The hardships of children, compelled to learn what they did not understand, have been bewailed in prefaces and reviews; incredible things boasted by literary jugglers, have been believed by men of sense; and the sympathies of nature, with accumulated prejudices, have been excited against that method of teaching grammar, which after all will be found in experience to be at once the easiest, the shortest, and the best.

I mean, essentially, the ancient positive method, which aims directly at the inculcation of principles.
4.

It has been already admitted, that definitions and rules committed to memory and not reduced to practice, will never enable any one to speak and write correctly.

But it does not follow, that to study grammar by learning its principles, or to teach it technically by formal lessons, is of no real utility.

Surely not.