, taken from the
Psalms, or made up to order to look like apocryphal psalms; in Webster
there is a suggestive divergence, for while, as in Dilworth, the first
sentence is, "No man may put off the law of God," it takes a very few
pages for the child to reach the very practical passage, "As for those
boys and girls that mind not their books, and love not church and
school, but play with such as tell tales, tell lies, curse, swear, and
steal, they will come to some bad end, and must be whipt till they mend
their ways." The child brought up on Dilworth is practiced until nearly
the last page of the work upon the lesson of the first sentence, with
variations. Other differences would be suggested at once by the use of
the two books. In Dilworth the child learns all manner of English proper
names and abbreviations likely to be of use, such as Ldp., Bp., Rt.
Wpful, Rt. Honble, Ast. P.G.C. and P.M.G.C., the last two standing, as
the reader has of course already guessed, for Astronomy Professor of
Gresham College, and Professor of Music at Gresham College, which we
politely take to have been Tho. Dilworth's Alma Mater. In a note at the
foot of the column, T. D. adds: "It argues a disrespect and slighting to
use contractions to our betters." The character of this torture of the
innocent was probably determined by the use for which it was intended in
England, as indicated by Mr. Dilworth's dedication "To the Reverend and
Worthy Promoters of the several Charity Schools in Great Britain and
Ireland."

Webster's Institute, on the other hand, was plainly meant for the farmer
boys and girls of his country. "The spelling-book," he says in one of
his essays, "does more to form the language of a nation than all other
books," and the man who first supplied our young nation with a
spelling-book has undoubtedly affected its spelling habits more than any
other single person. But Webster was a moralist and a philosopher as
well as a speller. He was by no means restricted in his ambition to the
teaching of correct spelling; he aimed to have a hand in the moulding of
the national mind and the national manners. In his preface to "The
American Spelling-Book," he says: "To diffuse an uniformity and purity
of language in America, to destroy the provincial prejudices that
originate in the trifling differences of dialect and produce reciprocal
ridicule, to promote the interest of literature and the harmony of the
United States, is the most earnest wish