In 1840, so little had been done by Englishmen for the English language, that in acknowledging my great obligations to foreign scholars, I was only able to speak to what _might be done_ by my own countrymen. Since then, however, there has been a good {xiii} beginning of what is likely to be done well. My references to the works of Messrs. Kemble, Garnet, and Guest, show that my authorities are _now_ as much English as German. And this is likely to be the case. The details of the syntax, the illustrations drawn from our provincial dialects, the minute history of individual words, and the whole system of articulate sounds can, for the English, only be done safely by an Englishman: or, to speak more generally, can, for any language, only be dealt with properly by the grammarian whose mother-tongue is that language. The _Deutsche Grammatik_ of Grimm is the work not of an age nor of a century, but, like the great history of the Athenian, a [Greek: ktema eis aei]. It is the magazine from whence all draw their facts and illustrations. Yet it is only the proper German portion that pretends to be exhaustive. The Dutch and Scandinavians have each improved the exhibition of their own respective languages. Monument as is the _Deutsche Grammatik_ of learning, industry, comprehensiveness, and arrangement, it is not a book that should be read to the exclusion of others: nor must it be considered to exhibit the grammar of the Gothic languages, in a form unsusceptible of improvement. Like all great works, it is more easily improved than imitated. One is almost unwilling to recur to the old comparison between Aristotle, who absorbed the labour of his predecessors, and the Eastern sultans, who kill-off their younger brothers. But such is the case with Grimm and his fore-runners in philology. Germany, that, in {xiv} respect to the Reformation, is content to be told that Erasmus laid the egg which Luther hatched, must also acknowledge that accurate and systematic scholars of other countries prepared the way for the _Deutsche Grammatik_,--Ten Kate in Holland; Dowbrowsky, a Slavonian; and Rask, a Dane. Nor are there wanting older works in English that have a value in Gothic philology. I should be sorry to speak as if, beyond the writers of what may be called the modern school of philology, there was nothing for the English grammarian both to read and study. The fragments of Ben Jonson's English Grammar are worth the entireties of many later writers. The work of Wallis is eminently logical and precise. The voice of a mere ruler of rules is a sound to flee from; but the voice of a truly powerful understanding is a thing to be heard on all matters. It is this which gives to Cobbett and Priestley, to Horne Tooke as a subtle etymologist, and to Johnson as a practical lexicographer, a value in literary history, which they never can have in grammar. It converts unwholesome doctrines into a fertile discipline of thought.