be permitted emphatically to say with Prospero, Your breath has filled my sails.'" -Elocution, p. 18. If this boasting has any truth in it, he ought to be satisfied. But it is written, "He that loveth silver, shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance, with increase." Let him remember this.* He now announces three or four other works as forthcoming shortly. What these will achieve, the world will see. But I must confine myself to the Grammar. 6 37. In this volume, scarcely any thing is found where it might be expected. "The author,” as he tells us in his preface, "has not followed the common artificial and unnatural arrangement adopted by most of his predecessors; yet he has en leavoured to pursue a more judicious one, namely, the order of the understanding."—Grammar, p. 12. But if this is the order of his understanding, he is greatly to be pitied. A book more confused in its plan, more wanting in method, more imperfect in distinctness of parts, more deficient in symmetry, or more difficult of reference, shall not easily be found in stereotype. Let the reader try to follow us here. Bating twelve pages at the beginning, occupied by the title, recommendations, advertiscment, contents, preface, hints to teachers, and advice to lecturers; and fifty-four at the end, embracing syntax, orthography, orthoëpy, provincialisms, prosody, punctuation, versification, rhetoric, figures of speech, and a Key, all in the sequence here given; the work consists of fourteen chapters of grammar, absurdly called "Familiar Lectures." The first treats of sundries, under half a dozen titles, but chiefly of Orthography; and the last is three pages and a half, of the most common remarks, on Derivation. In the remaining twelve, the Etymology and Syntax of the ten parts of speech are commingled; and an attempt is made, to teach simultaneously all that the author judged important in either. Hence he gives us, in a strange congeries, rules, remarks, illustrations, false syntax, systematic parsing, exercises in parsing, two different orders of notes, three different orders of questions, and a variety of other titles merely occasional. All these things, being additional to his main text, are to be connected, in the mind of the learner, with the parts of speech successively, in some new and inexplicable catenation found only in the arrangement of the lectures. The author himself could not see through the chaos. He accordingly made his table of contents a mere meagre alphabetical index. Having once attempted in vain to explain the order of his instructions, he actually gave the matter up in despair! 38. In length, these pretended lectures vary, from three or four pages, to eightand-thirty. Their subjects run thus: 1. Language, Grammar, Orthography; 2. Nouns and Verbs; 3. Articles; 4. Adjectives; 5. Participles; 6. Adverbs; 7. Prepositions; 8. Pronouns; 9. Conjunctions; 10. Interjections and Nouns; 11. Moods and Tenses; 12. Irregular Verbs; 13. Auxiliary, Passive, and Defective Verbs; 14. Derivation. Which, now, is "more judicious," such confusion as this, or the arrangement which has been common from time immemorial? Who that has any respect for the human intellect, or whose powers of mind deserve any in return, will avouch this jumble to be "the order of the understanding?" Are the methods of science to be accounted mere hinderances to instruction? Has grammar really been made easy by this confounding of its parts? Or are we lured by the name, “Familiar Lectures"-a term manifestly adopted as a mere decoy, and, with respect to the work itself, totally inappropriate? If these chapters have ever been actually delivered as a series of lectures, the reader must have been employed on some occasions eight or ten times as long as on others! "People," says Dr. Johnson, “have now-a-days got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as a private reading of the books from which the lectures are taken. I know of nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shown. You may teach chymistry by lectures-you might teach the making of shoes by lectures."-Boswell's Life of Johnson. *I am sorry to observe that the gentleman, Phrenologist, as he professes to be, has so little reverence in his He could not read the foregoing suggestion without scoffing at it. Biblical truth is not powerless, though the scornful may refuse its correction.-G. B. 1838. CROWNL 66 39. With singular ignorance and untruth, this gentleman claims to have invented a better method of analysis than had ever been practised before. Of other grammars, his preface avers, They have all overlooked what the author considers a very important object; namely, a systematick order of parsing.”—Grammar, p. 9. And, in his "Hints to Teachers," presenting himself as a model, and his book as a paragon, he says: "By pursuing this system, he can, with less labour, advance a pupil farther in the practical knowledge of this abstruse science, in two months, than he could in one year, when he taught in the old way."