four feet long, painted in oil by H. M. Windsor, one of the pupil-teachers; it consisted of a large royal plume in the centre, and, in Elizabethan characters, 'Long may they live,' and 'Happy may they be,' on either side. The flag poles were provided by the boys at their own expense, and painted blue, trimmed and tipped with metallic spear-heads (cast by the pupils at the school), and fastened on with ferules by their own hands. Every boy and girl in the three schools wore a neat white favour provided by their respective parents, who manisfested as much interest in the celebration as the boys themselves. The whole of the internal arrangements were designed and executed by Mrs. Drage, assisted by the pupil-teachers and elder boys, under the general superintendence of Mr. Drage, the respected master.-The girls' school-room was decorated in a similar manner, under the superintendence of Miss Pridham, the principal mistress. Across the room was suspended the motto, 'Lord, bless the royal pair,' wrought in leaves by Miss Lewis, the assistant mistress, and pupil-teachers. On the teachers' desk was a beautiful royal plume, made and presented by Mrs. Crowley, of Thornton Heath, one of the lady managers of the school.-The infants' school-room was also tastefully decorated with stars and festoons of evergreens, interspersed with roses. Over the gallery was the appropriate motto, Little children offer best wishes for the royal pair.' The whole was executed by Mrs. Frederick Frith, of Addiscombe Road, assisted by Miss Mitcham, the governess, and Miss Fillingham, pupil-teacher. "The beauty and taste displayed in the decoration of these schools was so great that upwards of a thousand visitors were attracted to the school between the 9th and the 11th of March, to view the spectacle. It is worthy of notice that besides the industry displayed in the devices, flags, banners, &c., the whole cost of the display, amounting to about £36, was defrayed by the children themselves. Such occasional efforts and demonstrations serve other purposes than the obvious and temporary one. They call forth the taste, invention, and good feeling of the children, and leave an enduring impression of a very wholesome kind on their whole future life." WARS OF THE ROSES. THE Wars of the Roses were so called because the heraldic badges of the rival Houses of Lancaster and York were, respectively, a red and a white rose. On the dethronement of Richard II., Edmund, Earl of March, great-grandson of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III., was entitled to the crown, but his pretensions were passed over in silence, and Henry IV., son of John of Gaunt, fourth son of the same monarch, was acknowledged king. He, as well as Henry V. swayed the sceptre without opposition; and the Lancastrian dynasty was so well established that the accession of Henry VI., an infant a few months old, was fully acquiesced in; and though this prince, on reaching manhood, proved to be very feeble in character, it was not till his reign had lasted for nearly thirty years that his right was called in question. About this time, Richard, Duke of York, began secretly to feel his way to the throne. But his attempts to secure political ascendancy were resisted by Queen Margaret, and by Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, one of Henry's kinsmen. The birth of a son to the king, in 1453, frustrated the designs of Richard; but as Henry, not long after, fell into a state of mental as well as physical incapacity, the Duke was admitted into the cabinet; and his rival, Somerset, was committed to prison. Early in 1455, Henry recovered both his health and the use of his reason, put an end to the protectorate conferred on the Duke of York by parliament, and released his opponent. Richard, in the ensuing summer, took up arms professedly against Somerset, and gained a victory at St. Alban's, where the latter was slain. The unfortunate king fell into the hands of the Yorkists; and the claims of Richard were soon brought openly before the public; but in 1456 the Lancastrian party regained their power, and maintained it till the war broke out anew in 1459. Constitutional writers are agreed that, though Richard's hereditary right was preferable to that of Henry, the latter was, unquestionably, lawful monarch of England, seeing that he held the crown by virtue of repeated parliamentary enactments, confirmed by the general consent of the nation, and by the oaths of allegiance taken by the members of the rival family. victorious. Henry VI. taken and Somerset slain; the total loss amounted to about sixscore. Yorkists victorious. Aud- Duke of Buckingham. Earl of Warwick; Yorkists victorious Edward, Earl of Buckingham, with 300 knights and gentlemen, slain. Henry VI. fell into the hands of the victors. Lancastrians victorious. York slain, and Salisbury beheaded; more than 2,000 of their followers perished. Yorkists victorious. Somerset taken and beheaded. Sir John Conyers Earl of Pembroke This battle resulted from the rivalry of the Nevilles and the Woodvilles. The troops supporting the forme victorious. The queen's father and brother, as well as Pembroke, taken and beheaded. Yorkists victorious. Yorkists victorious. Warwick slain. The num ber who fell doubtful, Yorkists victorious. So merset and Prince Edward, son of Henry VI., put to death About 3,000 Lancastrians fell. Lancastrians victorious. Richard III. and about 3,000 of his followers slain in the battle. Richmond declared king. * From Curtis's Chronological and Genealogical Tables illustrative of English History, page 4. THE RIGHT USE OF WORDS. In the midst of all the grammatical and logical exercises which are given in schools, there is one kind of instruction which is specially apt to be disregarded The teacher of grammar helps his pupils to classify words, and to discuss their changes and inflections; by dictation, he shows how words are to be written ; afterwards, when his pupils go on to logical analysis, to syntax, or to rhetoric, he shows them how to fit the words into sentences. But throughout the whole course it is seldom attempted to give words to the