A Grammar, like a Dictionary, was provided for in the statutes of the Academy. But the original members of that body, few of whom were men of note and authority, showed a marked unwillingness to approach the difficult discussions involved in such a work, and did not undertake them at all till 1740. Even then, they went on slowly and with anxiety; so that the result of their labors did not appear till 1771. For this delay they were not wholly in fault. They had little to guide them, except the rival Grammars of Gayoso and San Pedro, which were published while the Academy was preparing its own, and the original attempt of Lebrixa, which had long been forgotten. But, after so protracted a labor, the Academicians should have produced something more worthy of their claims; for what they gave to the world, at last, was an unphilosophical and unpractical work, which, though subjected to frequent revision since, is hardly an outline of what it ought to be, and quite inferior to the Grammar of Salvá.[284] [284] Of Lebrixa’s Grammar I have already spoken, (Vol. I. p. 549,) and the memory of it was now so much revived that a counterfeit edition of it was published, about 1775, in small folio, hardly, I should judge from its appearance, with the intention of deceiving. But such things were not uncommon about that time, as Mendez says, who thinks the edition in question had been printed about twenty years when he published his work in 1796. (See Typog., p. 242.) It is, however, already so rare, that I obtained a copy of it with difficulty. That of Gayoso was first printed at Madrid, in 1745, 12mo, and that of San Pedro in Valencia, 1769, 12mo, which last Gayoso, disguising himself under a sort of anagram, attacked, in his “Conversaciones Críticas, por Don Antonio Gobeyos,” (Madrid, 1780, 12mo,) where he shows that San Pedro was not so original as he ought to have been, but treats his Grammar with more harshness than it deserved. Salvá’s “Gramática de la Lengua Castellana como ahora se halla” was first printed in 1831, and the sixth edition appeared at Madrid in 1844, 12mo; a striking proof of the want of such a book.