den Irrthum aufmerksam machte, nicht fahren lassen, obgleich ihm das tiefe Gefühl und der glückliche Fluß seiner gleichzeitigen Gedichte (man vergl. das „Mailied“ und „Herbstgefühl“) abzugehn scheint. Jacobi dichtete es wohl gleichsam als Gegenstück zu dem obengenannten Herbstgefühl," welches in der Fris IV. 249 mit der Ueberschrift,, der Herbst 1775" erschienen war*).

*) Eine arge Verläumdung ist es, wenn Freimund Pfeiffer, S. 108 ff. be hauptet, Merck sei es gewesen, der das Band zwischen Friederiken und Goethen getrennt habe, freilich aus Liebe zu Goethe. Hies Band war schon bei der Abreise Goethe's von Straßburg auf immer gelöst, noch ehe Goethe Merck's Bekanntschaft gemacht hatte, was nach der Rückkehr von Straßburg erfolgte (B. 22, 70), wohl nicht vor dem! Jahre 1772.

H. Dünger.

Remarks on the English grammar and language with some illustrations from Lindley Murray's English grammar.

The ancient schools of grammatical learning were; that of the Greeks of the lower empire, commonly called the Byzantine grammarians, who taught and illustrated the works of the ancients; the Latin, which was much respected throughout the middle ages in consequence of the wants of the church, and which, on the revival of letters, was simplified end adapted to modern use; the Masora, which preserved both the writings and theory of the ancient Hebrew, and finally the Arabian, to which alone however, we shall have no further occasion to allude.

As soon as the art of printing made it desirable to appeal to the understandings of men through their mother tongues, it was found necessary to reduce these to order, and reference was forthwith made to these ancient schools, but above all to the Latin, for principles on which grammatical rules might be based. It was much to be regretted, that English scholars did not turn to the Greek in preference, there being these points of analogy; Greek has no ablative case any more than English; it has aorists which correspond remarkably to what some of our grammarians call our past, and some our imperfect tense; and it, like English, abounds in the use of the participle instead of connective adverbs. In consequence however of the adoption of the Latin grammatical model, those languages which, like it, abounded most in terminations were the easiest to reduce to rule, but on the other hand, those which had few terminations, and were consequently easiest to learn, puzzled the grammarians most, and were worst used by them. Dr. Johnson felt this, when he was obliged to preface his large dictionary by a grammar; so having no real knowledge of Anglosaxon, the parent type of the language, all his derivations being taken from Leye, Skinner, and Junius, hedeclared English had no syntax, and cut down his work to the smallest possible dimensions.

Thus in England the grammar of our own language was almost universally neglected, and the learned maintained, that if a young man knew the Latin, he knew enough. And therefore, though Ben Jonson had printed a very excellent tract on the subject, it was hardly known even to the readers of his other works, and though Dr. Wallis had given some excellent hints, and Swift had directed public attention to this defect in our éduca

tion, it was not till the publication of a small book by Dr. Lowth, Bishop of London that anything was done to instruct the young, or the illiterate classes on this important point. The great value of his grammar is, that being a Hebraist, he had been led to compare English with one of the most ancient and simple languages in the world, and so if he did not discover its real rules, proposed at any rate what very much resembled them. Meanwhile the encrease of wealth throughout the country was producing large middle schools and extending the influence of the middle class. It was found, that to be able to read the Bible, and understand the four first rules of arithmetic was no longer all that was necessary for a youth, who was not destined for the law or the church. It was doubtless to meet the demands of this class, that Sheridan wrote his pronouncing dictionary. Johnson pronounced the labour useless, the accents in his opinion being all that required marking, and this appears to be the general feeling among English scholars, so rarely is the book to be seen on their shelves. But the language had now broken loose from the letters of Latin, and the demand for the instruction of the middle classes was becoming hourly more urgent, when in the beginning of this century Lindley Murray an American by birth, residing near York, undertook to meet it in his series of grammatical works. Two important fields lay beyond the sphere of his enquiries; the whole period of our language lying between the accession of Henry VIII. and the Revolution, and the common language of the people in ordinary business and daily life, all the commercial phraseology and all the works of dramatists or novelists. The common judgment of scholars in the earlier part of George the third's reign was against Shakspear's diction, which Goldsmith pronounced obsolete, and Johnson, the first who vindicated his claims as a scientific dramatist, declared to be often obscure, bombastic, and vulgar. There might be much gold here, but Murray did not dare to use it. The learned had not adopted it, and it was to him therefore but uncoined bullion. It is astonishing, however, that he had not studied Hooker, whom Goldsmith pronounces to have never used an expression, that was not the purest English even in his day, and the rythmical beauty of whose prose is admirably classical. Still more surprising that he never quotes Barrow, whom Lord Chatham, himself a purist in phrases, proposed as a model of eloquence to William Pitt. The popular idiom was left in the hands of Cobbett, who uses it most dextrously to show, how badly the classical scholars often wrote their mother tongue. His grammar would be our best were it not written in the form of letters to his son, and did it not constantly obtrude his own views of the politics and statesmen of the regency and reign of George IV. Still it is deserving of more attention than it has received, from foreign scholars.

