the more difficult parts of them. In both oral and written analysis there
is danger of repeating what needs no repetition. When the diagram has
served its purpose, it should be dropped.


AUTHORS' NOTE TO REVISED EDITION.

During the years in which "Higher Lessons" has been in existence, we have
ourselves had an instructive experience with it in the classroom. We have
considered hundreds of suggestive letters written us by intelligent
teachers using the book. We have examined the best works on grammar that
have been published recently here and in England. And we have done more. We
have gone to the original source of all valid authority in our language--
the best writers and speakers of it. That we might ascertain what present
linguistic usage is, we chose fifty authors, now alive or living till
recently, and have carefully read three hundred pages of each. We have
minutely noted and recorded what these men by habitual use declare to be
good English. Among the fifty are such men as Ruskin, Froude, Hamerton,
Matthew Arnold, Macaulay, De Quincey, Thackeray, Bagehot, John Morley,
James Martineau, Cardinal Newman, J. R. Green, and Lecky in England; and
Hawthorne, Curtis, Prof. W. D. Whitney, George P. Marsh, Prescott, Emerson,
Motley, Prof. Austin Phelps, Holmes, Edward Everett, Irving, and Lowell in
America. When in the pages following we anywhere quote usage, it is to the
authority of such men that we appeal.

Upon these four sources of help we have drawn in the Revision of "Higher
Lessons" that we now offer to the public.

In this revised work we have given additional reasons for the opinions we
hold, and have advanced to some new positions; have explained more fully