pupil, and to increase his command over the resources of language itself. Now the linguistic discipline required by every scholar-whether boy or manconsists of two distinct parts. It should, first, furnish an ample vocabulary of terms and phrases, and next, should show how those words should be used. There can be no really comprehensive course of instruction in the art and science of human speech, which does not make provision for both of these objects. Yet the former of them is strangely overlooked. We teach the rules for analysing and arranging the elements of language, but we do not seek to furnish the copia verborum-the command of the material out of which sentences are made. There is a passage in Professor Max Müller's "Lectures on the Science of Language," which is very significant, and which may properly be quoted here :— "We are told, on good authority, by a country clergyman, that some of the labourers in his parish had not 300 words in their vocabulary. The vocabulary of the ancient sages of Egypt, at least so far as it is known to us from the hieroglyphic inscriptions, amounts to 685 words.* The libretto of an Italian opera seldom displays a greater variety of words.† A well-educated person in England, who has been at a public school and at the university, who reads his Bible, his Shakspeare, the 'Times," and all the books of Mudie's library, seldom uses more than about 3,000. or 4,000 words in actual conversation. Accurate thinkers and close reasoners, who avoid vague and general expressions, and wait till they find the word that exactly fits their meaning, employ a larger stock; and eloquent speakers may rise to a command of 10,000. Shakspeare, who displayed a greater variety of expression than probably any writer in any language, produced all his plays with about 15,000 words. Milton's works are built up with 8,000; and the Old Testament says all that it has to say with 5,642 words." To every one who reads this passage thoughtfully, and who pursues the train of reflection which it suggests, it will soon be evident that the range of ideas at a man's command is largely determined by the number of words of which he knows the meaning, and which he knows how to use. The experience of every student will tell him that each new term which he has added to his vocabulary has added to his materials for thinking, and has enriched his mind. Each accession to his know. ledge has been, as it were, registered by the learning of a new term; and every new distinction between things hitherto confounded together-every graceful image and every abstract truth which the mind has recognized-has left its mark in the shape either of new words, or more minute verbal distinctions. The peasant referred to in the extract which we have just made, must have led a hopelessly dull and lethargic life. His 300 words just served to describe his mere animal and social needs. To have taught him 300 more, would have been to make him conscious of other needs, and to introduce him to a nobler and a better life. It is the poverty of our language that often keeps our thoughts low and mean. Words are not only the representatives of thought, but the very instruments with which we think; and it "This is the number of words in the vocabulary given by Bunsen, in the first volume of his Egypt,' pp. 453-491. Several of these words, however, though identical in sound, must be separated etymologically, and later researches have still further increased the number." "Marsh's 'Lectures,' p. 182. His observations are extremely valuable, but I doubt whether his estimate of the cornucopia of English is correct. He puts it at 100,000 words. Now, Richardson and Webster give altogether 43,566 words; so that even if they contained only, as Mr. Marsh thinks, two-thirds or three-fourths of all words in actual use, this would only give about 50,000 English words." ought, therefore, to be a prime aim in all intellectual education to place in the pupil's hands, and at his disposal, a good store of words. Now, how far is this object attained or even recognised as a worthy one in our systems of elementary instruction? It is believed that an honest answer to this question is not very satisfactory. It is true that in many schools the old-fashioned custom of learning by heart columns of words from a dictionary or a spelling-book is still observed; and at least it must be allowed that this custom presupposes the necessity of a good stock of words as part of the equipment of a scholar. But even to this plan there were always grave objections. In the first place, the alphabetical arrange. ment by which words of a given number of syllables are grouped is a very unsuitable one for the purpose. The plan brings together before the learners important and unimportant, familiar and unfamiliar words-words of whose meaning it is disgraceful to be ignorant, and words which even the most accomplished scholars would think it pedantic to use in their ordinary speech; and it attaches equal importance to them all. It gives meanings to the words, and requires them to be learned by heart; but since these words are altogether isolated from each other, and there are no links of association by which they can be united in the memory to anything else that the pupil understands, they are generally forgotten as soon as learned. But even if the crude, brief “meanings " which are thus learned could be remembered, they would serve little purpose. For the plan makes no provision for showing the pupil how to use the words which he thus commits to memory; and therefore the practical purpose of increasing the vocabulary available for the learner's own use is not served after all. There is one condition on which even the learning of meanings of words from a spelling-book may be made to do good service. It is, that the pupil should be required to put every word he has thus learned into a sentence. When, as very often happens, a word is susceptible of several different interpretations, it is a good exercise to desire the pupil to make several sentences, each containing the same word, though giving to that word a different meaning. Half-a-dozen new