The Grammar of English Grammars
With an introduction historical and critical; the whole methodically arranged and amply illustrated; with forms of correcting and of parsing, improprieties for correction, examples for parsing, questions for examination, exercises for writing, observations for the advanced student, decisions and proofs for the settlement of disputed points, occasional strictures and defences, an exhibition of the several methods of analysis, and a key to the oral exercises: to which are added four appendixes, pertaining separately to the four parts of grammar.
Approx. 1,028,224 words.
iscerning student or teacher, I owe an apology for the abundant condescension with which I have noticed in this volume the works of unskillful grammarians. For men of sense have no natural inclination to dwell upon palpable offences against taste and scholarship; nor can they be easily persuaded to approve the course of an author who makes it his business to criticise petty productions. And is it not a fact, that grammatical authorship has sunk so low, that no man who is capable of perceiving its multitudinous errors, dares now stoop to notice the most flagrant of its abuses, or the most successful of its abuses? And, of the quackery which is now so prevalent, what can be a more natural effect, than a very general contempt for the study of grammar? My apology to the reader therefore is, that, as the honour of our language demands correctness in all the manuals prepared for schools, a just exposition of any that are lacking in this point, is a service due to the study of English grammar, if not to the authors
