A History of English Language

A history of the english language 258
have run their lengths. Good order and authority are now necessary. But where shall we
find them, and at the same time the obedience due to them? We must have recourse to the
old Roman expedient in times of confusion, and choose a Dictator. Upon this principle, I
give my vote for Mr. Johnson to fill that great and arduous post.” In 1756 Sheridan wrote,
“if our language should ever be fixed, he must be considered by all posterity as the
founder, and his dictionary as the corner stone.” 28 Boswell was apparently expressing the
opinion of his age when he spoke of Johnson as “the man who had conferred stability on
the language of his country.”
198. The Eighteenth-century Grammarians and Rhetoricians.
What Dr. Johnson had done for the vocabulary was attempted for the syntax by the
grammarians of the eighteenth century. Treatises on English grammar had begun to
appear in the sixteenth century 29 and in the seventeenth were compiled by even such
authors as Ben Jonson and Milton. These early works, however, were generally written
for the purpose of teaching foreigners the language or providing a basis for the study of
Latin grammar. Occasional writers like John Wallis (Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae,
1653) recognized that the plan of Latin grammar was not well suited to exhibiting the
structure of English, but not until the eighteenth century, generally speaking, was English
grammar viewed as a subject deserving of study in itself. Even then freedom from the
notions derived from Latin was something to be claimed as a novelty and not always
observed. William Loughton, Schoolmaster at Kensington, whose Practical Grammar of
the English Tongue (1734) went through five editions, inveighs against those who “have
attempted to force our Language (contrary to its Nature) to the Method and Rules of the
Latin Grammar” and goes so far as to discard the terms noun, adjective, and verb,
substituting names, qualities, affirmations. But most of the compilers of English
grammars came equipped for their task only with a knowledge of the classical languages
and tried to keep as many of the traditional concepts as could be fitted to a more analytic
and less inflectional language.
The decade beginning in 1760 witnessed a striking outburst of interest in English
grammar. In 1761 Joseph Priestley published TheRudiments of English Grammar. In it he
showed the independence, tolerance, and good sense that characterized his work in other
fields, and we shall have more to say of it below. It was followed about a month later by
Robert Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762). Lowth was a clergyman
who ultimately rose to be bishop of London. He was much more conservative in his
stand, a typical representative of the normative and prescriptive school of grammarians.
His gram-
28
T.Sheridan, British Education, I, 376.
29
See Emma Vorlat, The Development of English Grammatical Theory 1586–1737, with Special
Reference to the Theory of Parts of Speech (Leuven, Belgium, 1975).