An Outline of the General Principles of Grammar

Excerpt from An Outline of the General Principles of Grammar: With a Brief Exposition of the Chief Idiomatic Peculiarities of the English Language, to Wich Questions Have Been Added

We do not aim to disparage or ignore these as facts in ~our language, but find fault with the large space they fill. The young student who speaks En glish already practices by far the greater part of these lessons. -he knows them unconsciously; he uses them before he has heard of Grammar, and as they belong to the phonetic system of the language, they are unavailing until'a philosophical inquiry and anal ysis come in. Separated from their governing princi ples, they are barren, and the time for those principles has'not yet arrived for the student. The same Gram mar appropriates thirty pages to prosody and fifty five to rhetoric. Without wishing to impugn the merit of these, we remark that as such subjects (though of course parts of Grammar in its wide ap plication) are always made distinctive studies in the department of Belles Lettres, they needlessly aug ment an elementary treatise on Grammar. The subjoined compendium excludes both, and thus is enabled to be brief.

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