For men of sense have no natural inclination to dwell upon palpable offences against taste and scholarship; nor can they be easily persuaded to approve the course of an author who makes it his business to criticise petty productions.

And is it not a fact, that grammatical authorship has sunk so low, that no man who is capable of perceiving its multitudinous errors, dares now stoop to notice the most flagrant of its abuses, or the most successful of its abuses?
And, of the quackery which is now so prevalent, what can be a more natural effect, than a very general contempt for the study of grammar?
My apology to the reader therefore is, that, as the honour of our language demands correctness in all the manuals prepared for schools, a just exposition of any that are lacking in this point, is a service due to the study of English grammar, if not to the authors in question.
The exposition, however, that I have made of the errors and defects of other writers, is only an incident, or underpart, of the scheme of this treatise.

Nor have I anywhere exhibited blunders as one that takes delight in their discovery.

My main design has been, to prepare a work which, by its own completeness and excellence, should deserve the title here chosen.
But, a comprehensive code of false grammar being confessedly the most effectual means of teaching what is true, I have thought fit to supply this portion of my book, not from anonymous or uncertain sources, but from the actual text of other authors, and chiefly from the works of professed grammarians.
"In what regards the laws of grammatical purity," says Dr.Campbell, "the violation is much more conspicuous than the observance."-- See _Philosophy of Rhetoric_, p.190.It therefore falls in with my main purpose, to present to the public, in the following ample work, a condensed mass of special criticism, such as is not elsewhere to be found in any language.
And, if the littleness of the particulars to which the learner's attention is called, be reckoned an objection, the author last quoted has furnished for me, as well as for himself, a good apology.

"The elements which enter into the composition of the hugest bodies, are subtile and inconsiderable.
The rudiments of every art and science exhibit at first, to the learner, the appearance of littleness and insignificancy.