PREFACE.

My design is so directly unfolded in the titlepage, that it precludes the necessity of an elaborate recommendation of my book to the perusal of those who set a proper value upon sciences which maintain the highest prominence in the intellectual attainments of our agespeaking and writing with ease, freedom, and accuracy! Read this book, my friend! nay, if you are pretty conversant with the leading principles of our language, start not back at so familiar a request! There may be something in it worth attention-perhaps, something new!

J. B. D.

Leeds, April 12th, 1839.

ENGLISH GRAMMAR.

1. HAVING no pretensions to be writing for any other than the plain English reader, I shall do my utmost to chase away all the embarrassing subtleties of those writers on grammar who have gone too far from home, both in subject and technicalities, for his comprehension, and shall keep in view, rather my reader's advancement, than immaturely staggering him with an ostentatious display of my own ability to make a mere plaything of English matter of fact-a thing too often the result of turning over a leaf or two of some mysterious Latin grammar.

2. I do not charge all our grammar writers with making so blind a shift, but I cannot exempt them from the merits of the system, for, where better acquaintance with the learned languages has been possessed, better tact has been displayed in dealing out anomalies of a still more mysterious character.

3. This truth can lack no demonstration when we take into account the intellectual indelicacies which are daily looking us in the face, but which, it is hoped, will, ere long, call forth many a secret and unaffected blush from the endearing countenances of both their framers and abettors.

B

4. While Cobbett kept in ambush, foreign and unwholesome weeds were taking deeper and deeper root, but, when the ploughboy presented himself in the field, and harrowed up the ground, this refuse was carried away in the Augean cart, save a few stems that promiscuously dropt from the piled load, to rid which, no effort should be spared by the honest lovers of literary freedom. Keeping before me my position, I proceed to our subject.

5. As it is manifest that language is composed of words, so it must be equally manifest that words are of various descriptions. The following are the heads under which they are most commonly arranged:

6. ARTICLES, NOUNS, ADJECTIVES, PRONOUNS, VERBS, ADVERBS, CONJUNCTIONS, PREPOSITIONS, and INTERJECTIONS.

7. To these, I may add, there are minor divisions almost innumerable. For some of the nine terms I have placed before you, I shall, in the first place, offer others as substitutes. Whatever I may apparently leave deficient in the outset, as to the utility of this substitution, you will, I doubt not, in your progress, see all the mist gradually disappearing, and all the minor divisions, one by one, falling, as the light gleams upon them, into childish nonentities.

NOUN.

8. "The first class of speech is NOUN or its name, and that noun substantive or self-standing."-ELPHIN"A substantive or noun is the name of anything that exists, or of which we have any notion."

STON.