-Grammar, p. 12. What his "old way" was, does not appear. Doubtless something sufficiently bad. And as to his new way, I shall hereafter have occasion to show that that is sufficiently bad also. But to this gasconade the simple-minded have given credit-because the author showed certificates that testified to his great success, and called him “amiable and modest!" But who can look into the book, or into the writer's pretensions in regard to his predecessors, and conceive the merit which has made him—“preëminent by so much odds?" Was Murray less praiseworthy, less amiable, or less modest? In illustration of my topic, and for the sake of literary justice, I have selected that honoured" Compiler" to show the abuses of praise; let the history of this his vaunting modifier cap the climax of vanity. In general, his amendments of "that eminent philologist," are not more skillful than the following touch upon an eminent dramatist; and here, it is plain, he has mistaken two nouns for adjectives, and converted into bad English a beautiful passage, the sentiment of which is worthy of an author's recollection: "The evil deed or deeds that men do, lives after them; Kirkham's Grammar, p. 75. 40. Lord Bacon observes, "Nothing is thought so easy a request to a great person as his letter; and yet, if it be not in a good cause, it is so much out of his reputation." It is to this mischievous facility of recommendation, this prostituted influence of great names, that the inconvenient diversity of school-books, and the continued use of bad ones, are in a great measure to be attributed. It belongs to those who understand the subjects of which authors profess to treat, to judge fairly and fully of their works, and then to let the reasons of their judgement be known. For no one will question the fact, that a vast number of the school-books now in use are either egregious plagiarisms or productions of no comparative merit. And, what is still more surprising and monstrous, presidents, governors, senators, and judges; professors, doctors, clergymen, and lawyers; a host of titled connoisseurs; Every schoolboy is familiar with the following lines, and rightly understands the words “evil” and “good” to be nouns, and not adjectives: "The evil that men do, lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones."-SHAKSPEARE. Julius Caesar, Act 3: Antony's Funeral Oration over Cæsar's Body. Kirkham has vehemently censured me for omitting the brackets in which he encloses the words that he supposes to be understood in this couplet. But he forgets two important circumstances: First, that I was quoting, not the bard, but the grammatist; Second, that a writer uses brackets, to distinguish his own amendments of what he quotes, and not those of an other man. Hence the marks which he has used, would have been improper for me. Their insertion does not make his reading of the passage good English, and, consequently, does not avert the point of my criticism. The foregoing Review of Kirkham's Grammar, was published as an extract from my manuscript, by the editors of the Knickerbocker, in their number for June, 1837. Four months afterwards, with friendships changed, they gave him the "justice" of appearing in their pages, in a long and virulent article against me and my works, representing me, "with emphatic force," as "a knave, a liar, and a pedant." The enmity of that effusion I forgave; because I bore him no personal ill-will, and was not selfish enough to quarrel for my own sake. Its imbecility clearly proved, that in this critique there is nothing with which he could justly find fault. Perceiving that no point of this argument could be broken, he changed the ground, and satisfied himself with despising, upbraiding, and vilifying the writer. Of what use this was, others may judge. This extraordinary grammarian survived the publication of my criticism about ten years; and, it is charitably hoped, died happily; while I have had, for a period somewhat longer, all the benefits which his earnest "castígation" was fit to confer. It is not perceived, that what was written before these events, should now be altered or suppressed by reason of them. With his pretended "defence," I shall now concern myself no further than simply to deny one remarkable assertion contained in it; which is this-that I, Goold Brown, "at the funeral of Aaron Ely," in 1830, "praised, and highly praised, this self-same Grammar, and declared it to be A GOOD WORK!'"'-KIRKHAM, in the Knickerbocker, Oct., 1837, p. 362. I treated him always courteously, and, on this solemn occasion, walked with him without disputing on grammar; but, if this statement of his has any reasonable foundation, I know not what it is.-G. B. in 1850. with incredible facility lend their names, not only to works of inferior merit, but to the vilest thefts, and the wildest absurdities, palmed off upon their own and the public credulity, under pretence of improvement. The man who thus prefixes his letter of recommendation to an ill-written book, publishes, out of mere courtesy, a direct impeachment of his own scholarship or integrity. Yet, how often have we seen the honours of a high office, or even of a worthy name, prostituted to give a temporary or local currency to a book which it would disgrace any man of letters to quote! With such encouragement, nonsense wrestles for the seat of learning, exploded errors are republished as novelties, original writers are plundered by dunces, and men that understand nothing well, profess to teach all sciences! 