The injustice and roguery of this passage, it is impossible for the casual reader fully to conceive. After forming a postulate to fit his own purpose, the critic ransacks my works to garble a passage that, by contortion and misapplication, shall fit it in such a manner as to make me utter a _libel_ against my own moral character! My pen falters while I expose the duplicity of this transaction. 'Murray simply intended to do good.' Kirkham says, 'My pretensions reach not so far.' So far as what? As to _do good_, of course. This is undoubtedly the meaning INTENDED to be conveyed by the wily critic. But let us look at the meaning of the passage, when taken in its original connexion, as it stands in my Elocution. It occurs at the close of that work, in some eulogistic remarks made upon Dr. JAMES RUSH, the distinguished author of the 'Philosophy of the Human Voice.' The whole passage reads thus: 'Dr. Rush, in his 'Philosophy of the Human Voice,' boldly addresses _posterity_. This is manly; and I hazard little in prophesying, that posterity will gladly give him a hearing. My pretensions reach not so far. To the present generation only I present my claims. Should it lend me a listening ear, and grant me its suffrages, the height of my ambition will be attained. Though unwilling to be a mere _time-server_, yet I know not that I have any thing on which to rest my claims upon generations to come.' Now instead of saying in this passage that 'my pretensions reach not so far as _to do good_,' I simply say, that they reach not so far _as those of Dr. Rush_!--and the passage is so free from ambiguity as to render it impossible for my opponent to have mistaken my meaning. Mistaken it, indeed! He very well KNEW, when he penned this slanderous paragraph, that my professed object in writing school-books WAS to 'do good;' and yet he has the hardihood to hoax his readers into the belief that I openly disavow any such intention! Comment is unnecessary. And yet this is the modest man who has the effrontery to call in question the _motives_ of him whom he traduces; to lecture him upon the principles of morality and justice; and cantingly to quote scripture _at_ him! He intimates that I have not the moral courage to 'dare to do right.' I have the courage to dare to _tell the truth_. But since my antagonist has maliciously attempted, by misquoting my language, to prove that I disavow any intention either to do good or to do right, perhaps I may be indulged in a few quotations, too, from my own works, merely with the view of presenting this matter in its proper light: 'In gratitude, therefore, to that public which has smiled so propitiously on his humble efforts to advance the cause of learning, he has endeavored, by unremitting attention to the _improvement_ of his work, to render it as _useful_ and as _unexceptionable_ as his time and talents would permit.' _Kirkham's Grammar_, p. 7.