ical works on Grammar that were ever written. The
essence of it (and, indeed, almost all that is really valuable in it) is
contained in his _Letter to Dunning_, published about the year 1775.
Mr. Tooke's work is truly elementary. Dr. Lowth described Mr. Harris's
_Hermes_ as "the finest specimen of analysis since the days of
Aristotle"--a work in which there is no analysis at all, for analysis
consists in reducing things to their principles, and not in endless
details and subdivisions. Mr. Harris multiplies distinctions, and
confounds his readers. Mr. Tooke clears away the rubbish of school-boy
technicalities, and strikes at the root of his subject. In accomplishing
his arduous task, he was, perhaps, aided not more by the strength and
resources of his mind than by its limits and defects. There is a web of
old associations wound round language, that is a kind of veil over its
natural features; and custom puts on the mask of ignorance. But this
veil, this mask the author of _The Diversions of Purley_ threw aside and
penetrated to the naked truth of things, by the literal, matter-of-fact,
unimaginative nature of his understanding, and because he was not
subject to prejudices or illusions of any kind. Words may be said to
"bear a charmed life, that must not yield to one of woman born"--with
womanish weaknesses and confused apprehensions. But this charm was
broken in the case of Mr. Tooke, whose mind was the reverse of
effeminate--hard, unbending, concrete, physical, half-savage--and who
saw language stripped of the clothing of habit or sentiment, or the
disguises of doting pedantry, naked in its cradle, and in its primitive
state. Our author tells us that he found his discovery on Grammar among
a number of papers on other subjects, which he had thrown aside and
forgotten. Is this an idle boast? Or had he made other discoveries
of equal importance, which he did not think it worth his while to
communicate to the world, but chose to die the churl of knowledge? The
whole of his reasoning turns upon shewing that the Conjunction _That_
is the pronoun _That_, which is itself the participle of a verb, and
in like manner that all the other mystical and hitherto unintelligible
parts of speech are derived from the only two intelligible ones, the
Verb and Noun. "I affirm _that_ gold is yellow," that is, "I affirm
_that_ fact, or that proposition, viz. gold is yellow." The secret of
the Conjunction on which so many fine heads had split, on