successor Adams. Perhaps we are, just now, not very far distant from the precise moment, for making some grand attempt, with regard to fixing the standard of our language (no language can be fixed) in America. Such an attempt would, I think, succeed in America, for the same reasons that would make it fail in England; whither, however, it would communicate its good effects. Deservedly immortal would be that patriot, on either side of the Atlantick, who should succeed in such an attempt.

In the copy in the Library of Congress a red arrow has been placed in the margin, pointing to the spot where Mr. Jefferson should have been mentioned. Whether this was Mr. Jefferson’s copy, and the arrow placed there by himself, cannot now be ascertained.

Sir Herbert Croft, 1751-1816, was forced by the state of his finances to go to Hamburg in 1797, and did not return to his own country until the end of 1800. For another work by him see no. 4338.

In his essay on Anglo-Saxon, Jefferson describes Wallis as the best of our English grammarians, and quotes a passage from the preface to this work to illustrate a point: From these aberrations, into which our great Anglo-Saxon leader D ^r. Hickes has been seduced by too much regard to the structure of the Greek & Latin languages and too little to their radical difference from that of the Gothic family, we have to recall our footsteps into the right way, and we shall find our path rendered smoother, plainer, and more direct to the object of profiting of the light which each dialect throws on the other. and this even as to the English language, appears to have been the opinion of Wallis the best of our English Grammarians who, in the preface to his English grammar says ‘omnes ad Latinæ linguæ normam hanc nostram Anglicanum nimium exigentes multa inutilia præcepta de nominum casibus, generibus et declinationibus, atque verborum temporibus, modis et conjugationibus, de nominum item et verborum regimine, aliisque similibus tradiderunt, quæ a lingua nostra sunt prorsus aliena, adeoque confusionem potius et obscuritatem pariunt, quam explicationi inserviunt.’

The passage occurs on pages xxv and xxvi of the Preface to this work, and has been slightly edited by Jefferson, and a passage in parentheses omitted.

John Wallis, 1616-1703, English scholar, scientist and mathematician, published the first edition of this work in Oxford, 1652. The study necessary for the composition of the first section, De Loquela, led Wallis to the invention of a method for teaching the art of speech to deaf mutes. The epistle to Thomas Beverley is dated from Oxford, Sept. 30, 1698. For an account of this book, see the description of the first edition in Madan’s Oxford Books, 2238.