easy by this confounding of its parts?  Or are we lured by the name, “Familiar Lectures,”—­a term manifestly adopted as a mere decoy, and, with respect to the work itself, totally inappropriate?  If these chapters have ever been actually delivered as a series of lectures, the reader must have been employed on some occasions eight or ten times as long as on others!  “People,” says Dr. Johnson, “have now-a-days got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures.  Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as a private reading of the books from which the lectures are taken.  I know of nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shown.  You may teach chymistry by lectures—­you might teach the making of shoes by lectures.” —­Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

39.  With singular ignorance and untruth, this gentleman claims to have invented a better method of analysis than had ever been practised before.  Of other grammars, his preface avers, “They have all overlooked what the author considers a very important object; namely, a systematick order of parsing.”—­Grammar, p. 9.  And, in his “Hints to Teachers,” presenting himself as a model, and his book as a paragon, he says:  “By pursuing this system, he can, with less labour, advance a pupil farther in the practical knowledge of this abstruse science, in two months, than he could in one year, when he taught in the old way.”—­Grammar, p. 12.  What his “old way” was, does not appear.  Doubtless something sufficiently bad.  And as to his new way, I shall hereafter have occasion to show that that is sufficiently bad also.  But to this gasconade the simple-minded have given credit—­because the author showed certificates that testified to his great success, and called him “amiable and modest!” But who can look into the book, or into the writer’s pretensions in regard to his predecessors, and conceive the merit which has made him—­“preeminent by so much odds?” Was Murray less praiseworthy, less amiable, or less modest?  In illustration of my topic, and for the sake of literary justice, I have selected that honoured “Compiler” to show the abuses of praise; let the history of this his vaunting modifier cap the climax of vanity.  In general, his amendments of “that eminent philologist,” are not more skillful than the following touch upon an eminent dramatist; and here, it is plain, he has mistaken two nouns for adjectives, and converted into bad English a beautiful passage, the sentiment of which is worthy of an author’s recollection: 

   “The evil deed or deeds that men do, lives after them;
    The good deed or deeds is oft interred with their bones.” [16]
                    Kirkham’s Grammar, p. 75.