1$0 THE IMPROTElktiNT 01 THE MIND. 1: Accustom yourself to read those authors who think and write with great clearness and evidence, such as convey their ideas into your understanding, as fast as your eye or tongue can run over their sentences ; this will imprint upon the mind an habit of imitation, we shall learn the style with which we are verycon- versant, and practise it with ease and success. 2. Get á distinct and comprehensive knowledge of the sub- ject which you treat of; survey it on all sides, and make your- self perfect master of it ; then you will have all the sentiments that relate to it in your view and under your command, and your tongue will very easily clothe those ideas with words which your mind has first made so familiar and easy to itself. Scribendi recte sapere est et principiara et fans, Verbeque provisem rent Eton invita sequentur. Hor, de Arte Poet. Good teaching from good knowledge springs, Words will make haste to follow things. 3. Be well skilled in the languagewhichyou speak ; acquaint yourself with all the idioms and special phrases of it, which are necessary to convey the needful ideas on the subject of which you treat, in the most various and most easy manner to the un- derstanding of the hearer ; the variation of a phrase in several forms is of admirable use to instruct, it is like turning all sides of the subject to view ; and if the learner happens not to take in the ideas in one form of speech, probably another may be suc- cessful for that end. Upon this account I havealways thought it an useful man- ner of instruction, which is used in some Latin schools, width they call variation. Take some plain sentence in the English tongue, and then turn it into many forms in Latin ; as for in- stance, a wolf let into the sheep -fold, will devour the sheep. If you let a wolf into the fold, the sheep will be devoured ; the wolf will devour the sheep, if the sheep-fold be left open ; if the fold be not left shut carefully, the wolf will devour the sheep ; the sheep will be devoured by the wolf if it find the way into the fold open ; there is no defence of the sheep from the wolf, unless it be kept out of the fold ; a slaughter will be made among the 'Sheep, if the wolf can get into the fold. Thus by turning the active voice of verbs into the passive, and the nominative case of nouns into the accusative, and altering the connexion of short sentences by different adverbs or conjunctions, and by ablative cases with a preposition brought instead of the nominative, or by participles sometimes put instead of the verbs, the negation of and the contrary, instead of the assertion of the thing first pro- posed, a great variety ot'forms of speechwill be created, which shall express the same sense.
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