4.  Yet a slight acquaintance with the history of grammar will suffice to show us, that it is much easier to acknowledge this principle, and to commend it in words, than to ascertain what it is, and abide by it in practice.  Good use is that which is neither ancient nor recent, neither local nor foreign, neither vulgar nor pedantic; and it will be found that no few have in some way or other departed from it, even while they were pretending to record its dictates.  But it is not to be concealed, that in every living language, it is a matter of much inherent difficulty, to reach the standard of propriety, where usage is various; and to ascertain with clearness the decisions of custom, when we descend to minute details.  Here is a field in which whatsoever is achieved by the pioneers of literature, can be appreciated only by thorough scholars; for the progress of improvement in any art or science, can be known only to those who can clearly compare its ruder with its more refined stages; and it often happens that what is effected with much labour, may be presented in a very small compass.

5.  But the knowledge of grammar may retrograde; for whatever loses the vital principle of renovation and growth, tends to decay.  And if mere copyists, compilers, abridgers, and modifiers, be encouraged as they now are, it surely will not advance.  Style is liable to be antiquated by time, corrupted by innovation, debased by ignorance, perverted by conceit, impaired by negligence, and vitiated by caprice.  And nothing but the living spirit of true authorship, and the application of just criticism, can counteract the natural tendency of these causes.  English grammar is still in its infancy; and even bears, to the imagination of some, the appearance of a deformed and ugly dwarf among the liberal arts.  Treatises are multiplied almost innumerably, but still the old errors survive.  Names are rapidly added to our list of authors, while little or nothing is done for the science.  Nay, while new blunders have been committed in every new book, old ones have been allowed to stand as by prescriptive right;. and positions that were never true, and sentences that were never good English, have been published and republished under different names, till in our language grammar has become the most ungrammatical of all studies!  “Imitators generally copy their originals in an inverse ratio of their merits; that is, by adding as much to their faults, as they lose of their merits.”—­KNIGHT, on the Greek Alphabet, p. 117.

   “Who to the life an exact piece would make,
    Must not from others’ work a copy take.”—­Cowley.