And yet that child began to practise oral composition at the age of eighteen months, and at the age of three was able to use complex sentences with freedom and skill.

In the upper classes the composition is too often as mechanical, as unreal, and as insincere as in the lower.

Sometimes a given subject is worked out by the teacher with the class, the children, one by one, suggesting sentences, which are shaped and corrected by the teacher and then written up on the blackboard, until there are enough of them to fill one page of an ordinary exercise book.

Then the whole essay (if one must dignify it with that name) is copied out, very neatly and carefully, by every child in the class; and the result is shown to the inspector as original composition.

At other times or in other schools the class teacher does not go quite so far as this.