There are also many works not called grammars, from which our copyists have taken large portions of their compilations.  Thus Murray confessedly copied from ten authors; five of whom are Beattie, Sheridan, Walker, Blair, and Campbell.  Dr. Beattie, who acquired great celebrity as a teacher, poet, philosopher, and logician, was well skilled in grammar; but he treated the subject only in critical disquisitions, and not in any distinct elementary work adapted to general use.  Sheridan and Walker, being lexicographers, confined themselves chiefly to orthography and pronunciation.  Murray derived sundry principles from the writings of each; but the English Grammar prepared by the latter, was written, I think, several years later than Murray’s.  The learned doctors Blair and Campbell wrote on rhetoric, and not on the elementary parts of grammar.  Of the two, the latter is by far the more accurate writer.  Blair is fluent and easy, but he furnishes not a little false syntax; Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric is a very valuable treatise.  To these, and five or six other authors whom I have noticed, was Lindley Murray “principally indebted for his materials.”  Thus far of the famous contributors to English grammar.  The Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, delivered at Harvard University by John Quincy Adams, and published in two octavo volumes in 1810, are such as do credit even to that great man; but they descend less to verbal criticism, and enter less into the peculiar province of the grammarian, than do most other works of a similar title.

37.  Some of the most respectable authors or compilers of more general systems of English grammar for the use of schools, are the writer of the British Grammar, Bicknell, Buchanan, William Ward, Alexander Murray the schoolmaster, Mennye, Fisher, Lindley Murray, Penning, W. Allen, Grant, David Blair, Lennie, Guy, Churchill.  To attempt any thing like a review or comparative estimate of these, would protract this introduction beyond all reasonable bounds; and still others would be excluded, which are perhaps better entitled to notice.  Of mere modifiers and abridgers, the number is so great, and the merit or fame so little, that I will not trespass upon the reader’s patience by any further mention of them or their works.  Whoever takes an accurate and comprehensive view of the history and present state of this branch of learning, though he may not conclude, with Dr. Priestley, that it is premature to attempt a complete grammar of the language, can scarcely forbear to coincide with Dr. Barrow, in the opinion that among all the treatises heretofore produced no such grammar is found.  “Some superfluities have been expunged, some mistakes have been rectified, and some obscurities have been cleared; still, however, that all the grammars used in our different schools, public as well as private, are disgraced by errors or defects, is a complaint as just as it is frequent and loud.”—­Barrow’s Essays, p. 83.