merely to interest, but to _teach_; to write lessons,
not essays,--lessons that may perhaps prove interesting to some who
have passed beyond the routine of school life, but still lessons, in
the strictest sense, adapted for school classes.

Aiming at practical utility, the book deals only with those
difficulties which, in the course of teaching, we have found to be
most common and most serious. For there are many difficulties, even
when grammatical accuracy has been attained, in the way of English
persons attempting to write and speak correctly. First, there is the
cramping restriction of an insufficient vocabulary; not merely a loose
and inexact apprehension of many words that are commonly used, and a
consequent difficulty in using them accurately, but also a total
ignorance of many other words, and an inability to use them at all;
and these last are, as a rule, the very words which are absolutely
necessary for the comprehension and expression of any thought that
deals with something more than the most ordinary concrete notions.
There is also a very common inability to appreciate the differences
between words that are at all similar. Lastly, where the pupil has
studied Latin, and trusts too much for his knowledge of English words
to his knowledge of their Latin roots, there is the possibility of
misderiving and misunderstanding a word, owing to ignorance of the
changes of letters introduced in the process of derivation; and, on
the other hand, there is the danger of misunderstanding and
pedantically misusing words correctly derived, from an ignorance of
the changes of meaning which a word almost always experiences in
passing from one language to another. The result of all this
non-understanding or slovenly half-understanding of words is a habit
of slovenly reading and slovenly writing, which when once acquired is
very hard to shake off.

Then, following on the difficulties attending the use of words, there
are others attending the choice and arrangement of words. There is the
danger of falling into "poetic prose," of thinking it necessary to
write "steed" or "charger" instead of "horse," "ire" instead of
"anger," and the like; and every teacher, who has had much experience
in looking over examination papers, will admit that this is a danger
to which beginners are very liable. Again, there is the temptation to
shrink with a senseless fear from using a plain word twice in the same
page, and often from using a plain wo