PUBLISHERS' NOTE.

THESE Lectures are now offered to the public in the form in which they were left by the Author after a final revision. It will be seen that there are occasional modifications in the text the result of fresh light thrown on certain points by the critical research of the last twenty years; and much additional matter will be found in the new notes which, it is believed, will increase in no small degree the value of the work.

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PREFACE.

In pursuance of a plan for enlarging the means of education afforded by Columbia College in the city of New York, courses of instruction, called Post-graduate Lectures, were organized in the summer of 1858. I was invited by the Trustees of that institution to give readings on the English language. The Lectures which compose the present volume were prepared and delivered in the autumn and winter of 1858-1859, and they are printed very nearly in their original form. The title "Postgraduate" and the Introductory Address sufficiently indicate the class of persons for whom they were designed. It was supposed that the course might extend through two terms, and the plan of the Lectures was arranged accordingly. The purpose of the first or introductory series was to excite a more general interest among educated men and women in the history and essential character of their native tongue, and to recommend the study of the language in its earlier literary monuments rather than through the medium of grammars and linguistic treatises. The second term would have been devoted to what might be called a grammatical history of English literature, or a careful and systematic examination of the origin and progressive development of English, as exhibited in actual practice by the best native writers.

This statement will explain many apparent deficiencies in the Lectures now published, and especially the omission of any notice of the minor dramatists, and of the Scottish dialect and other local peculiarities of English, as well as the small amount

of critical discussion upon the diction, style, and literary merits of different authors.

In selecting illustrations, I have chosen to draw attention to the less known fields of our literature, and I have had recourse to works neither so rare as to be inaccessible, nor, though highly deserving, so common as to be familiar, to most readers. Hence I have seldom cited Shakespeare, Milton, Addison, or other authors whose productions are, or ought to be, in every man's hands, though I am aware that they would often have supplied more apposite quotations than those I have employed. In the number of illustrations I have been sparing, and I have introduced only so many as I thought necessary to make my meaning plain, and, in two or three important cases, to establish the point for which I was contending. It would have been easy to make a show of cheap learning by multiplying extracts, but I have preferred, after pointing out sufficient, and I fear for the most part neglected, sources of instruction, to leave to the reader the pleasant and profitable task of seeking authorities for himself.

The Lectures are addressed to the many, not to the few; to those who have received such an amount of elementary discipline as to qualify them to become their own best teachers in the attainment of general culture, not to the professed grammarian or linguistic inquirer. The well-edited republications of old English authors which have issued from the Boston press, the learned and valuable labors of Mr. Klipstein in Anglo-Saxon philology, and the admirable elucidations of Shakespeare by Mr. White and other American critics, abundantly prove the existence among us of the knowledge and the taste, the further promotion of which has been my special aim. These studies are, we may hope, soon to receive a new impulse and new aids from the publication of a complete dictionary of the English language—a work of prime necessity to all the common moral and literary interests of the British and American people, and which is now in course of execution by the London Philological So