Thus the author of the Spectator says----"We must bear with this false modesty in our young nobility and gentry, till they cease at Oxford and Cambridge to grow dumb in the study of eloquence." And one of the bishop of Cloyne's queries is, "Whether half the learning and study of these kingdoms is not useless, for want of a proper delivery and pronunciation being taught in our schools and colleges?" Mr. Locke bears hard upon the masters, for not instructing their pupils in English, as well as Latin and Greek, in the following passage. "To write and speak correctly, gives a grace, and gains a favourable attention to what one has to say: and since it is English that an English gentleman will have constant use of, that is the language he should chiefly cultivate, and wherein most care should be taken to polish and perfect his style. This I find universally neglected, nor no care taken any-where to improve young men in their own language, that they may thoroughly understand and be masters of it. If any one among us have a facility or purity more than ordinary in his mother tongue, it is owing to chance, or his genius, or any thing, rather than to his education, or any care of his teacher. To mind what English his pupil speaks or writes, is below the dignity of one bred up amongst Greek and Latin, though he have but little of them himself. These are the learned languages, fit only for learned men to meddle with, and teach; English is the language of the illiterate vulgar: though yet we see the polity of some of our neighbours hath not thought it beneath the public care to promote and reward the improvement of their own language. Polishing and enriching their tongue, is no small business amongst them; it hath colleges and stipends appointed it; and there is raised amongst them a great ambition and emulation of writing correctly: and we see what they are come to by it, and how far they have spread one of the worst languages possibly in this part of the world, if we look upon it as it was in some few reigns backwards, whatever it be now. The great men among the Romans were daily exercising themselves in their own tongue; and we find yet upon record the names of orators, who taught some of their emperors Latin, though it were their mother tongue. 'Tis plain the Greeks were yet more nice in theirs: all other speech was barbarous to them but their own; and no foreign language appears to have been studied or valued amongst that learned and acute people; though it be past doubt that they borrowed their learning and philosophy from abroad." To this Mr. Locke adds, "I am not here speaking against Greek and Latin; I think they ought to be studied, and the Latin at least understood well by every gentleman. But whatever foreign languages a young man meddles with, (and the more he knows, the better) that which he should critically study, and labour to get a facility, clearness, and elegancy to express himself in, should be his own; and to this purpose