Julius Cæsar, Act 3: Antony's Funeral Oration over Cæsar's Body.
Kirkham has vehemently censured me for omitting the brackets in which he encloses the words that be supposes to be understood in this couplet. But he forgets two important circumstances: First, that I was quoting, not the bard, but the grammatist; Second, that a writer uses brackets, to distinguish his own amendments of what he quotes, and not those of an other man. Hence the marks which he has used, would have been improper for me. Their insertion does not make his reading of the passage good English, and, consequently, does not avert the point of my criticism.
The foregoing Review of Kirkham's Grammar, was published as an extract from my manuscript, by the editors of the Knickerbocker, in their number for June, 1837. Four months afterwards, with friendships changed, they gave, him the "justice" of appearing in their pages, in a long and virulent article against me and my works, representing me, "with emphatic force," as "a knave, a liar, and a pedant." The enmity of that effusion I forgave; because I bore him no personal ill-will, and was not selfish enough to quarrel for my own sake. Its imbecility clearly proved, that in this critique there is nothing with which he could justly find fault. Perceiving that no point of this argument could be broken, he changed the ground, and satisfied himself with despising, upbraiding, and vilifying the writer. Of what use this was, others may judge.
This extraordinary grammarian survived the publication of my criticism about ten years, and, it is charitably hoped, died happily; while I have had, for a period somewhat longer, all the benefits which his earnest "castigation" was fit to confer. It is not perceived, that what was written before these events, should now be altered or suppressed by reason of them. With his pretended "defence," I shall now concern myself no further than simply to deny one remarkable assertion contained in it; which is this—that I, Goold Brown, "at the funeral of Aaron Ely," in 1830, "praised, and highly praised, this self-same Grammar, and declared it to be 'A GOOD WORK!'"—KIRKHAM, in the Knickerbocker, Oct., 1837, p. 362. I treated him always courteously, and, on this solemn occasion, walked with him without disputing on grammar; but, if this statement of his has any reasonable foundation, I know not what it is.—G. B. in 1850.
[17] See Notes to Pope's Dunciad, Book II, verse 140.
[18] A modern namesake of the Doctor's, the Rev. David Blair, has the following conception of the utility of these speculations: "To enable children to comprehend the abstract idea that all the words in a language consist but of nine kinds, it will be found useful to explain how savage tribes WHO having no language, would first invent one, beginning with interjections and nouns, and proceeding from one part of speech to another, as their introduction might successively be called for by necessity or luxury."—Blair's Pract. Gram., Pref., p. vii.
[19] "Interjections, I shewed, or passionate exclamations, were the first elements of speech. Men laboured to communicate their feelings to one another, by those expressive cries and gestures which nature taught them."—Dr. Hugh Blair's Lectures, p. 57.
[20] "It is certain that the verb was invented before the noun, in all the languages of which a tolerable account has been procured, either in ancient or modern times."—Dr. Alex. Murray's History of European Languages, Vol. I, p. 326.
[21] The Greek of this passage, together with a translation not very different from the foregoing, is given as a marginal note, in Harris's Hermes, Book III, Chap. 3d.
[22] The Bible does not say positively that there was no diversity of languages before the flood; but, since the life-time of Adam extended fifty-six years into that of Lamech, the father of Noah, and two hundred and forty-three into that of Methuselah, the father of Lamech, with both of whom Noah was contemporary nearly six hundred years, it is scarcely possible that there should have occurred any such diversity, either in Noah's day or before, except from some extraordinary cause. Lord Bacon regarded the multiplication of languages at Babel as a general evil, which had had no parallel but in the curse pronounced after Adam's transgression. When "the language of all the earth" was "confounded," Noah was yet alive, and he is computed to have lived 162 years afterwards; but whether in his day, or at how early a period, "grammar" was thought of, as a remedy for this evil, does not appear. Bacon says, "Concerning speech and words, the consideration of them hath produced the science of grammar. For man still striveth to redintegrate himself in those benedictions, of which, by his fault, he hath been deprived; and as he hath striven against the first general curse by the invention of all other arts, so hath he striven to come forth from the second general curse, which was the confusion of tongues, by the art of grammar; whereof the use in a mother tongue is small, in a foreign tongue more, but most in such foreign tongues as have ceased to be vulgar tongues, and are turned only to learned tongues."—See English Journal of Education, Vol. viii, p. 444.