0

THE

ENGLISH LANGUAGE

IN ITS

ELEMENTS AND FORMS.

WITH A

HISTORY OF ITS ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT.

DESIGNED FOR USE IN

COLLEGES AND SCHOOLS.

Revised and Enlarged.

BY WILLIAM CHAUNCEY FOWLER, LL.D.,

LATE PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC IN AMHERST COLLEGE.

NEW YORK:

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS

PEARL STREET, FRANKLIN SQUARE

31881.

5245

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty-five, by

HARPER & BROTHERS,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York.

ADDITIONAL PREFACE.

THE additional helps recently furnished to this work seem to demand an additional preface explanatory of their value and use.

I. Two indexes have been annexed to it, the one of words, and the other of subjects. The first comprises a list of nearly 9000 words found in the body of the work, and thus often serves the purpose of a dictionary, but with more fullness of philological information. For while a dictionary furnishes information concerning the individual word under consideration, the grammar shows its connection with a group of words with which it is classed, and in its relation to some general fact or principle. Thus, in the dictionary, the word Al gebra stands isolated from kindred words; in the grammar it stands in a class of words resembling one another in form and feature, so that in obtaining a knowl edge of the word from the grammar, you at the same time obtain a knowledge of the group or class.

Dictionaries, even the large ones of Webster and Worcester, are very deficient in grammatical etymology. Thus, if a student seeks to know whether the word cannon has the same form in the singular and in the plural, he will look into those dictionaries in vain; but the index of words in this grammar refers him to the text, which informs him that the word is used in the same form in both numbers. So important did Dr. Johnson and Dr. Webster consider a grammar as a

complement to a dictionary, that each prefixed one to his large work.

II. Grammar in its higher aspects is well characterized by the great Anglo-Saxon grammarian Ælfric as the key that unlocks the books, Seô cœg pe pârâ bôcâ andyyt unlýcð, the master key of literature. The peculiarity of Fowler's Grammar is that it exhibits grammar in its relation with the history of language, with logic, and rhetoric, ready for use as the master key.

Practical exercises, therefore, for this Grammar could not be merely forms for writing short sentences, or collec tions of erroneous phrases to be corrected, or even single paragraphs from books to be criticised. Generous representative portions of the representative works of the great representative English authors were to be thor oughly discussed, and the application of the philological laws of the grammar to the criticism and comprehension of literature shown by urging and directing the student to apply them in these discussions.

This has been done in March's Method of Philological Study of the English Language. Extracts from Bunyan, Milton, Shakespeare, Spenser, Chaucer, are there subjected to such a discussion by means of questions put in the very words which a teacher would use, and which the student answers for himself with the help of abundant references to the sections of the Grammar. The method is progressive, taking up one division after another of the Grammar until the manner of working every part of it in recitation drill has been thoroughly exemplified. The adjustment and use of the master key is thus made familiar to the student. This work is kept bound with Fowler's 12mo Grammar, but is sold separately for use with the larger work, to the more copious philological matter of which it has spe cial adaptation. W. C. F.

Durham, Conn., November, 1867.