We ought to procure such books as are likely to give the children a taste for the literature of the West; not books filled with idle distinctions and definitions, which every man who has learned them makes haste to forget.

Who ever reasoned better for having been taught the difference between a syllogism and an enthymeme?
Who ever composed with greater spirit and elegance because he could define an oxymoron or an aposiopesis?
I am not joking, but writing quite seriously, when I say that I would much rather order a hundred copies of Jack the Giant-killer for our schools than a hundred copies of any grammar of rhetoric or logic that ever was written." "Goldsmith's Histories of Greece and Rome are miserable performances, and I do not at all like to lay out 50 pounds on them, even after they have received all Mr.Pinnock's improvements.

I must own too, that I think the order for globes and other instruments unnecessarily large.
To lay out 324 pounds at once on globes alone, useful as I acknowledge those articles to be, seems exceedingly profuse, when we have only about 3,000 pounds a year for all purposes of English education.

One 12-inch or 18-inch globe for each school is quite enough; and we ought not, I think, to order sixteen such globes when we are about to establish only seven schools.

Useful as the telescopes, the theodolites, and the other scientific instruments mentioned in the indent undoubtedly are, we must consider that four or five such instruments run away with a year's salary of a schoolmaster, and that, if we purchase them, it will be necessary to defer the establishment of schools." At one of the colleges at Calcutta the distribution of prizes was accompanied by some histrionic performances on the part of the pupils.
"I have no partiality," writes Macaulay, "for such ceremonies.