Ebook The Practice of Elocution

The present work is one of several intended to assist the English student in acquiring the full use of the language, both in oral speech and in writing. These works I have not prepared hastily, nor with shallow experience. Of the subjects which they treat, I have been a practical teacher in London for forty years; and my pupils have been of all ages, and of various training. The learning acquired at Oxford and Cambridge does not render superfluous such instruction as I profess to give; and from these Universities, as from other places of learning, I have had, and continue to have, numerous pupils.

But I wish to plead in favour of these works something more than my experience as a teacher. They are parts in the practical development of a theory, which exhibits the relation of language to thought in a light very different from that under which elementary grammars, dictionaries, and guides to elocution, are in general planned and executed. In the works which I lay before the English student, logical accuracy or error is not confounded with grammatical, nor the meaning of separate words taken into account, when their function is spoken of as parts of one expression that is to have but one meaning.