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An excerpt from the PREFACE. The purity of the English language is as dear to educated Americans as it is to ourselves. One of them (A. J. C.) thus writes in a recent number of the New York 'Round Table': The corrupter of a language stabs straight at the heart of his country. He commits a crime against every individual of the nation, for he throws a poison into a stream from which all must drink. He wrongs himself first, and afterward every man and woman whose native speech he mars. It is the duty of every educated man to guard zealously the purity of his native tongue. No inheritance which can descend to an individual or to a nation is comparable in value with a language which possesses words into which may be coined all great thoughts, pure motives, noble enter- prises, grand endeavors, the wealth of philosophy, poetry, and history, and even the beauty of the canvas and the glory of the marble. He who does aught to preserve such a language deserves the gratitude of his people, as he who mars an organism so beautiful and precious, merits their severest displeasure. He who hunts down and pillories a slang phrase, a vulgarism, a corruption of any kind, is a public benefactor. In the fulfilment of the sacred trust which rests on him as an educated man, he adds a stone to the bulwark of his nation's safety and greatness. My contribution towards that bulwark is this little work, which urges upon every Englishman the study of his own language, and points out to him the disgrace he may incur by neglecting it. Incidentally the book cautions him against self- deception in this matter. It tells him of one who had received a collegiate education, had attained academical honours, was raised to the deanery of Canterbury, and who considered himself to be such a thorough master of the language, that he actually assumed the office of public lecturer on the Queen's English; and yet was so ignorant of its simplest rules, that the grossness of his errors in grammar and in composition, even in his lectures, made him the laughing-stock of those whom he thought himself competent to instruct. o But I wish it to be distinctly understood that in writing these criticisms I have not been actuated by any feeling of ill-will towards the Dean of Canterbury. I object not to the man, but to the man's language; it is extremely faulty; and since the faults of teachers, if suffered to pass unreproved, soon become the teachers of faults, it was necessary that someone should take upon himself the task of demonstrating, as 'The Edinburgh Review' said, that while the Dean undertook to instruct others, he was himself hut a castaway in matters of grammar. As a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, one of the objects of which is to preserve the purity of the English language, I took upon myself the demonstration. How far I have succeeded, each individual reader will determine for himself; but the yearly increasing sale of ' The Dean's English bears very flattering testimony to the fact that the work meets with the approval of the public generally. The best evidence, however, of its popularity is to be found in the circumstance that the Dean's own publishers have been tempted to reprint the book in America.

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