have no obvious reference to the
powers of the letters thus named.

OBS. 3.--Letters, like all other things, must be learned and spoken of _by
their names_; nor can they be spoken of otherwise; yet, as the simple
characters are better known and more easily exhibited than their written
names, the former are often substituted for the latter, and are read as the
words for which they are assumed. Hence the orthography of these words has
hitherto been left too much to mere fancy or caprice. Our dictionaries, by
a strange oversight or negligence, do not recognize them as words; and
writers have in general spelled them with very little regard to either
authority or analogy. What they are, or ought to be, has therefore been
treated as a trifling question: and, what is still more surprising, several
authors of spelling-books make no mention at all of them; while others,
here at the very threshold of instruction, teach falsely--giving "_he_" for
_Aitch_, "_er_" for _Ar_, "_oo_" or "_uu_" for _Double-u_, "_ye_" for _Wy_,
and writing almost all the rest improperly. So that many persons who think
themselves well educated, would be greatly puzzled to name on paper these
simple elements of all learning. Nay, there can be found a hundred men who
can readily write the alphabetic names which were in use two or three
thousand years ago in Greece or Palestine, for one who can do the same
thing with propriety, respecting those which we now employ so constantly in
English:[88] and yet the words themselves are as familiar to every
school-boy's lips as are the characters to his eye. This fact may help to
convince us, that _the grammar_ of our language has never yet been
sufficiently taught. Among all the particulars which constitute this
subject, there are none which better deserve to be everywhere known, by
proper and determinate names, than these prime elements of all written
language.

OBS. 4.--Should it happen to be asked a hundred lustrums hence, what were
the names of the letters in "the Augustan age of English literature," or in
the days of William the Fourth and Andrew Jackson, I fear the learned of
that day will be as much at a loss for an answer, as would most of our
college tutors now, were they asked, by what series of names the Roman
youth were taught to spell. Might not Quintilian or Varro have obliged
many, by recording these? As it is, we are indebted to Priscian, a
grammarian of the sixth century, for almost all we know about