Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Highgate, to James Gillman, Jr., 1819 February 24 : autograph manuscript signed.

Relating to him the purpose of Education and giving him two rules to use in his exercises in Latin & Greek; saying "Now the purpose of Education, the Object of being sent to school, is no other than to build up your mind into a Temple for the good spirit to dwell in : and Goodness and Learning are to stand, like Moses and Aaron, on each side of the Altar;" giving him "...two Rules, and two only for the present, in order that you may not have more to learn than you can remember and practice. For without Practice there is no memory that can be relied on...Rule 1. Before you begin to construe a Greek or Latin sentence, read the whole aloud, distinctly. If you catch yourself stammering at any word, spell it, and then begin again. Having read it off 'trippingly over the tongue', then examine word by word what you already know the English of, and parse it to yourself however well you may remember it - and every word, you are not quite certain of, look out in your Lexicon or Dictionary, and then be sure to compare it with the correspondent Declension, or conjugation in your Grammar. - Having done all this, then begin with the first words and do not change the order in which they stand in the Greek or Latin, as long as it makes sense in our language. - I would wish you to try what you can do by your own cleverness for a little while : and then I will both write out and explain to you the exceptions, that is, the instances in which a position of words is quite plain in the Greek or Latin but would be nonsense in English. Such as Fartum comedit Jacobus uvis refertum - a Pudding eats James plum, while the Latin says plain as a pike staff that it is James who eats a Plum-pudding;" relating the 2nd rule from Ellis's Exercises on working out the "sense" of the words; saying "First, read the English so as to understand the sense - and it would not be amiss, if you were to try whether you could not say the same thing in other words, even in English. Having done this, do not look at the English side any more; but first put the Latin into the grammatical Numbers, cases, tenses &c, then construe your own Latin, and ask yourself whether it expresses the same sense as the English Words;" concluding "Bear these two rules in mind, dear James, for your own sake, for your Father's & Mother's sakes and at the earnest request of your loving Friend."