37.  In this volume, scarcely any thing is found where it might be expected.  “The author,” as he tells us in his preface, “has not followed the common ‘artificial and unnatural arrangement adopted by most of his predecessors;’ yet he has endeavoured to pursue a more judicious one, namely, ’the order of the understanding.’”—­Grammar, p. 12.  But if this is the order of his understanding, he is greatly to be pitied.  A book more confused in its plan, more wanting in method, more imperfect in distinctness of parts, more deficient in symmetry, or more difficult of reference, shall not easily be found in stereotype.  Let the reader try to follow us here.  Bating twelve pages at the beginning, occupied by the title, recommendations, advertisement, contents, preface, hints to teachers, and advice to lecturers; and fifty-four at the end, embracing syntax, orthography, orthoepy, provincialisms, prosody, punctuation, versification, rhetoric, figures of speech, and a Key, all in the sequence here given; the work consists of fourteen chapters of grammar, absurdly called “Familiar Lectures.”  The first treats of sundries, under half a dozen titles, but chiefly of Orthography; and the last is three pages and a half, of the most common remarks, on Derivation.  In the remaining twelve, the Etymology and Syntax of the ten parts of speech are commingled; and an attempt is made, to teach simultaneously all that the author judged important in either.  Hence he gives us, in a strange congeries, rules, remarks, illustrations, false syntax, systematic parsing, exercises in parsing, two different orders of notes, three different orders of questions, and a variety of other titles merely occasional.  All these things, being additional to his main text, are to be connected, in the mind of the learner, with the parts of speech successively, in some new and inexplicable catenation found only in the arrangement of the lectures.  The author himself could not see through the chaos.  He accordingly made his table of contents a mere meagre alphabetical index.  Having once attempted in vain to explain the order of his instructions, he actually gave the matter up in despair!

38.  In length, these pretended lectures vary, from three or four pages, to eight-and-thirty.  Their subjects run thus:  1.  Language, Grammar, Orthography; 2.  Nouns and Verbs; 3.  Articles; 4.  Adjectives; 5.  Participles; 6.  Adverbs; 7.  Prepositions; 8.  Pronouns; 9.  Conjunctions; 10.  Interjections and Nouns; 11.  Moods and Tenses; 12.  Irregular Verbs; 13.  Auxiliary, Passive, and Defective Verbs; 14.  Derivation.  Which, now, is “more judicious,” such confusion as this, or the arrangement which has been common from time immemorial?  Who that has any respect for the human intellect, or whose powers of mind deserve any in return, will avouch this jumble to be “the order of the understanding?” Are the methods of science to be accounted mere hinderances to instruction?  Has grammar really been made