Grammatical institutes Author:John Ash Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE. THE importance of an English education is now pretty well understood ; and it is generally acknowledged, that not only for ladies, but for young gent... more »lemen designed merely for trade, an intimate acquaintance with the properties and beauties of the English tongue would be a very desirable and necessary attainment; far preferable to a smattering of the learned languages. But then, it has been supposed, even by men of learning, that the English tongue is too vague and untractablc to be reduced to any certain standard, or rules of construction ; and that a competent knowledge of it cannot be attained without an acquaintance with the Latin. For my part, I hope these gentlemen are mistaken, because this would be an in- B vincible obstacle to Ihc progress of an English education. " This vulgar error, for so I !eg leave in call it, might perhaps arise from a too partial fondness for the Latin; in which, about two centuries ago, we had the service oif the church, the translation of (he Bible, and most other books; few of any value, being then extant in onr mother tongue. But now (lie case is happily altered. Nor do I think the error, above-mentioned would havcbpen so long indulged under the ' blessings of the reformation, had it-iiot been for tlifi many fruitless attempts which have been made to fix the grammatical construction of the English tongue. Many gentlemen, who have written on this subject, have too inconsiderately adopted various distinctions of the learned lan- guages, which have no existence in our own: many, on ihe other hand, convinced of this impropriety, luive btvn too brief, or at least too general, in their definitions and rules, runniug into the quite oppositeextreme: and most of them, I think, have too much neglected the peculiarities of ...« less