The amount of grammar covered by Pro Patria[1] may seem to some teachers disproportionately small; and, no doubt, if it had been my object simply to teach grammar, I might have made the text smaller. But a long experience in teaching Latin to pupils of various ages and stages has made me sceptical as to the value of a skin-deep knowledge of grammar. It is one thing to learn declensions and conjugations out of a grammar or from grammar sentences, and quite another thing to know them as they appear in actual life. How many boys and girls leave school without having acquired any real mastery even of the simplest kind of Latin or the power of making any practical use of the grammatical facts which they have so laboriously learned! That is the sort of educational result on which the present outcry against Latin in schools is largely based. The great mistake seems to be that the elementary stages of learning are turned into a purely grammatical discipline and that the grammar is hurried over before the study of the language proper and the literature are commenced. Declensions and conjugations learned in this fashion find no real lodgment in the mind; or, at best, the outcome of the tedious process is that the pupil “holds the parts in his hand,” but misses “the spirit that binds them together.”[2] It is against this abstract method of teaching that Ora Maritima and Pro Patria are a protest. It has been my objective to write for the use of the beginner a ‘real book,’ which shall have a literary as well as a linguistic interest of its own, and from which the pupil shall gain something more than a bowing acquiantance with Nouns and Verbs. I have therefore, not shunned repetitions; and I have deliberately aimed at providing a certain
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