The Grammar of English Grammars. Goold Brown
merit, but to the vilest thefts, and the wildest absurdities, palmed off upon their own and the public credulity, under pretence of improvement. The man who thus prefixes his letter of recommendation to an ill-written book, publishes, out of mere courtesy, a direct impeachment of his own scholarship or integrity. Yet, how often have we seen the honours of a high office, or even of a worthy name, prostituted to give a temporary or local currency to a book which it would disgrace any man of letters to quote! With such encouragement, nonsense wrestles for the seat of learning, exploded errors are republished as novelties, original writers are plundered by dunces, and men that understand nothing well, profess to teach all sciences!
41. All praise of excellence must needs be comparative, because the thing itself is so. To excel in grammar, is but to know better than others wherein grammatical excellence consists. Hence there is no fixed point of perfection beyond which such learning may not be carried. The limit to improvement is not so much in the nature of the subject, as in the powers of the mind, and in the inducements to exert them upon a theme so humble and so uninviting. Dr. Johnson suggests, in his masterly preface, "that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient." Who then will suppose, in the face of such facts and confessions as have been exhibited, that either in the faulty publications of Murray, or among the various modifications of them by other hands we have any such work as deserves to be made a permanent standard of instruction in English grammar? With great sacrifices, both of pleasure and of interest, I have humbly endeavoured to supply this desideratum; and it remains for other men to determine, and other times to know, what place shall be given to these my labours, in the general story of this branch of learning. Intending to develop not only the principles but also the history of grammar, I could not but speak of its authors. The writer who looks broadly at the past and the present, to give sound instruction to the future, must not judge of men by their shadows. If the truth, honestly told, diminish the stature of some, it does it merely by clearing the sight of the beholder. Real greatness cannot suffer loss by the dissipating of a vapour. If reputation has been raised upon the mist of ignorance, who but the builder shall lament its overthrow? If the works of grammarians are often ungrammatical, whose fault is this but their own? If all grammatical fame is little in itself, how can the abatement of what is undeserved of it be much? If the errors of some have long been tolerated, what right of the critic has been lost by nonuser? If the interests of Science have been sacrificed to Mammon, what rebuke can do injustice to the craft? Nay, let the broad-axe of the critic hew up to the line, till every beam in her temple be smooth and straight. For, "certainly, next to commending good writers, the greatest service to learning is, to expose the bad, who can only in that way be made of any use to it." [17] And if, among the makers of grammars, the scribblings of some, and the filchings of others, are discreditable alike to themselves and to their theme, let the reader consider, how great must be the intrinsic worth of that study which still maintains its credit in spite of all these abuses!
CHAPTER IV.
OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE.
"Tot fallaciis obrutum, tot hallucinationibus demersum, tot adhuc tenebris circumfusum studium hocce mihi visum est, ut nihil satis tuto in hac materia præstari posse arbitratus sim, nisi nova quadam arte critica præmissa."—SCIPIO MAFFEIUS: Cassiod. Complexiones, p. xxx.
1. The origin of things is, for many reasons, a peculiarly interesting point in their history. Among those who have thought fit to inquire into the prime origin of speech, it has been matter of dispute, whether we ought to consider it a special gift from Heaven, or an acquisition of industry—a natural endowment, or an artificial invention. Nor is any thing that has ever yet been said upon it, sufficient to set the question permanently at rest. That there is in some words, and perhaps in some of every language, a natural connexion between the sounds uttered and the things signified, cannot be denied; yet, on the other hand, there is, in the use of words in general, so much to which nature affords no clew or index, that this whole process of communicating thought by speech, seems to be artificial. Under an other head, I have already cited from Sanctius some opinions of the ancient grammarians and philosophers on this point. With the reasoning of that zealous instructor, the following sentence from Dr. Blair very obviously accords: "To suppose words invented, or names given to things, in a manner purely arbitrary, without any ground or reason, is to suppose an effect without a cause. There must have always been some motive which led to the assignation of one name rather than an other."—Rhet., Lect. vi, p. 55.
2. But, in their endeavours to explain the origin and early progress of language, several learned men, among whom is this celebrated lecturer, have needlessly perplexed both themselves and their readers, with sundry questions, assumptions, and reasonings, which are manifestly contrary to what has been made known to us on the best of all authority. What signifies it[18] for a man to tell us how nations rude and barbarous invented interjections first,[19] and then nouns, and then verbs,[20] and finally the other parts of speech; when he himself confesses that he does not know whether language "can be considered a human invention at all;" and when he believed, or ought to have believed, that the speech of the first man, though probably augmented by those who afterwards used it, was, essentially, the one language of the earth for more than eighteen centuries? The task of inventing a language de novo, could surely have fallen upon no man but Adam; and he, in the garden of Paradise, had doubtless some aids and facilities not common to every wild man of the woods.
3. The learned Doctor was equally puzzled to conceive, "either how society could form itself, previously to language, or how words could rise into a language, previously to society formed."—Blair's Rhet., Lect. vi, p. 54. This too was but an idle perplexity, though thousands have gravely pored over it since, as a part of the study of rhetoric; for, if neither could be previous to the other, they must have sprung up simultaneously. And it is a sort of slander upon our prime ancestor, to suggest, that, because he was "the first," he must have been "the rudest" of his race; and that, "consequently, those first rudiments of speech," which alone the supposition allows to him or to his family, "must have been poor and narrow."—Blair's Rhet., p. 54. It is far more reasonable to think, with a later author, that, "Adam had an insight into natural things far beyond the acutest philosopher, as may be gathered from his giving of names to all creatures, according to their different constitutions."—Robinson's Scripture Characters, p. 4.
4. But Dr. Blair is not alone in the view which he here takes. The same thing has bean suggested by other learned men. Thus Dr. James P. Wilson, of Philadelphia, in an octavo published in 1817, says: "It is difficult to discern how communities could have existed without language, and equally so to discover how language could have obtained, in a peopled world, prior to society."—Wilson's Essay on Gram., p. 1. I know not how so many professed Christians, and some of them teachers of religion too, with the Bible in their hands, can reason upon this subject as they do. We find them, in their speculations, conspiring to represent primeval man, to use their own words, as a "savage, whose 'howl at the appearance of danger, and whose exclamations of joy at the sight of his prey, reiterated, or varied with the change of objects, were probably the origin of language.'—Booth's Analytical Dictionary. In the dawn of society, ages may have passed away, with little more converse than what these efforts would produce."—Gardiner's Music of Nature, p. 31. Here Gardiner quotes Booth with approbation, and the latter, like Wilson, may have borrowed his ideas from Blair. Thus are we taught by a multitude of guessers, grave, learned, and oracular, that the last of the ten parts of speech was in fact the first: "Interjections are exceedingly interesting in one respect. They are, there can be little doubt, the oldest words in all languages; and may be considered the elements of speech."—Bucke's Classical Gram., p. 78. On this point, however, Dr. Blair seems not to be quite consistent with himself: "Those exclamations, therefore, which by grammarians are called interjections, uttered in a strong and passionate manner, were, beyond doubt, the first elements or beginnings of speech."—Rhet., Lect. vi, p. 55. "The names of sensible objects were, in all languages, the words most early introduced."—Rhet., Lect. xiv, p.