statement of his ruling principle is that he was governed by usage, but did not sufficiently discriminate between usage by educated and usage by uneducated people; he had, indeed, so violent a prejudice against grammarians in general, and so much respect for popular instinct, that it was a recommendation to him when a phrase was condemned by the grammarians, while in common use by the people. For example he says in a Letter to the Governors, Instructors, and Trustees of the Universities and other Seminaries of Learning in the United States, "According to the grammars, the pronoun you, being originally plural, must always be followed by a plural verb, though referring to a single person. This is not correct, for the moment the word is generally used to denote an individual, it is to be considered as a pronoun in the singular number, the following verb should be regulated by that circumstance and considered as in the singular.... Indeed, in the substantive verb, the word has taken the singular form of the verb, you was, which practice is getting the better of old rules and probably will be established." But old rules have considerable vitality, and the general opinion still is that if an individual permits himself to be represented by a plural pronoun he must accept all the grammatical consequences. "I will even venture to assert," he continues in the same letter, "that two thirds of all the corruptions in our language have been introduced by learned grammarians, who, from a species of pedantry acquired in schools, and from a real ignorance of the original principle of the English tongue, have been for ages attempting to correct what they have supposed vulgar errors, but which are in fact established analogies.... In this country it is desirable that inquiries should be free, and opinions unshackled. North America is destined to be the seat of a people more numerous probably than any nation now existing with the same vernacular language, unless one except some Asiatic nations. It would be little honorable to the founders of a great empire to be hurried prematurely into errors and corruptions by the mere force of authority."

This appeal to the pride of the young nation is a curious instance of the growing consciousness of Americanism which was more rampant in Webster than in any of his contemporaries. The passages which I have been quoting intimate the deference which Webster displayed toward the people. He was one of the first to carry a spirit of democracy into letters. Intense Federalist as he was, his Federalism agreed with a stout anti-aristocratic spirit; and throughout his work one may detect a confidence in the common sense of the people which was as firm as Franklin's, and was used, in his enthusiasm, to determine questions in language and literature never before brought to such a test. Unquestionably a main source of Webster's strength and success lay in this democratic instinct; it was not patriotism alone, it was the spirit which hailed the new democracy, and in its very contempt of precedent and historic authority disclosed its rude self-reliance.

This temper had a more favorable field for its exhibition in the third part of "A Grammatical Institute" which bore the sub-title: "An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking; calculated to improve the Minds and refine the Taste of Youth, and also to instruct them in the Geography, History, and Politics of the United States. To which are prefixed Rules in Elocution, and Directions for expressing the Principal Passions of the Mind." This laboriously emphatic title-page bears the motto from Mirabeau: "Begin with the infant in his cradle; let the first word he lisps be Washington." In strict accordance with this patriotic sentiment, the compiler gives a series of lessons which would not be inappropriate to any girl or boy who in infancy had performed the feat of lisping the easy-going name which Mirabeau himself probably had some difficulty in conquering. "In the choice of pieces," says Webster in his preface, "I have been attentive to the political interests of America. I consider it as a capital fault in all our schools that the books generally used contain subjects wholly uninteresting to our youth; while the writings that marked the Revolution, which are perhaps not inferior to the orations of Cicero and Demosthenes, and which are calculated to impress interesting truths upon young minds, lie neglected and forgotten. Several of those masterly addresses of Congress, written at the commencement of the late Revolution, contain such noble sentiments of liberty and patriotism that I cannot help wishing to transfuse them into the breasts of the rising generation." Accordingly, he makes abundant room in his book for orations by Hancock, Warren, Livingston, and Joel Barlow, and for poetry by Freneau, Dwight, Barlow, and Livingston again, all kept in countenance by Cicero, Publius Scipio, Shakespeare, and Pope, while a tribute is paid to "Mr. Andrus of Yale College, since deceased," by the insertion of "A Dialogue written in the year 1776." To plump from Joel Barlow at the North Church in Hartford, July 4, 1787, to a portion of Cicero's oration against Verres, probably produced no severe shock, since both orations were intended as exercises in speaking, and the former by its structure was removed to about the same chronological distance from the young speaker as the latter. It would be a curious inquiry how far writers of historical addresses in America have from the beginning been affected by the necessity which a regard for ancient models laid upon them of fitting the facts of our Revolutionary War to oratorical periods, and how far popular conceptions of the beginning of our national life have been formed by the "pieces" which young Americans have been called upon to speak. The Roman was the most distinguished predecessor by name of this new republic, and enthusiastic patriots went to it for literary furniture as freely as their ancestors in New England applied to the Jewish theocracy. In the contemporary ephemeral literature of the time there is a faint survival of the older forms, but a more energetic reproduction of Roman symbols, taken sometimes directly from Latin literature and history, sometimes indirectly from the chill Augustan renaissance of the English eighteenth-century literature. The interior manners of the two periods are well contrasted in two sets of letters, the earlier passing between John and Margaret Winthrop, the later between John and Abigail Adams. The Scriptural allusions which crowd the Winthrop letters have not wholly disappeared in the Adams letters, but they are more formally introduced as fragmentary bits of wisdom, and appear side by side with quotations from Pliny and Rollin's "Ancient History;" Mrs. Adams signs herself Portia; the vessels which carry the letters are the Apollo, the Juno, and the Minerva; and classical allusions constitute a good share of such playfulness as may be found.

The judgment with which Webster made his reading selections largely from American sources was not the result of a mere Anglo-phobia; it was the product of an ardent, hopeful patriotism trained within narrow provincial bounds. Webster was not old enough to have been much under the impression of the English rule in America, and his days had been spent in farming villages where the traditions were little affected by foreign life, or in a college which jumped over intermediate centuries to find models in Roman antiquity. His education, meaning by that the cultivation of his powers by what were literary or circumstantial influences, had made him quite exclusively an American and a