10.  Hence the enormous insult to learning and the learned, conveyed in the following scornful quotations:  “Grammarians, go to your tailors and shoemakers, and learn from them the rational art of constructing your grammars!”—­Neef’s Method of Education, p. 62.  “From a labyrinth without a clew, in which the most enlightened scholars of Europe have mazed themselves and misguided others, the author ventures to turn aside.”—­Cardell’s Gram., 12mo, p. 15.  Again:  “The nations of unlettered men so adapted their language to philosophic truth, that all physical and intellectual research can find no essential rule to reject or change.”—­Ibid., p. 91.  I have shown that “the nations of unlettered men” are among that portion of the earth’s population, upon whose language the genius of grammar has never yet condescended to look down!  That people who make no pretensions to learning, can furnish better models or instructions than “the most enlightened scholars,” is an opinion which ought not to be disturbed by argument.

11.  I regret to say, that even Dr. Webster, with all his obligations and pretensions to literature, has well-nigh taken ground with Neef and Cardell, as above cited; and has not forborne to throw contempt, even on grammar as such, and on men of letters indiscriminately, by supposing the true principles of every language to be best observed and kept by the illiterate.  What marvel then, that all his multifarious grammars of the English language are despised?  Having suggested that the learned must follow the practice of the populace, because they cannot control it, he adds:  “Men of letters may revolt at this suggestion, but if they will attend to the history of our language, they will find the fact to be as here stated.  It is commonly supposed that the tendency of this practice of unlettered men is to corrupt the language.  But the fact is directly the reverse.  I am prepared to prove, were it consistent with the nature of this work, that nineteen-twentieths of all the corruptions of our language, for five hundred years past, have been introduced by authors—­men who have made alterations in particular idioms which they did not understand.  The same remark is applicable to the orthography and pronunciation.  The tendency of unlettered men is to uniformity—­to analogy; and so strong is this disposition, that the common people have actually converted some of our irregular verbs into regular ones.  It is to unlettered people that we owe the disuse of holpen, bounden, sitten, and the use of the regular participles, swelled, helped, worked, in place of the ancient ones.  This popular tendency is not to be contemned and disregarded, as some of the learned affect to do;[3] for it is governed by the natural, primary principles of all languages, to which we owe all their regularity and all their