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From the PREFACE. THE present work on English Grammar forms a part of Harper's Language-Series. While it is the most advanced hook of that series, it at the same time furnishes by itself a complete grammatical course for ungraded and for private schools. Learning our mother tongue ought to be the most interesting of school studies; and yet, for nearly a century, countless numbers of technical grammars, all modeled after Lindley Murray, have been, by turns, the object of aversion to successive generations of school children. This is not to be wondered at. The traditional rules of syntax, and the time-honored nomenclature of etymology, have come down to us a heritage from the elder grammarians, who, writing before philology became a science, put forth all their strength in a too successful endeavor to subject our simple and peculiar English speech to the vassalage of Latin forms. The introduction, some thirty years ago, of the method ^ of Sentential ANALYSIS, devised by the German philologist Becker, and adapted to American school use in the meritorious works of Professor Greene and others, marks the only considerable innovation, in this country, on the Murray system. The new doctrine excited great interest, and soon ran into a wide currency. When we consider, however, that Analysis is the syntax of English to no greater a degree than it is the syntax of any other speech; that it is, in point of fact, general or universal syntax, it is not strange that it failed to realize the brilliant results claimed for it by its early champions, and that of late it is falling out of favor with judicious teachers, who find that Analysis, while a curious and interesting study, and not without its value as a means of mental discipline, fails to accomplish the professed design of English grammar, which design now is, and always has been, to teach the art of speaking and writing the English language with propriety... ..

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