perseverance, may reach accuracy in drawing; this, at least, has been proved by some examples--not by many, certainly, but by some. In languages we may have a limited purpose also. That charming and most intelligent traveller, Louis Énault, tells us that he regularly gave a week to the study of each new language that he needed, and found that week sufficient. The assertion is not so presumptuous as it appears. For the practical necessities of travelling M. Énault found that he required about four hundred words, and that, having a good memory, he was able to learn about seventy words a day. The secret of his success was the invaluable art of selection, and the strict limitation of effort in accordance with a preconceived design. A traveller not so well skilled in selection might have learned a thousand words with less advantage to his travels, and a traveller less decided in purpose might have wasted several months on the frontier of every new country in hopeless efforts to master the intricacies of grammatical form. It is evident that in the strictest sense M. Énault's knowledge of Norwegian cannot have been sound, since he did not master the grammar, but it was sound in its own strictly limited way, since he got possession of the four hundred words which were to serve him as current coin. On the same principle it is a good plan for students of Latin and Greek who have not time to reach true scholarship (half a lifetime is necessary for that), to propose to themselves simply the reading of the original authors with the help of a literal translation. In this way they may attain a closer acquaintance with ancient literature than would be possible by translation alone, whilst on the other hand their reading will be much more extensive on account of its greater rapidity. It is, for most of us, a waste of time to read Latin and Greek without a translation, on account of the comparative slowness of the process; but it is always an advantage to know what was really said in the original, and to test the exactness of the translator by continual reference to the _ipsissima verba_ of the author. When the knowledge of the ancient language is not sufficient even for this, it may still be of use for occasional comparison, even though the passage has to be fought through _à coupes de dictionnaire_. What most of us need in reference to the ancient languages is a frank resignation to a restriction of some kind. It is simply impossible for men occupied as most of us are in other pursuits to reach perfect scholarship in those languages, and if we reached it we should not have time to maintain it.