A History of English Language

The appeal to authority, 1650-1800 259
mar was more in accordance with the tendencies of the time and soon swept the field. At
least twenty-two editions appeared during the eighteenth century, and its influence was
spread by numerous imitators, including the well-known Lindley Murray. The British
Grammar by James Buchanan appeared in the same year. A somewhat more elementary
manual, by John Ash, was published in 1763 with the title Grammatical Institutes. It was
designed as an “easy introduction to Dr. Lowth’s English Grammar.” These were the
most popular grammars in the eighteenth century. In 1784 Noah Webster published the
second part of A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, which enjoyed much
prestige in America and not a little circulation in England. Most of these books were the
work of men with no special qualifications for the thing they attempted to do. There
were, to be sure, writings on linguistic matters that were not in the mold of the practical,
prescriptive grammars. A philosophical concern for linguistic universals, especially lively
in France at the time, found expression in England in works such as John Wilkins’ Essay
towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) and James Harris’
Hermes (1751). After more than a century of relative neglect these and other “universal
grammars” have recently been revived because of similarities that have been found
between them and certain aspects of contemporary linguistics. 30 The effect of these
philosophical writings upon the development of specific structures in the English
language is difficult to assess, but it seems to have been negligible. More important for
the history of the English language are the works of more practical and often less gifted
grammarians who turned philosophical concerns into linguistic prescriptions. They
exerted a considerable influence, especially through the use of their books in the schools,
and it will be necessary to consider their aims, the questions they attempted to settle, their
method of approach, and the results they achieved. 31
With them belongs another group that may be called the rhetoricians. Though they did
not compile grammars, they often discussed the same questions of usage. Of these one of
the most important was Thomas Sheridan, father of the dramatist. His most important
work was a lengthy treatise called British Education (1756), in which he attempted to
show “that a revival of the art of speaking, and the study of our language, might
contribute, in a great measure,” to the cure of “the evils of immorality, ignorance and
false taste.” The second part of his
30
See Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics (New York, 1966), an influential but professedly
polemical account. Cf. Robin Lakoff, rev. of facsimile ed. of Grammaire générale et raisonée, ou
La Grammaire du Port-Royal, Language, 45 (1969), 343–64, and Hans Aarsleff, “The History of
Linguistics and Professor Chomsky,” Language, 46 (1970), 570–85.
31
Here, too, discriminations must be made among grammars such as Lowth’s, which by the light of
the times was by no means contemptible, and inferior imitations such as Murray’s. See R.S.Sugg,
Jr., “The Mood of Eighteenth-Century English Grammar,” PQ, 43 (1964), 239–52.