From the acquisition of letters, the child passed to the study of _syllables_, and we find _syllabizing_ used generally by the Greeks for elementary instruction in reading. But while the Greek child was not afflicted, like English children, with the absurd conundrums of a perfectly irrational spelling; while he had a fair guarantee that the individual letters reproduced the sound of the whole word, there were other difficulties in his way. He had not, indeed, to burden his memory with the sounds to be attached to symbols like _though_ and _tough_, _plague_ and _ague_, but he must, on the other hand, study with peculiar care the separation of words--interpunction--and also punctuation and accent. Accent, indeed, and the subtle use of the numerous particles, were given, and could only be given, by familiarity with Greek as a mother tongue. As Aristotle remarks, one could always know a foreigner, however well he spoke Greek, by the use of the particles. I heard Ernest Renan make the very same remark about foreigners’ French a few years ago. But in classical days, accents were not even written, and words were not separated, neither were clauses distinguished by stops. Hence the difficulties of reading were considerably increased, as any one may prove for himself by taking up a mediæval Greek MS. There, indeed, the accents are a guide, but even with them the separation of words is a difficulty, and has led to endless mistakes in our printed texts. We know, too, that the Greeks were particular about melodious intonation and rhythmical balance of clauses even in prose: all this gave the _grammatist_ ample scope for patience. There is even a special teacher--φωνασκός--mentioned in early days as regulating and training the singing voice of children. Indeed, we are surprised at the general assumption among their educators that every one had both natural voice and ear.[30]