All these reasons concerning the tongue and its importance being put together, not only prove the nation’s exercise in learning, and their practice in other dealings, but seem to infer--to say the least--no base-witted people, because it is not the part of fools to be so learned, so warlike, and so well-practised in affairs. I shall not need to prove any of these positions, either from foreign or home history, as my readers who are strangers will not urge me for them, and those of my own nation will not, I think, gainsay me in them, since they know them to be true, and may use them for their honour. Therefore I may well conclude my first position, that if use and custom, having the advantage of such length of time to refine our tongue, of so great learning and experience to furnish material for the refining, and of so good intelligence and judgment to direct it, have attained nothing which they refuse to let go in the correct manner of our writing, then our tongue has no certainty to trust to, but writes all at random. But the antecedent is, in my opinion, altogether impossible; therefore the consequent is a great deal more than probable, which is that our tongue has in her own possession very good evidence to prove her own correct writing; and though no man as yet, to judge by any public writing of his, seems to have seen this, yet the tongue itself is ready to show it to anyone who is able to read it, and to judge what evidence is trustworthy in regard to the standard of writing. Therefore, seeing I have proved sufficiently in my own opinion that there is great cause why our tongue should have some good standard in her own writing, and consider myself to have had the sight of that evidence by which such a standard appears most capable of justification, and am not altogether ignorant of how to give a decision upon it, I will do my best, according to the course which I said was kept in the first general refining of any speech, and has also been transferred to every secondary and particular tongue, to set forth some standard for English writing. This I will base upon those notes which I have observed in the tongue itself, the best and finest therein, which by comparison with themselves offer the means of correcting the worse, without either introducing any innovation, as those do who set forth new devices, or mistaking my way, as those do who despair that our tongue can be brought to any certainty without some marvellous foreign help. Thus much for the material fit for art in our tongue; now for the objections which charge it with infirmities.