Note: this eBook differs notably from the original printed version and the first eBook version published on the Gutenberg Project.
This “upgrade” is intended to be faithful to the original purpose of the book: “to lighten tedium to a learner”, but answering to the modern needs.
Please check the edition notes.
REBILIUS CRŪSŌ:
ROBINSON CRUSOE, IN LATIN;
A BOOK TO LIGHTEN TEDIUM
TO A LEARNER.
BY
FRANCIS WILLIAM NEWMAN,
EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON;
HONORARY FELLOW OF WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD.
LONDON:
TRÜBNER & CO., 57 & 59, LUDGATE HILL.
M.DCCC.LXXXIV.
NOTTINGHAM:
PRINTED BY STEVENSON, BAILEY, AND SMITH,
LISTER GATE.
PREFACE.
This book was composed when the writer was a Professor ofLatin, as part of a larger scheme. He has long been convincedthat the mode of teaching Latin has become less and less effectivein proportion as it has been made more and more scientific.The effort has been general to confine the pupil to the mostelaborate styles and the most approved classics, and the exerciseof memory has been superseded by minute accuracy in the studyof very limited pieces. In the natural mode we have enormousendless repetition and much learning of the names of things.We begin with short sentences and a very limited number ofverbs; and we learn with the least possible number of rules. Ifwe could talk in Latin, that would be of all best; but as wecannot get exercise in talking it for practical needs, no teachercan hope to gain adequate readiness and facility: or if a fewmight, yet this could not be counted on in any general system.It has long been my conviction that we ought to seek to learn alanguage first, and study its characteristic literature afterward.Greek and Latin literature plunge us into numerous difficultiesall at once, inasmuch as their politics, their history, their geographyand their religion are all strange to the young student.To take difficulties one by one is obvious wisdom; and with aview to this I elaborately maintained in an article of the Museum(No. iv., Jan., 1862, Edinburgh) that we ought to teach by modernLatin. As parts of such a system I have executed and publisheda Latin “Hiawatha,” and Latin Verse Translations of manysmall pieces of English poetry. If I could write Latin conversationsthat would interest learners, I should gladly have undertaken[iv]this: but when I tried, I could not invent matter that seemedinteresting enough. This indeed is my objection to Erasmus’s“Colloquies,” which also are not easy enough in idiom to satisfyme. This “Robinson Crusoe” I thought I could make veryinteresting, and it includes a far greater variety of vocabularythan can be obtained from any of our received classics of thesame length. I hope also the style is easy.
I surely need not apologize for taking only the general ideafrom Defoe. His tale is far too diffuse, too full of moralizingand with too little variety. He was very ignorant of the Botanyand Zoology of the tropics, and when his tale is faithfullyabridged, its impossibilities become too glaring. The Arabic“Robinson Crusoe” published by the Church Missionary Societycuts down De