words learned in this way, and made to connect themselves with the daily life and thoughts of a child, and to become incorporated into the stock of terms which he actually uses, will be a more valuable possession to him than six score of words, whose meanings he only learns by heart. In many schools the use of spelling-books and of columns of separate words in any form is discarded altogether; and the teacher thinks it better to confine himself to the explanation of such words as occur in the reading lessons, and in the ordinary teaching of the school. There is something to be said for such a plan, and it certainly seems more rational to give definitions of those terms with which the child has formed some interesting and intelligible associations, than to explain words with which he has formed no associations at all. But even by this plan the difficulty to which we refer is not met. It is one thing to explain words, to use them intelligibly, and even to make a pupil give their meanings; it is quite another to teach that pupil to use them for himself. A child may know enough of the language of books to read them with interest and profit; but if he stops here, and does not know enough of that language to make it his own, and to employ it freely when he wishes to express his own ideas, he is very imperfectly taught after all. To the little child of a primary school, the language of books and of educated men is substantially a foreign language; and it is the object of school lessons to make him not only understand this language, but speak it. If a man, for example, has just learnt enough of German to read an ordinary German book, and by translating it mentally into his own mother tongue to make out its meaning, he is not a finished German scholar. His work is not yet half done. The more difficult task of translating his own speech into German has to be accomplished. He must learn not only to speak German freely, but to think in that language, and to dispense altogether with the process of translation. Ideas should, in fact, connect themselves Zmmediately with the German words, not mediately by transition through English words. Now just as a good teacher of German or French takes special pains about re-translation into that language, and thinks all his work unsatisfactory which falls short of this result, so the elementary teacher should deal with his pupils. He must exercise them not only in translating book-language into their own tongue, but also in re-translating-putting their own thoughts into the language of books. And by book-language we do not of course mean affected or pedantic expressions; but the simple, accurate, and refined speech which every reader and thinker learns in time to use. The sooner a child acquires the mastery of this kind of English, the more clearly he will think and the more likely he will be to become in time a cultivated man. To what purpose is it that children in a good school read every day new extracts from our best literature, or learn from their master new terms, synonymes, etymologies, and the like, if all the while they never appropriate a higher language to themselves, but go on from day to day, considering the talk of daily life to be one thing, and the phraseology of schoolmasters and of the writers of books to be another. There is no culture going on all this while, for the grammatical teaching which does not tell on a learner's daily conversation and habits of thought is worth little or nothing. It is hoped that some teachers, to whom this view of the subject may not be very familiar, will take the trouble to reflect a little on the matter, and to criticise their own methods of teaching accordingly. Such teachers may perhaps find it an advantage to bear in mind the following simple rules :— 1. After explaining the meaning of a word, always require the pupil to use the word, by putting it into an original sentence, orally or in writing. II. Take special pains with those exercises in grammar and composition wherein the pupil is required to supply an ellipsis, or to construct sentences illustrative of particular rules. The best books do not contain enough of these exercises in connexion with any one truth or rule, though they give a few good types of what is required. The teacher should therefore multiply them. III. Introduce simple lessons on paraphrase very early in a child's course, and employ them very frequently. IV. In all grammatical and other exercises in which the pupil is asked to make sentences, or give instances, let the choice be made from as wide a range of subjects as possible. Thus, if it be required to name six adjectives, and to place them in sentences, do not be content with the usual manufactured phrases about the "blue sky," and the " 'good boy," and the "tall tree," but encourage the choice of less familiar examples, borrowed from the history lesson, from some story or piece of poetry lately read, or from the facts of daily life. V. In like manner, let the sentences and illustrations in each exercise be well varied. It is a good rule to keep in view, that in all essential points, the sentences under a given rule should be as like one another, and in all non-essential points as unlike one another, as possible. VI. With elder children, give frequent practice with synonymes and pseudoSynonymes. Let them have a lesson, for example, on the finer distinctions between the words of a group nearly related in meaning, such as "fear, fright, terror, alarm, dread, apprehension;"* and then require the whole to be brought as a written exercise in the form of sentences. These sentences need not be all cut down to the same pattern, but may properly be thrown occasionally into a brief narrative, and seen in their due connexion with a suitable context. VII. The practice of writing letters periodically to the teacher, on some subject of general interest, may be tried with advantage. It is by no means necessary that home exercises should always take the form of notes of a lesson, or, indeed, that they should have any immediate relation to the things talked about in school. It * See Whately's English Synonymes, p. 102. |