this idea of their throwing the mountains, which is in itself so grand, burlesque, and ridiculous.”—­Blair’s Rhet., p. 42.  “To which not only no other writings are to be preferred, but even in divers respects not comparable.”—­ Barclay’s Works, i, 53.  “To distinguish them in the understanding, and treat of their several natures, in the same cool manner as we do with regard to other ideas.”—­Sheridan’s Elocution, p. 137.  “For it has nothing to do with parsing, or analyzing, language.”—­Kirkham’s Gram., p. 19.  Or:  “For it has nothing to do with parsing, or analyzing, language.”—­Ib., Second Edition, p. 16.  “Neither was that language [the Latin] ever so vulgar in Britain.”—­SWIFT:  see Blair’s Rhet., p. 228.  “All that I propose is to give some openings into the pleasures of taste.”—­Ib., p. 28.  “But it would have been better omitted in the following sentences.”—­Murray’s Gram., 8vo, p. 210.  “But I think it had better be omitted in the following sentence.”—­Priestley’s Gram., p. 162.  “They appear, in this case, like excrescences jutting out from the body, which had better have been wanted.”—­Blair’s Rhet., p. 326.  “And therefore, the fable of the Harpies, in the third book of the AEneid, and the allegory of Sin and Death, in the second book of Paradise Lost, had been better omitted in these celebrated poems.”—­Ib., p. 430.  “Ellipsis is an elegant Suppression (or the leaving out) of a Word, or Words in a Sentence.”—­British Gram., p. 234; Buchanan’s, p. 131.  “The article a or an had better be omitted in this construction.”—­Blair’s Gram., p. 67.  “Now suppose the articles had not been left out in these passages.”—­Burke’s Gram., p. 27.  “To give separate names to every one of those trees, would have been an endless and impracticable undertaking.”—­Blair’s Rhet., p. 72. “Ei, in general, sounds the same as long and slender a.”—­Murray’s Gram., p. 12.  “When a conjunction is used apparently redundant it is called Polysyndeton.”—­Adam’s Gram., p. 236; Gould’s, 229. “Each, every, either, neither, denote the persons or things which make up a number, as taken separately or distributively.”—­ M’Culloch’s Gram., p. 31.  “The Principal Sentence must be expressed by verbs in the Indicative, Imperative, or Potential Modes.”—­Clark’s Pract.  Gram., p. 133.  “Hence he is diffuse, where he ought to have been pressing.”—­Blair’s Rhet., p. 246.  “All manner of subjects admit of explaining comparisons.”—­Ib., p. 164; Jamieson’s Rhet., 161.  “The present or imperfect participle denotes action or being continued, but not perfected.”—­Kirkham’s Gram., p. 78.  “What are verbs?  Those words which express what the nouns do”—­Fowle’s True Eng.  Gram., p. 29.

   “Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
    Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well.”
        —­J.  Sheffield, Duke of Buck.