. 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 ex