"Poor Scaliger (who well knew what a definition should be) from his own melancholy experience exclaimed--'_Nihil infelicius grammatico definitore!_' Nothing is more unhappy than the grammatical definer."-- _Tooke's Diversions_, Vol.

i, p.238.Nor do our later teachers appear to have been more fortunate in this matter.

A majority of all the definitions and rules contained in the great multitude of English grammars which I have examined, are, in some respect or other, erroneous.

The nature of their multitudinous faults, I must in general leave to the discernment of the reader, except the passages be such as may be suitably selected for examples of false syntax.

Enough, however, will be exhibited, in the course of this volume, to make the foregoing allegation credible; and of the rest a more accurate judgement may perhaps be formed, when they shall have been compared with what this work will present as substitutes.