If our Letters were thus Corrected, a stranger, or home-bred, might learn as much English in a day, as otherwise in a month or more.
Put nature in arts Cradle, and its fet in the stox.
There have been many changes of [G]overnment this hundred years, yet the same errors rule, that we are, and no body for promisiz better.
But what ails you to be so bitter against the Letters? Why I look at them as the dark-house to lodge all our errors in, and a feather-bed, where all, both errors and unknown sins may be lodg’d, therefore I pull out the Straws out of your bolster, that I may let light into the house, that you ma see you lodge in a thorn-bush instead of a feather-bed. But I find, (God [h]elp us both) that at all final errors are friends of the greater, that neither am I able by these letters to speak, nor you to understand me by Writing. Nay no man is by old Letters able so much as to hint what he would have the new ones call’d, but the old will insinuate their sufficiency.
The Fourth Part, of Instructions Instructed, or Light out of Darkness.
The first Table, wherein the self-same sounds are Spell’d by different Letters, first Right, and then Wrong.
A as a, Manna, Joshua, Asia, Judah, Hannah; why ma we not cast awa the Hebrew He out of words, as well as the Latins and Greeks have done? Day, say, their, they, fair. These Letters that be, not pronounc’d are very wellcome to be gone, the door stands wide open.
E, as be, the, Phebe, yea, weigh, key, holy. If propagating Error be lawful, ’tis lawful to teach wrong.
I, as Ivi; lie, lye, thy, why, thigh, buy, for the first might as lawfully be spell’d like the last, as UYe I, as the last is wrong spell’d, but more lawfully ma the last be spell’d as your first.