AN ENGLISH GRAMMAR: METHODICAL, ANALYTICAL, AND HISTORICAL. 1994 WITH A TREATISE ON THE ORTHOGRAPHY, PROSODY, INFLECTIONS AND NUMEROUS AUTHORITIES CITED IN ORDER OF HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT. BY PROFESSOR MAETZNER, OF BERLIN. TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN, WITH THE SANCTION OF THE AUTHOR, BY CLAIR JAMES GRECE, LL.B., FELLOW OF THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY. IN THREE VOLUMES.-VOL. I. LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 1874. LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS PREFACE BY THE TRANSLATOR. While the lexicographical department of the English tongue has been cultivated, and further productions are awaited, the grammatical has been almost completely neglected. The works of this class have not striven after a higher aim than the constitution of certain arbitrary formulæ for the attainment of a superficial propriety in the use of the stores of the language; formulæ tried by which the greatest lights of English literature would, almost without exception, stand condemned, while a scientific foundation for the formulæ and rules has hardly been attempted. English grammar has, in fact, under the hands of native grammarians, barely emerged from the region of dogmatism. From this observation the work of Dr. Latham must be excepted, yet the purport of that work is rather archeological than grammatical; and the learned author probably never contemplated that his work would be resorted to for the elucidation of a doubtful construction or idiom. While Englishmen have thus been content to leave the usage of their own tongue, so far as its more delicate grammatical features are concerned, blind, instinctive and unconscious, the nation in which erudition and scientific philology are, as it were, indigenous, having already subjected the classical tongues to an exhaustive scientific treatment, as well lexicographically as grammatically, |