copy out correctly in good writing, a printed passage of 500 words in half an hour, you can write quickly enough; but you should not rest satisfied till you can do this.

Among the candidates who competed a short time ago for one of two vacancies in a Dublin office, was one who was well up on all the subjects, and his penmanship was very good, just the kind most prized by the examiners. But his hand was heavy for want of practice, and his execution, though by no means slow, was not quick enough for the quantity of work required within the time. In three or four of the subjects, he left several questions unanswered, merely for want of time, though he knew them as well as the others; and he took only fourth place, though he was undoubtedly as well prepared as the two next above him.

Quickness in writing is to be attained only by practice. No time need be exclusively devoted to it; for inasmuch as many other subjects must be practised on paper, this very practice is sufficient for the penmanship. But to make it so, you must, in the first place, execute all your writing carefully, and in the second place, as quickly as you can, consistently with the quality. Go through every exercise in fact, as if the goodness and quickness of your penmanship were to be finally tested by it; and though this may be troublesome at first, a little perseverance will make it your natural way of writing, requiring no effort at all.

CHAPTER IV.

ORTHOGRAPHY.

MANY people are under the impression that for any moderately intelligent, fairly educated person, spelling is quite an easy part of the examination, requiring little or no preparation, as if it came almost by nature, without any special effort. How great a mistake this is will appear from the fact, that of 495 candidates, rejected for failures in all the various subjects by the Civil Service examiners during the year preceding the 30th June, 1869, 110 were rejected for spelling alone, and 123 others for spelling combined with arithmetic or handwriting. This ominous fact should be a warning to those who imagine that the examination in Orthography is a matter of trifling consideration.

Whatever opinion you may have as to your proficiency in spelling, you had better not depend on it; for this is a point on which one is quite easily deceived, and very few can tell without trial whether they are up to the mark. The test by which you are to ascertain whether or not you are a good speller is perfectly obvious. Write without stopping from another person's reading, say three full pages (of print) of Macaulay's Essays, The Student's Hume, Goldsmith's Histories, Johnson's Rasselas, The Rambler, or the Fifth national

school Lesson Book; and it will be better if you do not take these pages consecutively, but select them at random from three different parts of the book.

Carefully compare your copy with the original, and if you have either written all (consisting of say 1200 words) correctly, or missed only one or two very unusual words or proper names, you may rest satisfied with your proficiency. But if you misspell as many as five or six or more wordsnot proper names-you must not think of going forward till you have improved your spelling.

There is only one never-failing plan to ensure good spelling-writing. Whoever writes much and writes attentively will infallibly be a good speller. You may as well think that a man can be a good carpenter by merely looking at his planes, saws, and chisels, and never using them, as that you can learn to spell without writing. No plan has ever been, and none ever will be, invented to supersede this.

It has often been observed that those who read much spell well. Attentive reading is a valuable help in teaching to spell, for the more one reads, the more distinctly will the images of the words be impressed on his memory. But reading is after all only a helper; it will not finish; you must write in order to command the spelling of the entire range of the language. Besides, so far as improvement in spelling is concerned, reading is a slow process; it applies rather to years than to a limited period; and the student who wants to cure bad spelling in preparation for a coming examination, though his reading will assist him,

must depend for his success almost entirely on writing.

A person who is a bad speller-one, for instance, who misses four or five words in writing from dictation a page of printed matter--has a heavy task before him; for it will certainly take him a year's writing for an hour every day, to remedy this fatal defect in his education.

A person of this kind must pursue the following course. Take up any of the works mentioned above (p. 26)-Johnson's Rasselas or Goldsmith's England will answer very well-a volume of Macaulay's Essays still better--and, beginning at the first page, copy out, while the book lies open before you, page after page, taking the greatest care of the spelling, and executing the penmanship all through, just as you would if the Civil Service examiner were to test your handwriting by every page of your copy.

If you have a teacher, he will of course detect all the misspelled words-for you will misspell, even though you are writing from an open book;if you have not, you must detect them yourself by comparing your transcript with the original, either after you have written, or as you go along; but do this very carefully, so as to be sure not to overlook a word.

Keep a note-book in which you are to enter lists of all the words that you either misspell, or that you think you might be in danger of misspelling you were writing them without looking at them in print. Copy the words of this note book over and over again, till you are perfectly certain you cannot miss one of them.

if

When you have in this manner gone over a good

sized volume-say 500 or 600 pages-so as to be quite sure you cannot misspell a word out of the whole, you may conclude that you are well enough prepared for examination in orthography.

If you are less deficient -if you are satisfied that you are already a pretty fair speller, or from having been very helpless, you have, by persevering practice, attained a respectable degree of proficiency;-in either of these cases a less severe ordeal will be sufficient :-you must still copy, but you need not copy the whole text, but only the difficult and unusual words. You will still keep a note-book as before, You must be careful, however, not to confine yourself too much to unusual words: it happens not unfrequently that a person by constant practice makes himself master of most of the difficult words in the language; but when he comes to write an ordinary passage, while he spells the hard words correctly, he misses many of the easy ones.

Be fully convinced that there is no other way but this-no royal road-to learn spelling. Whoever thinks he can supersede this laborious preparation by any shorter method, is like a man who proposes to reach the new world without the ordeal of a weary voyage. There may be one or two trifling contrivances-which are likely to cause more trouble than they are worth-to ensure the spelling of a few words; but it is merely lessening the distance to the nearest seaport-a mile offand you still have to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

Getting off by heart lists of hard words, i.e. learning to spell them by word of mouth, without using the pen, is next door to losing your time: keep writing them instead, and you need not open your mouth to spell them orally at all.