lectures of their fitness for those whose profit in writing and in
publishing I had mainly in view, namely schoolmasters, and those
preparing to be such.

Had I known any book entering with any fulness, and in a popular manner,
into the subject-matter of these pages, and making it its exclusive
theme, I might still have delivered these lectures, but should scarcely
have sought for them a wider audience than their first, gladly leaving
the matter in their hands, whose studies in language had been fuller
and riper than my own. But abundant and ready to hand as are the
materials for such a book, I did not; while yet it seems to me that the
subject is one to which it is beyond measure desirable that their
attention, who are teaching, or shall have hereafter to teach, others
should be directed; so that they shall learn to regard language as one
of the chiefest organs of their own education and that of others. For I
am persuaded that I have used no exaggeration in saying, that for many
a young man 'his first discovery that words are living powers, has been
like the dropping of scales from his eyes, like the acquiring of
another sense, or the introduction into a new world,'--while yet all
this may be indefinitely deferred, may, indeed, never find place at all,
unless there is some one at hand to help for him, and to hasten the
process; and he who so does, will ever after be esteemed by him as one
of his very foremost benefactors. Whatever may be Horne Tooke's
shortcomings (and they are great), whether in details of etymology, or
in the philosophy of grammar, or in matters more serious still, yet,
with all this, what an epoch in many a student's intellectual life has
been his first acquaintance with _The Diversions of Purley_. And they
were not among the least of the obligations which the young men of our
time owed to Coleridge, that he so often himself weighed words in the
balances, and so earnestly pressed upon all with whom his voice went