of words, and that the class to which they grammatically belonged had nothing to do with the class of ideas they represented. It is now above twenty years since the two quarto volumes of the _Diversions of Purley_ were published, and fifty since the same theory was promulgated in the celebrated _Letter to Dunning_. Yet it is a curious example of the _Spirit of the Age_ that Mr. Lindley Murray’s Grammar (a work out of which Mr. C*** helps himself to English, and Mr. M*** to style[42]) has proceeded to the thirtieth edition in complete defiance of all the facts and arguments there laid down. He defines a noun to be the name of a thing. Is quackery a thing, _i.e._ a substance? He defines a verb to be a word signifying _to be, to do, or to suffer_. Are being, action, suffering, verbs? He defines an adjective to be the name of a quality. Are not _wooden_, _golden_, _substantial_ adjectives? He maintains that there are six cases in English nouns, that is, six various terminations without any change of termination at all,[43] and that English verbs have all the moods, tenses, and persons that the Latin ones have. This is an extraordinary stretch of blindness and obstinacy. He very formally translates the Latin Grammar into English, (as so many had done before him) and fancies he has written an English Grammar; and divines applaud, and schoolmasters usher him into the polite world, and English scholars carry on the jest, while Horne Tooke’s genuine anatomy of our native tongue is laid on the shelf. Can it be that our politicians smell a rat in the Member for Old Sarum? That our clergy do not relish Parson Horne? That the world at large are alarmed at acuteness and originality greater than their own? What has all this to do with the formation of the English language or with the first conditions and necessary foundation of speech itself? Is there nothing beyond the reach of prejudice and party-spirit? It seems in this, as in so many other instances, as if there was a patent for absurdity in the natural bias of the human mind, and that folly should be _stereotyped_! SIR WALTER SCOTT