In teaching the alphabet to children, the principle of individuation is indispensable; and its neglect has been productive of serious and permanent mischief. A child of good capacity, by a proper attention to this principle, will, with pleasure and ease, learn the names and forms of the letters, with the labour of only a few hours;[15] while, by neglecting the principle, the same child would, after years of irritation and weariness, be still found ignorant of its alphabet. The overlooking of the principle at this period has done an immense deal of injury to the cause of education. It has, at the very starting post in the race of improvement, quenched and destroyed all the real, as well as the imaginary delights of learning and knowledge. It has given the tyro such an erroneous but overwhelming impression of the difficulties and miseries which he must endure in his future advance, that the disgust then created has often so interwoven itself with his every feeling, that education has during life appeared to him the natural and necessary enemy to every kind of enjoyment. It used to be common, and the practice may still we believe be found lingering among some of the lovers of antiquity, to make a child commence at the letter A, and proceed along the alphabet without stopping till he arrived at Z; and this lesson not unfrequently included both the alphabets of capitals and small letters. Now the cruelty of such an exercise with a child will at once be apparent, if we shall only change its form. If a teacher were to read over to an infant twice a-day a whole page or paragraph _without stopping_ of Caesar or Cicero in Latin, and demand that on hearing it he shall learn it, we could at once judge of the difficulty, and the feelings of a volatile mind chained to the constant and daily repetition of such a task; and if this exercise were termed its "education," we can easily conceive the amount of affection that the child would learn to cherish towards it. Now this is really no exaggerated illustration of the matter in hand, for in both cases the principle of individuation, so carefully guarded and enforced by Nature, is equally outraged; and it is only where, by some means or other, a remedy for the evil accidentally occurs, that the result in the case of the alphabet, is not exactly the same as it would have been in the case of the classics above supposed. The writer once saw in a Sunday school, where the children were taught twice each Sabbath, a class in which some of the children had attended for upwards of two years, and were still in their alphabet; and if the same mode had been pursued, there is little doubt that they would have been in it yet.