THE

LONDON MAGAZINE.

MAY 1, 1827.

THE HAMILTONIAN SYSTEM.

NOTHING is more difficult in this transitory state than to choose the proper medium between modesty and quackery. In the management of useful ideas, it is equally fatal to pretend too little and to pretend too much; to let an invention die for want of breath, or to burst it by excessive puffing. It is not in the way of modesty that the inventor, as he calls himself, of the Hamiltonian "System," as he calls it, is likely to fail.

At the outset, it must be confessed, that the weakness of human nature affords a great encouragement to extravagant pretensions. A man who promises to creep into a pint bottle, will attract a greater crowd than he who promises to creep into a quart; but when, after a trial, the multitude have been satisfied that they cannot be deceived by the greatest pretender, he will have a smaller chance of obtaining attention when he shows them that he can really thrust his finger into the neck of the bottle.

It is the business of those sanguine and inventive geniuses who are somewhat unjustly, though compendiously, classed under the general name of quacks, to catch at all events public attention. For this purpose, they not only give the greatest air of improbability to the pretended results, but the greatest possible novelty to their means; they pretend to attain by expedients altogether new, an end altogether impossible; this would be the perfection of quackery; and towards this unattainable point of perfection quacks always strive.

As people are too apt in the first instance to attribute undue importance to such pretenders; so they are also too ready when they discover gross instances of exaggeration and absurdity in the pretensions, to set them aside as altogether worthless.

The acquisition of a knowledge of languages is so useful, but so tedious a process, that it is worth while to examine whether there is really any thing in " the Hamiltonian system" which is calculated to shorten it. Our opinion of it may be shortly expressed in the old French sentence:-There is much in it novel and valuable; but that which is novel is not valuable, and that which is valuable is not novel. The subject is, however, too important to be thus summarily dismissed. MAY, 1827.

B

"The Hamiltonian System" which is applied in exactly the same fashion to all languages, to the simple and the complex, to the uninflected and the deeply inflected, is this. Some easy book in the language to be acquired is chosen, in which the teacher reads aloud each word with a literal translation, after the mode which is known in grammar schools, as construing; but without any regard to elegance in the English version. Each word in the original is rendered by him uniformly by the same English word. The learner repeats after him sentence by sentence. In this way, without paying attention to the grammar, or looking into a grammar or dictionary, the mind is furnished with a stock of words. After the pupil has made some progress in this kind of knowledge," A grammar," says Mr. Hamilton,"containing the declensions and conjugations, and printed specially for my classes, is then put into the pupil's hands, (not to be got by heart, nothing is ever got by rote in this system,) but that he may comprehend more readily his teacher on grammar generally, but especially on the verbs." The teacher then explains the grammatical rules, and illustrates them by examples; and finally, the pupils translate from English into the language to be acquired. According to this plan, it is pretended that a pupil will in ten lessons of an hour each, acquire ten thousand words; and that he will acquire a knowledge of any language with very little labour, and in a very short time, compared with that employed in the ordinary methods of teaching.

What is and what is not new in this system? We shall refer, in answering this question, not to barren speculations or forgotten bookswhich it would be unfair to plead in bar of the pretensions of a practical teacher, but to the general practice of other instructors and to ordinary school-books.

In the first place, the practice of furnishing learners with a stock of words at the very commencement of their study of the modern languages, especially French and Italian, by the practice of literally translating after the masters, or by the help of interlineal translations, is not new even in England. It has been the common practice of French teachers in this country, at least from the commencement of the present century, and was at a much earlier period general on the Continent. But the Hamiltonian System is peculiar in this, that while the process of fixing these words on the mind is going forward, attention to the grammar is altogether excluded. The teachers of the simple languages, according to the received system first taught (by rote, which Mr. Hamilton so much dreads) the articles, the plurals of the nouns, then the verbs, step by step, while they acquire that stock of words which serves to give interest to the study of a language. Mr. Hamilton endeavours to give them the stock of words first.

It is peculiar also to Mr. Hamilton, that he applies this plan rigidly to deeply inflected languages.

Now in these his peculiarities, a little reason and a little experiment would show Mr. Hamilton to be wrong.

There is one grand error in his system, that he considers the knowledge of grammar as a matter quite distinct from the knowledge of the signification of words. But a grammar of any language is a system of rules concerning the signification of words, and intended to facilitate the knowledge of them; and it is only a good grammar