But perhaps the most strenuous and elaborate attempt to reform us in this particular direction was made by Dr. Jones, who drew up a _Practical Phonography_, "Or the New Art of Rightly Spelling and Writing Words by the Sound thereof," for the use of the Duke of Gloucester, son of Queen Anne, somewhere before 1701, in which year he communicated the fruit of his researches to the public. His description of the art as a new one must be interpreted by his ignorance of the previous labours of Bullokar and Butler, and as a proof that the proposal had met with no response; and the fact that the Doctor's own volume is almost unknown may be capable of a similar explanation. I have no means of judging what kind of reception was accorded to Dr. Jones at the time; but the tone of that gentleman's Preface was certainly not propitiatory or diffident; for he freely speaks of the miserable ignorance of the world and of his own condescension to the undertaking, in order to remove or enlighten it; and yet, from another point of view, he addressed himself to the task of instituting a grammatical code based on that very ignorance of which he complains. For you have not to travel beyond the introductory remarks to stumble on the following directions for the pronunciation and _ergo_ the spelling of half-a-dozen familiar words and proper names:--_Aron_, _baut_ (bought), _Mair_, _Dixnary_, _pais_ (pays), and _Wooster_; and at the same time on the very threshold of his text he allows "that English Speech is the Art of signifying the Mind by human Voice, as it is commonly used in England, (particularly in London, the Universities, or at Court)." Dr. Jones was a learned and well read medical man, and the monument of his erudition and scholarship lies before me in the shape of this portentous volume of 144 pages, which, if the young Duke had not died from another cause, might have proved fatal to him and to his royal mother's hopes of a successor in the Stuart line. That our national pronunciation is slovenly and against philological laws, nobody will probably deny; but it would not be an improvement or a gain to corrupt our written language by levelling it down to our spoken one. INDEX. Abacus, 209-15. A. B. C., 88, 209-15, 234-7. Abingdon School, 132, 183. Absence from school severely treated, 108-9. Academies, private, 143-4, 170-4, 178-83. Accomplishments taught at the _Musæum Minervæ_, 170-4. ---- at a private academy in 1676, 178-9. _Acolastus_, 127, 257. Addison's _Letter from Italy_, 203. Æsop, 48, 99, 139, 141, 287. Ainsworth, Robert, 229-30. Aldus, 76. Ale, 140. Alexander de Villâ Dei, 45-6, 243-4. Alfric, Archbishop, his _Colloquy_, 30. Allibone, John, 12. Alphabet, Jonson's remarks on our, 234-6. _Alphabetum Latino-Anglicum_, 1543, 124. America, 33-4. American Plantations, 17, 84. Amwell, 51-3, 200. Andreas, Bernardus, 68, 102. Andrew of Wyntown, 184. Anglo-Gallic dictionary, 35.