and illustrated by observations, not indeed of great or striking
importance, separately considered, but necessary to the elucidation
of our language, and hitherto neglected or forgotten by English
grammarians.

That part of my work on which I expect malignity most frequently
to fasten, is the explanation; in which I cannot hope to satisfy
those, who are perhaps not inclined to be pleased, since I have
not always been able to satisfy myself. To interpret a language
by itself is very difficult; many words cannot be explained by
synonimes, because the idea signified by them has not more than
one appellation; nor by paraphrase, because simple ideas cannot
be described. When the nature of things is unknown, or the notion
unsettled and indefinite, and various in various minds, the words by
which such notions are conveyed, or such things denoted, will be
ambiguous and perplexed. And such is the fate of hapless lexicography,
that not only darkness, but light, impedes and distresses it;
things may be not only too little, but too much known, to be happily
illustrated. To explain, requires the use of terms less abstruse
than that which is to be explained, and such terms cannot always
be found; for as nothing can be proved but by supposing something
intuitively known, and evident without proof, so nothing can be
defined but by the use of words too plain to admit a definition.

Other words there are, of which the sense is too subtle and evanescent
to be fixed in a paraphrase; such are all those which are by the
grammarians termed expletives, and, in dead languages, are suffered
to pass for empty sounds, of no other use than to fill a verse,
or to modulate a period, but which are easily perceived in living
tongues to have power and emphasis, though it be sometimes such as