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t method cannot be essentially different from that which has been longest in use, and is probably most known. But there is everywhere ample room for improvement. Perfection was never attained by the most learned of our ancestors, nor is it found in any of our schemes. English grammar can be better taught than it is now, or ever has been. Better scholarship would naturally produce this improvement, and it is easy to suppose a race of teachers more erudite and more zealous, than either we or they.
8. Where invention and discovery are precluded, there is little room for novelty. I have not laboured to introduce a system of grammar essentially new, but to improve the old and free it from abuses. The mode of instruction here recommended is the result of long and successful experience. There is nothing in it, which any person of common abilities will find it difficult to understand or adopt. It is the plain didactic method of definition and example, rule and praxis; which no man who means to teach grammar well, will ever desert, with the hope of finding an other more rational or more easy. This book itself will make any one a grammarian, who will take the trouble to observe and practise what it teaches; and even if some instructors should not adopt the readiest means of making their pupils familiar with its contents, they will not fail to instruct by it as effectually as they can by any other. A hope is also indulged, that this work will be particularly useful to many who have passed the ordinary period allotted to education. Whoever is acquainted with the grammar of our language, so as to have some tolerable skill in teaching it, will here find almost every thing that is true in his own instructions, clearly embraced under its proper head, so as to be easy of reference. And perhaps there are few, however learned, who, on a perusal of the volume, would not be furnished with some important rules and facts which had not before occurred to their own observation.
9. The greatest peculiarity of the method is,