OBS. 28.—­Among these reformers of our alphabet and orthography, of whose schemes he gives examples, the Doctor mentions, first, “Sir Thomas Smith, secretary of state to Queen Elizabeth, a man of real learning, and much practised in grammatical disquisitions;” who died in 1597;—­next, “Dr. Gill, the celebrated master of St. Paul’s School in London;” who died in 1635;—­then, “Charles Butler, a man who did not want an understanding which might have qualified him for better employment;” who died in 1647;—­and, lastly, “Bishop Wilkins, of Chester, a learned and ingenious critic, who is said to have proposed his scheme, without expecting to be followed;” he died in 1672.

OBS. 29.—­From this time, there was, so far as I know, no noticeable renewal of such efforts, till about the year 1790, when, as it is shown above on page 134 of my Introduction, Dr. Webster, (who was then only “Noah Webster, Jun., attorney at law,”) attempted to spell all words as they are spoken, without revising the alphabet—­a scheme which his subsequent experience before many years led him to abandon.  Such a reformation was again attempted, about forty years after, by an other young lawyer, the late lamented Thomas S. Grimke, of South Carolina, but with no more success.  More recently, phonography, or phonetic writing, has been revived, and to some extent spread, by the publications of Isaac Pitman, of Bath, England, and of Dr. Andrew Comstock, of Philadelphia.  The system of the former has been made known in America chiefly by the lectures and other efforts of Andrews and Boyle, of Dr. Stone, a citizen of Boston, and of E.  Webster, a publisher in Philadelphia.

OBS. 30.—­The pronunciation of words being evidently as deficient in regularity, in uniformity, and in stability, as is their orthography, if not more so, cannot be conveniently made the measure of their written expression.  Concerning the principle of writing and printing by sounds alone, a recent writer delivers his opinion thus:  “Let me here observe, as something not remote from our subject, but, on the contrary, directly bearing upon it, that I can conceive no [other] method of so effectually defacing and barbarizing our English tongue, no [other] scheme that would go so far to empty it, practically at least and for us, of all the hoarded wit, wisdom, imagination, and history which it contains, to cut the vital nerve which connects its present with the past, as the introduction of the scheme of ‘phonetic spelling,’ which some have lately been zealously advocating among us; the principle of which is, that all words should be spelt according as they are sounded, that the writing should be, in every case, subordinated to the speaking.  The tacit assumption that it ought so to be, is the pervading error running through the whole system.”—­R.  C. Trench, on the Study of Words, p. 177.