s to improve upon all the
English grammarians. Dr. Webster is not the only reader of the EPEA
PTEROENTA, who has been thereby prompted to meddle with the common scheme
of grammar; nor is he the only one who has attempted to simplify the
subject by reducing the parts of speech to _six_. John Dalton of
Manchester, in 1801, in a small grammar which he dedicated to Horne Tooke,
made them six, but not the same six. He would have them to be, nouns,
pronouns, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions. This writer, like
Brightland, Tooke, Fisher, and some others, insists on it that the articles
are _adjectives_. Priestley, too, throwing them out of his classification,
and leaving the learner to go almost through his book in ignorance of their
rank, at length assigns them to the same class, in one of his notes. And so
has Dr. Webster fixed them in his late valuable, but not faultless,
dictionaries. But David Booth, an etymologist perhaps equally learned, in
his "Introduction to an Analytical Dictionary of the English Language,"
declares them to be of the same species as the _pronouns_; from which he
thinks it strange that they were ever separated! See _Booth's Introd._, p.
21.

20. Now, what can be more idle, than for teachers to reject the common
classification of words, and puzzle the heads of school-boys with
speculations like these? It is easy to admit all that etymology can show to
be true, and still justify the old arrangement of the elements of grammar.
And if we depart from the common scheme, where shall we stop? Some have
taught that the parts of speech are only _five_; as did the latter stoics,
whose classes, according to Priscian and Harris, were these: articles,
nouns appellative, nouns proper, verbs, and conjunctions. Others have made
them _four_; as did Aristotle and the elder stoics, and, more recently,
Milnes, Brightland, Harris, Ware, Fisher, and the author of a work on
Universal Grammar, entitled Enclytica. Yet, in naming the four, each of
these contrives to differ from _all the rest!_ With Aristotle, they are,
"nouns, verbs, articles, and conjunctions;" with Milnes, "nouns, adnouns,
verbs, and particles;" with Brightland, "names, qualities, affirmations,
and particles;" with Harris, "substantives, attributives, definitives, and
connectives;" with Ware, "the name, the word, the assistant, the
connective;" with Fisher, "names, qualities, verbs, and particles;" with
the author of Enclytica, "names, verbs, mod