ELEMENTS

OF

ENGLISH GRAMMAR.

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS London: FETTER LANE, E.C.

C. F. CLAY, MANAGER

Edinburgh: 100, PRINCES STREET

Berlin: A. ASHER AND CO.

Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS

few York: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS Bombay and Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.

All Rights reserved

,,

OF

ENGLISH GRAMMAR

WITH A CHAPTER ON ESSAY-WRITING

BY

ALFRED S. WEST, M.A.

TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON.

CAMBRIDGE:
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Key to the Questions contained in West's Elements of English Grammar and English Grammar for Beginners, by ALFRED S. WEST, M.A. Cambridge University Press. Second Impression. Price 35. 6d. net.

425
W51
Ed. 3

First Edition 1893
Reprinted 1894, 1895, 1897

New Edition 1898
Reprinted 1899, 1901, 1902, 1903, 1905
Revised Edition (101,000 to 115,000), 1907

Reprinted (116,000 to 535,000), 1910

701287

PREFACE.

TH

50

HIS book contains the Elements of English Grammar,

but it does not profess to be a complete manual of the English Language. Boys and girls from thirteen to seventeen years of age are the readers whose wants it has been written to supply. For a treatise intended to meet the requirements of older students, a different choice of materials would often have been made, and the materials chosen would have been treated in a different fashion. Hence it will be found that in the following pages no mention is made of some of the questions which are discussed in larger works; that other questions are touched upon, but not probed to the bottom; that here and there a definition lacks completeness, logical accuracy being sacrificed to intelligibility; and that the details of early English accidence have been inserted only when modern forms would be inexplicable without them.

There are s elementary books which furnish information so copious

that young readers cannot see the wood for the trees. One who undertakes to instruct boys and girls needs constantly to bear in mind όσο πλέον ήμισυ παντός-how much the half is greater than the whole, in order that

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