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.