed of far deeper sources of interest. An ideal landscape may be in the very highest style of the painter's art-may have all the elements of interest which it is possible for a picture to have: but it can never equal the glories of the real landscape when the light of the summer sun is falling softly upon it, and all the subtle forces of nature are at play, in and around it. And so, day by day and year by year, little histories are unfolded, of individual and family life, which the novelist in the highest flights of his fancy would never exactly have conceived. Sometimes these experiences are gay and joyous, and sometimes they are intensely sad. But they are such as are woven perpetually, and, rolled off from the busy loom of life.

We propose in these pages to give a fragment of veritable human history-not one of those rambling and shadowy stories, "founded on fact," but fact and reality itself—a chapter from the living joys and sorrows of a generation now almost entirely passed off the stage. And yet we will withhold the names of the actors,-not that there would be any particular harm in freely using them.

All who have been familiarly acquainted with Boston during the years of the present century, will remember well the "Old Stackpole House," as it has long been called, standing on Devonshire street, midway between Milk and Water streets. This antique structure is now no more. The costly and splendid Post Office building has risen over the spot where it stood. Five years ago, when the work of destruction was to begin in that part of the city, preparatory to the widening of Devon

shire street, one of the daily journals of Boston, under the head of "The Stackpole House," had the following paragraph: "This long celebrated hostelry is doomed. For 139 years its strong brick walls and tiled roofs have defied the winter storms and the summer heats; but to-morrow the hand of business progress will fall heavily upon its venerable form and soon prostrate it in the dust,-thus removing another of the ties that connect the present with the past. Every Boston boy who has reached his threescore years and ten will recall it in connection with his reminiscences of his early youth, and tell of father and grandfather, dead, long and long ago, who remembered the Stackpole House when it was in its glory."

This prediction was not literally fulfilled until some time afterward for when the first work of demolition was over, the venerable structure still stood, in a ghostly fashiondeserted and open to inspection-revealing to every passer-by its whole internal economy. Nevertheless it was "doomed," and was only waiting for the contractors on the Post Office building to begin their work, when this, and all the other ruins encumbering the ground, would be speedily removed. The magnificent edifice now standing on this spot, with its massive and pillared granite walls, covers of course far more ground than was occupied by this ancient family mansion.

When the Stackpole House was built upon this spot, more than 140 years ago (in 1729), Boston, as compared with its present extent, was only a large village. Here was open territory, with arrangements for a choice, aristocratic, halfcountry residence. It stood, as we have said, midway between Milk and Water streets, but looking toward Milk street, and with an ample dooryard in front. Anciently, Devonshire street did not exist. A narrow lane, starting out at nearly right angles from Milk street, sometimes called Joliffe's lane, and sometimes by the more plebeian designation of Pudding lane, ran along upon that side of the building, occupying a part of what has since been Devonshire street.

But we must not linger upon these details. For sixty years after this house was built, it was not known by its modern name. Different families, in the last century and in the present, have occupied it for a longer or shorter time

the Waldos, the Tyngs, the Apthorps, the Winslows, the Welches. In the latter part of the last century, Mr. William Stackpole, a wine merchant, purchased the property, and though he occupied it with his family only a short time, as compared with the whole term of its existence, yet somehow he fixed his name upon it, and it has since been known by no other. Undoubtedly, in his day, there was a certain gayety about the old mansion-a fullness in the tides of life, that ebbed and flowed around it, that made a deep impression upon the "Young Boston" of that generation.

Fifty years ago, the waves of business began to roll up from the north end and invade the region where this old family residence stood. In all our great cities a process of this kind is perpetually going on. The tides of trade move steadily forward, carrying with them a great army of plain work-a-day people, and the rich, fashionable, aristocratic folks are certain to retire before this onward movement.

For many years after the Stackpole House ceased to be a genteel private residence, it was used as a fashionable restaurant, where the gay and lively Bostonians found good cooking, and where they used to assemble and unbend in festive cheer. Thirty or forty years ago this house was to the then citizens of Boston something like what the Parker House is today. But by degrees, the business of this part of the city became more rough, noisy, tumultuous, and fashion began to retreat from this place, even as a house of entertainment. The building descended still lower in the scale of being. It was put to meaner and meaner uses as the years rolled on, until, at length, its associations and its surroundings were of the coarse kind, rather than of the attractive. Its ancient glory had departed. The tide of festive joy that had so long broken around it had gone, never to return.

During the last year of its existence, while it stood, as we have described it, empty and deserted, revealing to those who passed by its ancient halls and stairways, trodden by the generations of the dead-its antique chambers and curious finish— its thick walls, built up in puritan honor, to endure-its quaint old rooms, where many had been born and many had diedin this broken and half-dilapidated state, it was a most com