he common inheritance of
about fifty millions of people; who are at least as highly distinguished
for virtue, intelligence, and enterprise, as any other equal portion of the
earth's population. All these are more or less interested in the purity,
permanency, and right use of that language; inasmuch as it is to be, not
only the medium of mental intercourse with others for them and their
children, but the vehicle of all they value, in the reversion of ancestral
honour, or in the transmission of their own. It is even impertinent, to
tell a man of any respectability, that the study of this his native
language is an object of great importance and interest: if he does not,
from these most obvious considerations, feel it to be so, the suggestion
will be less likely to convince him, than to give offence, as conveying an
implicit censure.

5. Every person who has any ambition to appear respectable among people of
education, whether in conversation, in correspondence, in public speaking,
or in print, must be aware of the absolute necessity of a competent
knowledge of the language in which he attempts to express his thoughts.
Many a ludicrous anecdote is told, of persons venturing to use words of
which they did not know the proper application; many a ridiculous blunder
has been published to the lasting disgrace of the writer; and so intimately
does every man's reputation for sense depend upon his skill in the use of
language, that it is scarcely possible to acquire the one without the
other. Who can tell how much of his own good or ill success, how much of
the favour or disregard with which he himself has been treated, may have
depended upon that skill or deficiency in grammar, of which, as often as he
has either spoken or written, he must have afforded a certain and constant
evidence.[53]

6. I have before said, that to excel in grammar, is but to know better than
others wherein grammatical excellence consists; and, as this excellence,
whether in the thing itself, or in him that attains to it, is merely
comparative, there seems to be no fixed point of perfection beyond which
such learning may not be carried. In speaking or writing to different
persons, and on different subjects, it is necessary to vary one's style
with great nicety of address; and in nothing does true genius more
conspicuously appear, than in the facility with which it adopts the most
appropriate expressions, leaving the critic no fault to expose, no word to
ame