To return to more prosaic methods. Plato gives an interesting sketch[242] of a reading class. “When boys have just learnt their letters, they recognise any of them readily enough in the shortest and easiest syllables, and are able to give a correct answer about them. But in the longer and more difficult syllables they are not certain, but form a wrong opinion and answer wrongly. Then the best way is to take them back to the syllables in which they recognise the same letters and then compare them with those in which they made mistakes, and, putting them side by side, show that in both combinations the same letters have the same meaning.” Take an English example. The master writes SCRAPE on the blackboard and asks the boys to tell him what letters it contains. The class fail to recognise the letters: the word is too long and difficult. The master then writes beside it consecutively APE, RAPE, CAPE, in all of which the boys recognise the letters correctly. Then CRAPE and SCRAP. From these he passes on to SCRAPE, which they now recognise by analogy from the words which they know already. “Finally, they learn always to give the same name to the same letter whenever it comes.”[243] The methods by which boys learn to spell are the same in all ages. “When boys come together to learn their letters, they are asked what letters there are in some word or other.”[244] A certain amount of mental arithmetic seems to have been included in this stage of spelling: the pupils were asked _how many_ letters there were in a word, as well as the order in which they were arranged.[245] But this will be discussed later. While the boys were still unable to read, and often afterwards owing to the comparative scarcity of books, the master dictated to them the poetry which he intended them to learn by heart, and they repeated it after him. The Kulix of Douris gives an interesting picture of either a reading or a repetition lesson.[246] On a high-backed chair sits an elderly master, holding a roll in his hand. On it is inscribed what is clearly meant to be an hexameter line from some epic poet, but Douris was not very well educated, and so the line is misspelt and will not scan. In front of the master stands a boy, behind whom sits an elderly man who is probably, as in the writing scene, a paidagogos. The master may be dictating the poem while the boy learns it by heart after him, or he may be hearing him say it. But very possibly the scene represents a reading-lesson. The attitudes of boy and master are not very convenient, if both are reading out of the same book; but this was unavoidable, for, owing to the canons of vase-painting, the figures could only be full-faced or in profile, and the front of the manuscript had to be turned in such a way as to be legible.