London : C. J. CLAY AND SONS, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,

AVE MARIA LANE.
Glasgow: 263, ARGYLE STREET.

PREFACE.

HIS book contains the Elements of English Grammar,

T a

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 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