41. All praise of excellence must needs be comparative, because the thing itself is so. To excel in grammar, is but to know better than others wherein grammatical excellence consists. Hence there is no fixed point of perfection beyond which such learning may not be carried. The limit to improvement is not so much in the nature of the subject, as in the powers of the mind, and in the inducements to exert them upon a theme so humble and so uninviting. Dr. Johnson suggests, in his masterly preface," that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient." Who then will suppose, in the face of such facts and confessions as have been exhibited, that either in the faulty publications of Murray, or among the various modifications of them by other hands, we have any such work as deserves to be made a permanent standard of instruction in English grammar? With great sacrifices, both of pleasure and of interest, I have humbly endeavoured to supply this desideratum; and it remains for other men to determine, and other times to know, what place shall be given to these my labours, in the general story of this branch of learning. Intending to develop not only the principles but also the history of grammar, I could not but speak of its authors. The writer who looks broadly at the past and the present, to give sound instruction to the future, must not judge of men by their shadows. If the truth, honestly told, diminish the stature of some, it does it merely by clearing the sight of the beholder. Real greatness cannot suffer loss by the dissipating of a vapour. If reputation has been raised upon the mist of ignorance, who but the builder shall lament its overthrow? If the works of grammarians are often ungrammatical, whose fault is this but their own? If all grammatical fame is little in itself, how can the abatement of what is undeserved of it be much? If the errors of some have long been tolerated, what right of the critic has been lost by nonuser? If the interests of Science have been sacrificed to Mammon, what rebuke can do injustice to the craft? Nay, let the broad-axe of the critic hew up to the line, till every beam in her temple be smooth and straight. For, "certainly, next to commending good writers, the greatest service to learning is, to expose the bad, who can only in that way be made of any use to it." And if, among the makers of grammars, the scribblings of some, and the filchings of others, are discreditable alike to themselves and to their theme, let the reader consider, how great must be the intrinsic worth of that study which still maintains its credit in spite of all these abuses! • See Notes to Pope's Dunciad, Book II, verse 140. CHAPTER IV. OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. "Tot fallaciis obrutum, tot hallucinationibus demersum, tot adhuc tenebris circumfusum studium hocce mihi visum est, ut nihil satis tuto in hac materia præstari posse arbitratus sim, nisi nova quadam arte critica præmissa."-SCIPIO MAFFEIUS: Cassiod. Complexiones, p. xxx. 1. The origin of things is, for many reasons, a peculiarly interesting point in their history. Among those who have thought fit to inquire into the prime origin of speech, it has been matter of dispute, whether we ought to consider it a special gift from Heaven, or an acquisition of industry-a natural endowment, or an artificial invention, Nor is any thing that has ever yet been said upon it, sufficient to set the question permanently at rest. That there is in some words, and perhaps in some of every language, a natural connexion between the sounds uttered and the things signified, cannot be denied; yet, on the other hand, there is, in the use of words in general, so much to which nature affords no clew or index, that this whole process of communicating thought by speech, seems to be artificial. Under an other head, I have already cited from Sanctius some opinions of the ancient grammarians and philosophers on this point. With the reasoning of that zealous instructor, the following sentence from Dr. Blair very obviously accords: "To suppose words invented, or names given to things, in a manner purely arbitrary, without any ground or reason, is to suppose an effect without a cause. There must have always been some motive which led to the assignation of one name rather than an other." -Rhet., Lect. vi, p. 55. 2. But, in their endeavours to explain the origin and early progress of language, several learned men, among whom is this celebrated lecturer, have needlessly perplexed both themselves and their readers, with sundry questions, assumptions, and reasonings, which are manifestly contrary to what has been made known to us on the best of all authority. What signifies it* for a man to tell us how nations rude and barbarous invented interjections first, and then nouns, and then verbs, and finally the other parts of speech; when he himself confesses that he does not know whether language can be considered a human invention at all;" and when he believed, or ought to have believed, that the speech of the first man, though probably augmented by those who afterwards used it, was, essentially, the one language of the earth for more than eighteen centuries? The task of inventing a language de novo, could surely have fallen upon no man but Adam; and he, in the garden of Paradise, had doubtless some aids and facilities not common to every wild man of the woods. 66 3. The learned Doctor was equally puzzled to conceive, "either how society could form itself, previously to language, or how words could rise into a language, previously to society formed."