minds:  and hence it is not uncommon for the same thought to be strictly original with many writers.  The author is not here attempting to manufacture a garment to shield him from rebuke, should he unjustly claim the property of another; but he wishes it to be understood, that a long course of teaching and investigation, has often produced in his mind ideas and arguments on the subject of grammar, exactly or nearly corresponding with those which he afterwards found, had, under similar circumstances, been produced in the minds of others.  He hopes, therefore, to be pardoned by the critic, even though he should not be willing to reject a good idea of his own, merely because some one else has, at some time or other, been blessed with the same thought.

As the plan of this treatise is far more comprehensive than those of ordinary grammars, the writer could not, without making his work unreasonably voluminous, treat some topics as extensively as was desirable.  Its design is to embrace, not only all the most important principles of the science, but also exercises in parsing, false syntax, and punctuation, sufficiently extensive for all ordinary, practical purposes, and a key to the exercises, and, moreover, a series of illustrations so full and intelligible, as completely to adapt the principles to the capacities of common learners. Whether this design has been successfully or unsuccessfully executed, is left for the public to decide.  The general adoption of the work into schools, wherever it has become known, and the ready sale of forty thousand copies, (though without hitherto affording the author any pecuniary profit,) are favorable omens.

In the selection and arrangement of principles for his work, the author has endeavored to pursue a course between the extremes, of taking blindly on trust whatever has been sanctioned by prejudice and the authority of venerable names, and of that arrogant, innovating spirit, which sets at defiance all authority, and attempts to overthrow all former systems, and convince the world that all true knowledge and science are wrapped up in a crude system of vagaries of its own invention.  Notwithstanding the author is aware that public prejudice is powerful, and that he who ventures much by way of innovation, will be liable to defeat his own purpose by falling into neglect; yet he has taken the liberty to think for himself, to investigate the subject critically and dispassionately, and to adopt such principles only as he deemed the least objectionable, and best calculated to effect the object he had in view.  But what his system claims as improvements on others, consists not so much in bettering the principles themselves, as in the method adopted of communicating a knowledge of them to the mind of the learner.  That the work is defective, the author is fully sensible:  and he is free to acknowledge, that its defects arise, in part, from his own want of judgment and skill.