ar. Of the two,
the latter is by far the more accurate writer. Blair is fluent and easy,
but he furnishes not a little false syntax; Campbell's Philosophy of
Rhetoric is a very valuable treatise. To these, and five or six other
authors whom I have noticed, was Lindley Murray "principally indebted for
his materials." Thus far of the famous contributors to English grammar. The
Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, delivered at Harvard University by John
Quincy Adams, and published in two octavo volumes in 1810, are such as do
credit even to that great man; but they descend less to verbal criticism,
and enter less into the peculiar province of the grammarian, than do most
other works of a similar title.

37. Some of the most respectable authors or compilers of more general
systems of English grammar for the use of schools, are the writer of the
British Grammar, Bicknell, Buchanan, William Ward, Alexander Murray the
schoolmaster, Mennye, Fisher, Lindley Murray, Penning, W. Allen, Grant,
David Blair, Lennie, Guy, Churchill. To attempt any thing like a review or
comparative estimate of these, would protract this introduction beyond all
reasonable bounds; and still others would be excluded, which are perhaps
better entitled to notice. Of mere modifiers and abridgers, the number is
so great, and the merit or fame so little, that I will not trespass upon
the reader's patience by any further mention of them or their works.
Whoever takes an accurate and comprehensive view of the history and present
state of this branch of learning, though he may not conclude, with Dr.
Priestley, that it is premature to attempt a complete grammar of the
language, can scarcely forbear to coincide with Dr. Barrow, in the opinion
that among all the treatises heretofore produced no such grammar is found.
"Some superfluities have been expunged, some mistakes have been rectified,
and some obscurities have been cleared; still, however, that all the
grammars used in our different schools, public as well as private, are
disgraced by errors or defects, is a complaint as just as it is frequent
and loud."--_Barrow's Essays_, p. 83.

38. Whether, in what I have been enabled to do, there will be found a
remedy for this complaint, must be referred to the decision of others. Upon
the probability of effecting this, I have been willing to stake some
labour; how much, and with what merit, let the candid and discerning, when
they shall have examined for themselves, judge.