OBS. 11.—­An other common fault in the treatment of this part of grammar, is the practice of making many of the rules double, or even triple, in their form.  Of L. Murray’s twenty-two rules, for instance, there are six which severally consist of two distinct paragraphs; and one is composed of three such parts, with examples under each.  Five others, though simple in their form, are complex in their doctrine, and liable to the objections which have been urged above against this characteristic.  These twelve, therefore, I either reject entirely from my catalogue, or divide and simplify to fit them for their purpose.  In short, by comparing the twenty-two rules which were adopted by this popular grammarian, with the twenty-four which are given in this work, the reader may see, that twelve of the former have pleased me too little to have any place at all among the latter, and that none of the remaining ten have been thought worthy to be copied without considerable alteration.  Nor are the rules which I adopt, more nearly coincident with those of any other writer.  I do not proffer to the schools the second-hand instructions of a mere compiler.  In his twenty-two rules, independently of their examples, Hurray has used six hundred and seventeen words, thus giving an average of twenty-eight to each rule; whereas in the twenty-four rules which are presented above, the words are but four hundred and thirty-six, making the average less than nineteen.  And yet I have not only divided some of his propositions and extended others, but, by rejecting what was useless or erroneous, and filling up the deficiencies which mark his code, I have delivered twice the amount of doctrine in two thirds of the space, and furnished eleven important rules which are not contained in his grammar.  Thus much, in this place, to those who so frequently ask, “Wherein does your book differ from Murray’s?”

OBS. 12.—­Of all the systems of syntax, or of grammar, which it has been my fortune to examine, a book which was first published by Robinson and Franklin of New York in 1839, a fair-looking duodecimo volume of 384 pages, under the brief but rather ostentatious title, “THE GRAMMAR of the English Language” is, I think, the most faulty,—­the most remarkable for the magnitude, multitude, and variety, of its strange errors, inconsistencies, and defects.  This singular performance is the work of Oliver B. Peirce, an itinerant lecturer on grammar, who dates his preface at “Rome, N. Y., December 29th, 1838.”  Its leading characteristic is boastful innovation; it being fall of acknowledged “contempt for the works of other writers.”—­P. 379.  It lays “claim to singularity” as a merit, and boasts of a new thing under the sun—­“in a theory RADICALLY NEW, a Grammar of the English Language; something which I believe,” says the author, “has NEVER BEFORE BEEN FOUND.”—­P. 9.  The old scholastic notion, that because Custom is the arbitress of speech, novelty is excluded from