-Blair's Rhet., Lect. vi, p. 54. This too was but an idle perplexity, though thousands have gravely pored over it since, as a part of the study of rhetoric; for, if neither could be previous to the other, they must have sprung up simultaneously. And it is a sort of slander upon our prime ancestor, to suggest, that, because he was "the first," he must have been the rudest" of his race; and that, 66 *A modern namesake of the Doctor's, the Rev. David Blair, has the following conception of the utility of these speculations: "To enable children to comprehend the abstract idea that all the words in a language consist but of nine kinds, it will be found useful to explain how savage tribes who having no language, would first invent one, beginning with interjections and nouns, and proceeding from one part of speech to another, as their introduction might successively be called for by necessity or luxury."-Blair's Pract. Gram., Pref., p. vii. "Interjections, I shewed, or passionate exclamations, were the first elements of speech. Men laboured to communicate their feelings to one another, by those expressive cries and gestures which nature taught them."— Dr. Hugh Blair's Lectures, p. 57. It is certain that the verb was invented before the noun, in all the languages of which a tolerable account has been procured, either in ancient or modern times.”—Dr. Alez. Murray's History of European Languages, Vol. I, p. 326. "consequently, those first rudiments of speech," which alone the supposition allows to him or to his family," must have been poor and narrow."-Blair's Rhet., p. 54. It is far more reasonable to think, with a later author, that, "Adam had an insight into natural things far beyond the acutest philosopher, as may be gathered from his giving of names to all creatures, according to their different constitutions."-Robinson's Scripture Characters, p. 4. 66 4. But Dr. Blair is not alone in the view which he here takes. The same thing has been suggested by other learned men. Thus Dr. James P. Wilson, of Philadelphia, in an octavo published in 1817, says: " It is difficult to discern how communities could have existed without language, and equally so to discover how language could have obtained, in a peopled world, prior to society."-Wilson's Essay on Gram., p. 1. I know not how so many professed Christians, and some of them teachers of religion too, with the Bible in their hands, can reason upon this subject as they do. We find them, in their speculations, conspiring to represent primeval man, to use their own words, as a savage, whose howl at the appearance of danger, and whose exclamations of joy at the sight of his prey, reiterated, or varied with the change of objects, were probably the origin of language.'-Booth's Analytical Dictionary. In the dawn of society, ages may have passed away, with little more converse than what these efforts would produce."-Gardiner's Music of Nature, p. 31. Here Gardiner quotes Booth with approbation, and the latter, like Wilson, may have borrowed his ideas from Blair. Thus are we taught by a multitude of guessers, grave, learned, and oracular, that the last of the ten parts of speech was in fact the first: "Interjections are exceedingly interesting in one respect. They are, there can be little doubt, the oldest words in all languages; and may be considered the elements of speech."-Bucke's Classical Gram., p. 78. On this point, however, Dr. Blair seems not to be quite consistent with himself: "Those exclamations, therefore, which by grammarians are called interjections, uttered in a strong and passionate manner, were, beyond doubt, the first elements or beginnings of speech."—Rhet., Lect. vi, p. 55. "The names of sensible objects were, in all languages, the words most early introduced."—Rhet., Lect. xiv, p. 135. "The names of sensible objects," says Murray too, were the words most early introduced."—Octavo Gram., p. 336. But what says the Bible? 66 : 5. Revelation informs us that our first progenitor was not only endowed with the faculty of speech, but, as it would appear, actually incited by the Deity to exert that faculty in giving names to the objects by which he was surrounded. "Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam, to see what he would call them and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowls of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found a help meet for him."—Gen., ii, 19, 20. This account of the first naming of the other creatures by man, is apparently a parenthesis in the story of the creation of woman, with which the second chapter of Genesis concludes. But, in the preceding chapter, the Deity is represented not only as calling all things into existence by his Word; but as speaking to the first human pair, with reference to their increase in the earth, and to their dominion over it, and over all the living creatures formed to inhabit it. So that the order of the events cannot be clearly inferred from the order of the narration. The manner of this comrnunication to mar may also be a subject of doubt. Whether it was, or was not, made by a voice or words, may be questioned. But, surely, that Being who, in creating the world and its inhabitants, manifested his own infinite wisdom, eternal power, and godhead, does not lack words, or any other means of signification, if he will use them. And, in the inspired record of his work in the beginning, he is certainly represented, not only as naming all things imperatively, when he spoke them into being, but as expressly calling the light Day, the darkness Night, the firmament Heaven, the dry land Earth, and the gatherings of the mighty waters Seas. 6. Dr. Thomas Hartwell Horne, in commending a work by Dr. Ellis, concerning the origin of human wisdom and understanding, says: "It shows satisfactorily, that |