Exercises (D). OMISSION. Write the following passages, excluding all words that are not necessary to the sense of the passage, but not altering any of them or adding to them: 1. O, just give me that indiarubber thing, you know— there, what baby puts in her mouth, you know-baby's ring. It's on the table. 2. All men and women, wherever they are to be found on the face of the earth, have exactly the same features to wit, eyes, nose, mouth, chin, cheeks, and ears. 3. It is a common remark, and one frequently repeated, that the more knowledge that a man possesses the more he perceives his ignorance, and that every addition to his information adds to his sense of his own mental poverty. 4. Whoever sees himself as others see him can never come to a conclusion as to his real appearance, as no two men ever see him alike, and he will therefore be perplexed by continual variations in his countenance. 5. There is nothing on the earth so thoroughly of this world, worldly, as a woman who, casting aside all higher thoughts, devotes her whole life to raising herself in society. 6. To spell immediate' with three m's is an obvious error in orthography. 7. An oak table is a table made out of the wood called oak, and an iron pin is a pin made of the metal called iron; so that we see that the same word is some times used as a substantive and sometimes as an adjective, though never at one and the same time. 8. There is there can be- -no pleasure so great as that which has been earned by self-denial, and the surrender of one's own gratification for the sake of duty. 9. A Welsh triad says that the three unconcealable traits of a person, by which he shall be known, are the glance of his eye, the pronunciation of his speech, and the mode of his self-motion-in briefer English, his look, his voice, and his gait. 10. The Indians have an invariable custom, which they always observe, of burying with the dead chief his most favourite horse and best-loved dog, together with his bow and arrows, and also so much food as satisfied him for six weeks on earth. 11. In the very beginning of the year-that is, as soon as the sun rose on the morning of the 1st of Januarythe priests assembled together to offer sacrifice for the people. The Temple was always so built that it faced the east, and as soon as the sun's face appeared above the horizon the great brazen doors of the Temple were thrown open with a clang, so that its polished walls and the magnificent array of gilded vessels upon the altar might catch the first flash of the sun's glorious beams. 12. The worst of insincere persons is this, that you cannot depend upon them, neither upon what they say nor upon what they will do; they are like the chameleon, who is always changing colour, and whom, though you have left him of a bright red, you may find on your return of a dull green-but with this difference, that the changes in colour of the chameleon are involuntary, while the changes of the insincere man are conscious. SUBSTITUTING SHORT WORDS FOR LONG. Shorten the following passages by omission, or by substituting short words for long, or one word for two, without altering the order or construction of the sentences :— 1. Every description of article will be discovered in this repository. 2. The miserable slaves were connected with chains. 3. The result exceeded our expectations. 4. He considered that the universe was spherical. 5. He endeavoured to proceed in the opposite direction. 6. Security promptly invigorated a mind enfeebled by idle perturbations. 7. Now, wherefore have I entitled this book 'The Heroes'? Because that was the appellation which the Hellens gave to men who were courageous and skilful, and dare do more than other individuals. At first, I imagine, that was all it meant; but after a time it came to mean something in addition; it came to mean men who assisted their country; men in those ancient times, when the country was half savage, who killed ferocious beasts and evil men, and drained swamps, and established towns, and therefore, after they were defunct, were honoured, because they had left their country better than they found it. And we call a man a hero in English to this day, and call it a 'heroic' thing to suffer pain and sorrow, that we may obtain advantage for our fellowmortals.-Altered from Kingsley. 8. Then a mighty awe descended upon Perseus; and he went out in the morning to the populace, and narrated his vision, and bade them build altars to Zeus, the Father of Divine and human beings, and to Athené, who gives sapience to heroes, and be no more afraid of the earthquakes and the floods, but sow and build in tranquillity. And they acted in this way for a while, and prospered; but after Perseus had departed they forgot Zeus and Athené, and worshipped once again Atergatis the Queen, and the never-dying fish of the consecrated lake, where Deucalion's deluge was swallowed up, and they burnt their children before the Fire King, till Zeus was irritated against that foolish people, and brought a strange nation out of Egypt who fought against them and despoiled them altogether, and resided in their cities for a great many hundred years.-Altered from Kingsley. 9. The Arabs have a singular manner of displaying their courage in engagements, not unlike the devotement to the infernal gods among the ancients. A soldier willing to signalise his attachment to his master binds up his leg to his thigh, and continues to fire away upon the enemy, till either they be routed, or he himself be slain upon the field of battle. 10. But if we would construct a judgment of the internal contents of that portentous head which is thus formidably adumbrated, how could it be done so well as by beholding the Doctor among his books, and there beholding the victuals upon which his terrific intellect is supported? There we should behold the accents, dialects, digammas, and other such small gear as in these days constitute the complete armour of a perfect scholar. Southey. 11. In goodness of heart, and in principles of piety, this exemplary couple was bound to each other by the most perfect unison of character, though in their tempers there was a contrast which had scarce the gradation of a single shade to smooth off its abrupt dissimilitude. Mr. Tyrold, gentle with wisdom, and benign in virtue, saw with compassion all imperfections but his own. Yet the mildness that urged him to pity blinded him not to approve; his equity was unerring though his judgment was indulgent. His partner had a firmness of mind which nothing could shake calamity found her resolute; even prosperity was powerless to lull her duties asleep. The exalted character of her husband was the pride of her existence and the source of her happiness. He was not merely her standard of excellence, but of endurance, since her sense of his worth was the criterion for her opinion of all others. This instigated a spirit of comparison, which is almost always uncandid, and which here could rarely escape proving injurious. Such at its very best is the unskilfulness of our fallible nature, that even the noble principle which impels our love of right misleads us but into new deviations, when its ambition presumes to point at perfection. In this instance, however, distinctness of disposition did not stifle reciprocity of affection—that magnetic concentration of all marriage felicity. Mr. Tyrold revered while he softened the rigid virtues of his wife, who adored while she fortified the melting humanity of her husband.-Miss Burney. The last piece cannot be abridged as much as it should be without shortening it in other ways than, by the mere omission of words and substitution of long words for short. To do it thoroughly it should be recast, and nearly every sentence remodelled, and abridged by the constant substitution of one word for a good many. It will be a good test of the aptitude of the pupil for précis-writing of the higher kind to try to reproduce the sense of the passage in as few words as possible. We might here give some examples and exercises of this more thorough style of abridgment, but we forbear to 1. Because the abridgment of phrases of a com do so. |