r
grammars, will at once show the need we have of a better, and be itself a
fit substitute for the principal treatises which it censures. Grammatical
errors are universally considered to be small game for critics. They must
therefore be very closely grouped together, to be worth their room in this
work. Of the tens of thousands who have learned for grammar a multitude of
ungrammatical definitions and rules, comparatively few will ever know what
I have to say of their acquisitions. But this I cannot help. To the readers
of the present volume it is due, that its averments should be clearly
illustrated by particular examples; and it is reasonable that these should
be taken from the most accredited sources, whether they do honour to their
framers or not. My argument is only made so much the stronger, as the works
which furnish its proofs, are the more esteemed, the more praised, or the
more overrated.

31. Murray tells us, "There is no necessary connexion between words and
ideas."--_Octavo Gram._, Vol. i, p. 139. Though this, as I before observed,
is not altogether true, he doubtless had very good reason to distinguish,
in his teaching, "between _the sign_ and _the thing signified_." Yet, in
his own definitions and explanations, he frequently _confounds_ these very
things which he declares to be so widely different as not even to have a
"necessary connexion." Errors of this kind are very common in all our
English grammars. Two instances occur in the following sentence; which also
contains an error in doctrine, and is moreover obscure, or rather, in its
literal sense, palpably absurd: "To substantives belong gender, number, and
case; and _they_ are _all of_ the third person _when spoken of_, and of the
second person _when spoken to_."--_Murray's Gram._, p. 38; _Alger's
Murray_, 16; _Merchant's_, 23; _Bacon's_, 12; _Maltby's_, 12; _Lyon's_, 7;
_Guy's_, 4; _Ingersoll's_, 26; _S. Putnam's_, 13; _T. H. Miller's_, 17;
_Rev. T. Smith's_, 13. Who, but a child taught by language like this, would
ever think of _speaking to a noun_? or, that a noun of the second person
_could not be spoken of_? or, that a noun cannot be put in the _first
person_, so as to agree with _I_ or _we_? Murray himself once taught, that,
"Pronouns _must always agree_ with their antecedents, _and_ the nouns for
which they stand, in gender, number, and _person_;" and he departed from a
true and important principle of syntax, when he altered his rule to its
presen