40.  Lord Bacon observes, “Nothing is thought so easy a request to a great person as his letter; and yet, if it be not in a good cause, it is so much out of his reputation.”  It is to this mischievous facility of recommendation, this prostituted influence of great names, that the inconvenient diversity of school-books, and the continued use of bad ones, are in a great measure to be attributed.  It belongs to those who understand the subjects of which authors profess to treat, to judge fairly and fully of their works, and then to let the reasons of their judgement be known.  For no one will question the fact, that a vast number of the school-books now in use are either egregious plagiarisms or productions of no comparative merit.  And, what is still more surprising and monstrous, presidents, governors, senators, and judges; professors, doctors, clergymen, and lawyers; a host of titled connoisseurs; with incredible facility lend their names, not only to works of inferior merit, but to the vilest thefts, and the wildest absurdities, palmed off upon their own and the public credulity, under pretence of improvement.  The man who thus prefixes his letter of recommendation to an ill-written book, publishes, out of mere courtesy, a direct impeachment of his own scholarship or integrity.  Yet, how often have we seen the honours of a high office, or even of a worthy name, prostituted to give a temporary or local currency to a book which it would disgrace any man of letters to quote!  With such encouragement, nonsense wrestles for the seat of learning, exploded errors are republished as novelties, original writers are plundered by dunces, and men that understand nothing well, profess to teach all sciences!

41.  All praise of excellence must needs be comparative, because the thing itself is so.  To excel in grammar, is but to know better than others wherein grammatical excellence consists.  Hence there is no fixed point of perfection beyond which such learning may not be carried.  The limit to improvement is not so much in the nature of the subject, as in the powers of the mind, and in the inducements to exert them upon a theme so humble and so uninviting.  Dr. Johnson suggests, in his masterly preface, “that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient.”  Who then will suppose, in the face of such facts and confessions as have been exhibited, that either in the faulty publications of Murray, or among the various modifications of them by other hands we have any such work as deserves to be made a permanent standard of instruction in English grammar?  With great sacrifices, both of pleasure and of interest, I have humbly endeavoured to supply this desideratum; and it remains for other men to determine, and other times to know, what place shall be given to these my labours, in the general story of this branch of learning.  Intending to develop not only the principles but also the history