Murray's pretensions, however, to become au authority were, that he had employed abundant leisure on a very extensive reading, and collation for his purpose, including all the standard English authors of half the 17th. and the whole of the 18th. century. When he had formed an opinion he expressed it clearly and well, and, to use a French expression, il savait rédiger" much better than most Englishmen. This last

is an essential point for a good class or schoolbook; for a teacher has no time, and a pupil no ability, to supply what is wanting or illustrate what is obscure. On the other hand his demerits were, an utter ignorance of the original authorities in grammatical science, of Saxon, German, and all the languages and dialects cognate to the English, and but a very limited Knowledge of Latin and Greek. In addition to these, which one would certainly imagine a sufficiently long list of objections against his claim, he had evidently paid no attention to the history and antiquities of the language, and therefore had no idea, how certain forms had come to be adopted or rejected, and on what models the great writers who had adorned our native tongue had formed themselves.

But to give instances of the working of the various sorts of ignorance we have mentioned. It is a curious fact, though now not generally known, that several successive editions (we think we once saw a thirteenth) were published in which English was denied an accusative case to the noun. Now this, be it observed was not done by adopting the modern French system of subject and object; for the words Nominative and Genitive were admitted though not adopted, and then straightway the language was refused an Objective or Accusative This arose from revolting against latinizing the system of our grammar but would have been a fault impossible to a man who had any ideas of grammar as a science. But in truth his whole theory of case is wrong. He classes My Thy. His Her. and the plurals as adjectives, though they are the real genitives of I Thou etc. We give three cases of the use of adjectives in English to show that they cannot be classed among them

We can say.

This is true.

Here are the white.

The blue eyes.

We cannot say.

That is my.
Here are the my.
The my eyes.

We hope this is conclusive; but he fell into the mistake from not understanding the word Genitive, which means, that case which unnamed the subsequent word would be unintelligible, or the begetting case; for instance Where is my hat" I should not think of the hat did I not first think of, and name, myself. The mischief does not stop here; but he goes clear off the track of the language, and henceforth his nouns and verbs may be English words, but English nouns or verbs they assuredly are not. For in the pronouns we have a remarkable type of what happens all through the language. My is the real genitive, Mine the objective, and Ofme the solute, or the same case in solution.

The use of the objective genitive is to limit the idea to possession, to make it a merely relative idea, and that of the solute to introduce, with ease, notions of production, connexion, affirmation and negation. And exactly correspondent is the real theory of the English verb, which first declares its meaning, then limits it to a relative continuity, and then solves it, to admit the various notions stated above Thus

This is the real system of our pronouns nouns and verbs, and not to state it thus is not to write English grammar, but rather some ideas of general grammar, which may apparently coincide with it. It is essential to foreigners, that this should be well explained, or the grammar will prove a hindrance to them in learning the language. With these remarks, which we hope hereafter to develop more thoroughly and usefully, we dismiss the consideration of Chapt. V. Section and the opening observations of Sec. 3. together with the whole Chapter on Verbs or VI.

We will now consider Murray as a critic; our examples being found principally in the exercises designed to accompany his grammar. He condemns for its grammatical structure Milton's expression the fairest of her daughters Eve." Now the poets object was to call up to the eyes of the mind the daughters of Eve and place their general mother in the midst, supereminent in majesty and beauty; and the business of the grammatical critic therefore was to indicate it as an inimitable turn of phrase, unfit as such Italian structures generally are for our language. As it is, he leaves a doubt on our mind whether he understood Milton, and we are quite sure he knew nothing of Italian.

Pope wrote

Who touch'd Isaiah's hallow'd lips wih fire." The analogy of the tenses here seems to require touchedst which Murray would adopt; but another and a wider analogy immediately occurs to exclude it. The ed in the past tenses of verbs was never pronounced in English, and its use by the old poets and in the public reading of the Scriptures is no proof of the contrary. Several dialects had always prevailed in the island, and so it became necessary in grave declamation to sustain the reading against the speaking tones. And further, it was the custom of all old Churches to read the services in a species of recitative, which required the ed to be uttered. This custom was adopted by great popular preachers in their public discourses, and thence we have to this day the word Cant. In Pope's time the sound had disappeared in poetry, and the st ought to have disappeared with it; for without the e in ed, it is an unpronounceable compound of consonants. Here we feel the necessity of an historical study of the language.

Again, he criticises the phraseology of our received version in Matt. Chapr. XV. v. 31. In so much that the multitude wondered, when they saw the dumb to speak etc. etc." saying that it ought to have been those that had been dumb, which is altogether altering the sense of the passage, for the wonder was, that the healing was so instantaneous as to confound the senses. Accordingly it is a just and literal translation of the Greek, and is similarly rendered in German; and no one, we imagine, will deny to Luther great skill and mastery in the use of his splendid language.

But after all our business with Murray is limited to showing, that his grammar is not a good one, and if we wanted authority for this, we should be borne out by Coleridge, who perfectly scoffs at his pretensions. Murray may rest in peace for us; it was less his fault,