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209 word, one might say that we never shall have a perfectly unexceptionable grammar, until we have one without a sin- gle exception in it. The business of wisdom, in all its operations, is to breathe the spirit of order into that which is, or appears to be, without order. Thus in language a philosophical grammarian will seek to discover, to arrange, and to classify, the principles and the analogies by which a nation has been guided and influenced in fashioning the vocal symbols of its thoughts. In Greek grammar a good deal has already been effected with this view : and a new life has been infused into it by the principle, which Hermann has done more than any other writer to enforce and illus- trate, that nothing in it is arbitrary, that every rule has a cause, and that every deviation from that rule must also have a cause of its own, though the fragmentary nature of our materials may often impede or prevent our detecting it. Instead, I say, of introducing the disorderliness and bad housewifery of our English grammars into the Greek, we might employ our time more profitably in trying to make our own grammars a little tidier. At present we have a single high column of verbs piled up in the middle of the room, while all that will not suit that pile, to the amount of about two hundred, lie scattered over the floor in con- fusion. Surely one cannot hold out this as a pattern of ar- rangement. Moreover those two hundred verbs, be it re- membered, belong to the prime stock of the language, being all, I believe, without a single exception, Anglosaxon primi- tives (see Vol. I. p. 6QS) : and they are among the words which occur the most frequently, and have given birth to the largest families. In Germany also the state of the case some time since was much the same. There too every verb, which did not answer exactly to the one regulation-standard, was called irregular : and Adelung makes the somewhat singu- lar observation, that " originally all verbs seem to have been irregular (ursprünglich waren wohl alle Verba irregular);" that is to say, they did not conform to a rule, which did not exist. It is a curious instance of the power of technicalities over thoughts, that he was not aware of the nonsense he was talking. A language could no more coalesce out of irregular words, than a world could out of the indeterminate atoms Vol, II. No. 4. D d