has ever yet inculcated.  But, upon the credulity of ignorance, his high-sounding certificates and unbounded boasting can impose any thing.  They overrule all in favour of cue of the worst grammars extant;—­of which he says, “it is now studied by more than one hundred thousand children and youth; and is more extensively used than all other English grammars published in the United States.”—­Elocution, p. 347.  The booksellers say, he receives from his publishers ten cents a copy, on this work, and that he reports the sale of sixty thousand copies per annum.  Such has of late been his public boast.  I have once had the story from his own lips, and of course congratulated him, though I dislike the book.  Six thousand dollars a year, on this most miserable modification of Lindley Murray’s Grammar!  Be it so—­or double, if he and the public please.  Murray had so little originality in his work, or so little selfishness in his design, that he would not take any thing; and his may ultimately prove the better bargain.

36.  A man may boast and bless himself as he pleases, his fortune, surely, can never be worthy of an other’s envy, so long as he finds it inadequate to his own great merits, and unworthy of his own poor gratitude.  As a grammarian, Kirkham claims to be second only to Lindley Murray; and says, “Since the days of Lowth, no other work on grammar, Murray’s only excepted, has been so favourably received by the publick as his own.  As a proof of this, he would mention, that within the last six years it has passed through fifty editions.”—­Preface to Elocution, p. 12.  And, at the same time, and in the same preface, he complains, that, “Of all the labours done under the sun, the labours of the pen meet with the poorest reward.”—­Ibid., p. 5.  This too clearly favours the report, that his books were not written by himself, but by others whom he hired.  Possibly, the anonymous helper may here have penned, not his employer’s feeling, but a line of his own experience.  But I choose to ascribe the passage to the professed author, and to hold him answerable for the inconsistency.  Willing to illustrate by the best and fairest examples these fruitful means of grammatical fame, I am glad of his present success, which, through this record, shall become yet more famous.  It is the only thing which makes him worthy of the notice here taken of him.  But I cannot sympathize with his complaint, because he never sought any but “the poorest reward;” and more than all he sought, he found.  In his last “Address to Teachers,” he says, “He may doubtless be permitted emphatically to say with Prospero, ’Your breath has filled my sails.’”—­Elocution, p. 18.  If this boasting has any truth in it, he ought to be satisfied.  But it is written, “He that loveth silver, shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance, with increase.”  Let him remember this.[15] He now announces three or four other works as forthcoming shortly.  What these will achieve, the world will see.  But I must confine myself to the Grammar.