Restricted within its proper limits, and viewed in its true light, the practical science of grammar has an intrinsic dignity and merit sufficient to throw back upon any man who dares openly assail it, the lasting stigma of folly and self-conceit.  It is true, the judgements of men are fallible, and many opinions are liable to be reversed by better knowledge:  but what has been long established by the unanimous concurrence of the learned, it can hardly be the part of a wise instructor now to dispute.  The literary reformer who, with the last named gentleman, imagines “that the persons to whom the civilized world have looked up to for instruction in language were all wrong alike in the main points,” [52] intends no middle course of reformation, and must needs be a man either of great merit, or of little modesty.

4.  The English language may now be regarded as the common inheritance of about fifty millions of people; who are at least as highly distinguished for virtue, intelligence, and enterprise, as any other equal portion of the earth’s population.  All these are more or less interested in the purity, permanency, and right use of that language; inasmuch as it is to be, not only the medium of mental intercourse with others for them and their children, but the vehicle of all they value, in the reversion of ancestral honour, or in the transmission of their own.  It is even impertinent, to tell a man of any respectability, that the study of this his native language is an object of great importance and interest:  if he does not, from these most obvious considerations, feel it to be so, the suggestion will be less likely to convince him, than to give offence, as conveying an implicit censure.

5.  Every person who has any ambition to appear respectable among people of education, whether in conversation, in correspondence, in public speaking, or in print, must be aware of the absolute necessity of a competent knowledge of the language in which he attempts to express his thoughts.  Many a ludicrous anecdote is told, of persons venturing to use words of which they did not know the proper application; many a ridiculous blunder has been published to the lasting disgrace of the writer; and so intimately does every man’s reputation for sense depend upon his skill in the use of language, that it is scarcely possible to acquire the one without the other.  Who can tell how much of his own good or ill success, how much of the favour or disregard with which he himself has been treated, may have depended upon that skill or deficiency in grammar, of which, as often as he has either spoken or written, he must have afforded a certain and constant evidence.[53]