PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION. In preparing this edition for the press, the compiler has sought to render his work more complete by adding Part VIII., supplementary to what appeared in the former editions, and particularly adapted to the wants of the more advanced students in common schools or academies. It will be found to embrace some of the more important and practical instructions found in works on Logic, and which properly belong to a complete treatise on the Art of Composition. The whole work has been carefully revised, but it was found necessary to make only a very few alterations, and those so slight, chiefly corrections of typographical errors, that no inconvenience will be experienced in using this edition with any of the former. The compiler would take the liberty to add, that after a trial of one year in the institution under his care, during which several classes, in the different departments, have been carried through the work, it has been found peculiarly well adapted to the important objects for A which it was compiled. He believes it is not too much to say, that it not only embraces, but presents in a more convenient method and form, the best portions, at least the most useful, of the works of Blair, Whateley, Beattie, Campbell, and Watts, while it comprehends, besides, the Practical Exercises, the History of the English Language and Literature, and the selections from British and American Poets, with critical notices, which did not enter into the plan of any of the above works. As now enlarged, the work will, it is hoped, be deemed worthy of a general introduction into academies, while it has not thereby lost, in any degree, its adaptedness to the wants of common schools, especially in the improved condition to which they are advancing from year to year. Watertown, January 2, 1846. III. Abridgment of Complex Sentences IV. Abridgment of Complex Sentences (continued) VI. Variety of Structure and Expression I. STYLE.-II. FIGURATIVE Language. CHAP. I. Of Language, and its Origin 40 CHAP. V. Composition VI. Genius VII. Taste XIX. Of Harmony XX. Of Sound united to the Sense XXI. Choice of Words with a View to Energy and Vivacity 13-1 IV. Of the early History of the English Language V. The Effect on it of the Saxon Conquest VI. The Effect on it of the Danish Conquest VII. The Effect on it of the Norman Conquest VIII. Of the Modern History of our Language CHAP. I. English Literature under the Tudors and the first Stuarts. 197 II. English Literature from the Restoration to the Reign of III. English Literature of the present Age IV. English Novels and Romances 1 203 |