to do this, perhaps sometimes feel, “What is the good?  I shall never look at a Euclid again after I leave school—­I want to learn how to hold my own in after-life,—­I want to be able to talk when I come out,—­I want to be a sensible woman, whose opinion will be asked by other people,—­I want to be clever at house-work or cooking, or to be able to manage a shop,—­I want to be strong enough and wise enough to be a support and comfort to others,—­I want to be a useful woman and not a mathematician!” Well! that is just what I want you to be, but I am quite sure that Mathematics will help you to this, by making you accurate and reasonable and attentive, without which qualities you will be no use and very little comfort.  If you work hard at Mathematics while you are here, and gain these qualities, you have my free leave to shut your Euclid for good on the day you leave school,—­you will have learnt his best lessons.

Is there any great mental good which you can gain by the study of Languages, quite apart from the advantage of being able to read and speak when you go abroad?  Yes; it enlarges your mind to know the various ways in which things are expressed by different nations.  A person who knows no language but his own is like a man who can only see with one eye.  It opens a whole new world of thought to realize that other nations have other words.

Again, it makes you know your own language.  Translation gives you choice of words and trains you to appreciate delicate shades of meaning; this helps you to appreciate Poetry, for one of the main beauties of great poets, such as Milton and Tennyson, is their marvellous perception of shades of difference, and the felicity with which they choose exactly the right adjective!

It is said that barbarous tribes use a very small vocabulary; I sometimes fear we may be going back to a savage state, when I think of the vocabulary of a modern schoolgirl, and see how much ground is covered over with these two narrow words, “awfully” and “jolly.”  Hannah More complained, in her day, of the indiscriminate use of the word “nice.”  “Formerly,” she says, “a person was ‘charming,’ or ‘accomplished,’ or ‘distinguished,’ or ‘well-bred,’ or ‘talented,’ etc., and each word had its own shade of meaning; now, every one is ‘nice,’ which saves much thought.”  “Nice” held its position, for we find Miss Austen making Henry Tilney laugh at the same misuse of the word.  “Awfully” and “jolly” seem to perform the same kind office for us which “nice” did for our grandmothers,—­they “save us much thought,” and are used with a large disregard of their inappropriateness; I have even been told by a girl that the Christian Year was “such an awfully jolly book”!  Now, I am sure of this:  you will find excessive use of those two words always betokens an empty, or rather an uncultivated, mind.  I do not believe in any exception; their votaries may have learning, but they have not digested it, they are not thoughtful, they are “young (or old) barbarians,” for it is the unfailing mark of a cultivated mind, to use the right word in the right place, and never “to use a sixpenny word when a threepenny one will do.”