19.  In a treatise on grammar, a bad scheme is necessarily attended with inconveniences for which no merit in the execution can possibly compensate.  The first thing, therefore, which a skillful teacher will notice in a work of this kind, is the arrangement.  If he find any difficulty in discovering, at sight, what it is, he will be sure it is bad; for a lucid order is what he has a right to expect from him who pretends to improve upon all the English grammarians.  Dr. Webster is not the only reader of the EPEA PTEROENTA, who has been thereby prompted to meddle with the common scheme of grammar; nor is he the only one who has attempted to simplify the subject by reducing the parts of speech to six.  John Dalton of Manchester, in 1801, in a small grammar which he dedicated to Horne Tooke, made them six, but not the same six.  He would have them to be, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions.  This writer, like Brightland, Tooke, Fisher, and some others, insists on it that the articles are adjectives.  Priestley, too, throwing them out of his classification, and leaving the learner to go almost through his book in ignorance of their rank, at length assigns them to the same class, in one of his notes.  And so has Dr. Webster fixed them in his late valuable, but not faultless, dictionaries.  But David Booth, an etymologist perhaps equally learned, in his “Introduction to an Analytical Dictionary of the English Language,” declares them to be of the same species as the pronouns; from which he thinks it strange that they were ever separated!  See Booth’s Introd., p. 21.

20.  Now, what can be more idle, than for teachers to reject the common classification of words, and puzzle the heads of school-boys with speculations like these?  It is easy to admit all that etymology can show to be true, and still justify the old arrangement of the elements of grammar.  And if we depart from the common scheme, where shall we stop?  Some have taught that the parts of speech are only five; as did the latter stoics, whose classes, according to Priscian and Harris, were these:  articles, nouns appellative, nouns proper, verbs, and conjunctions.  Others have made them four; as did Aristotle and the elder stoics, and, more recently, Milnes, Brightland, Harris, Ware, Fisher, and the author of a work on Universal Grammar, entitled Enclytica.  Yet, in naming the four, each of these contrives to differ from all the rest! With Aristotle, they are, “nouns, verbs, articles, and conjunctions;” with Milnes, “nouns, adnouns, verbs, and particles;” with Brightland, “names, qualities, affirmations, and particles;” with Harris, “substantives, attributives, definitives, and connectives;” with Ware, “the name, the word, the assistant, the connective;” with Fisher, “names, qualities, verbs, and particles;” with the author of Enclytica, “names, verbs, modes, and connectives.”  But why make the classes so numerous as four?  Many of the ancients, Greeks, Hebrews, and Arabians, according to Quintilian, made them three; and these three, according to Vossius, were nouns, verbs, and particles.  “Veteres Arabes, Hebraei, et Graeci, tres, non amplius, classes faciebant; l.  Nomen, 2.  Verbum, 3.  Particula seu Dictio.”—­Voss. de Anal., Lib. i, Cap. 1.