[55] “To Write and Speak correctly, gives a Grace, and gains a favourable Attention to what one has to say:  And since ’tis English, that an English Gentleman will have constant use of, that is the Language he should chiefly Cultivate, and wherein most care should be taken to polish and perfect his Stile.  To speak or write better Latin than English, may make a Man be talk’d of, but he would find it more to his purpose to Express himself well in his own Tongue, that he uses every moment, than to have the vain Commendation of others for a very insignificant quality.  This I find universally neglected, and no care taken any where to improve Young Men in their own Language, that they may thoroughly understand and be Masters of it.  If any one among us have a facility or purity more than ordinary in his Mother Tongue, it is owing to Chance, or his Genius, or any thing, rather than to his Education or any care of his Teacher.  To Mind what English his Pupil speaks or writes is below the Dignity of one bred up amongst Greek and Latin, though he have but little of them himself.  These are the learned Languages fit only for learned Men to meddle with and teach:  English is the Language of the illiterate Vulgar.”—­Locke, on Education, p. 339; Fourth Ed., London, 1699.

[56] A late author, in apologizing for his choice in publishing a grammar without forms of praxis, (that is, without any provision for a stated application of its principles by the learner,) describes the whole business of Parsing as a “dry and uninteresting recapitulation of the disposal of a few parts of speech, and their often times told positions and influence;” urges “the unimportance of parsing, generally;” and represents it to be only “a finical and ostentatious parade of practical pedantry.”—­Wright’s Philosophical Gram., pp. 224 and 226.  It would be no great mistake to imagine, that this gentleman’s system of grammar, applied in any way to practice, could not fail to come under this unflattering description; but, to entertain this notion of parsing in general, is as great an error, as that which some writers have adopted on the other hand, of making this exercise their sole process of inculcation, and supposing it may profitably supersede both the usual arrangement of the principles of grammar and the practice of explaining them by definitions.  It is asserted in Parkhurst’s “English Grammar for Beginners, on the Inductive Method of Instruction,” that, “to teach the child a definition at the outset, is beginning at the wrong end;” that, “with respect to all that goes under the name of etymology in grammar, it is learned chiefly by practice in parsing, and scarcely at all by the aid of definitions.”—­ Preface, pp. 5 and 6.