Lectures on Language, as particularly connected with English Grammar, by William S. Balch, published 1838. William Stevens Balch (1806-1887) was a Universalist minister, who traveled around giving lectures on grammar. This is a series of lectures on grammar and the English language, given and written for a popular (i.e. not technical) audience. Once you get past the excessive use of partial italics, it’s quite readable. Balch is not a precriptivist, though he does insist that one should follow his method for understanding grammar.
I confess, however, that with the mention of grammar, an association of ideas are called up by no means agreeable. The mind involuntarily reverts to the days of childhood, when we were compelled, at the risk of our bodily safety, to commit to memory a set of arbitrary rules, which we could neither understand nor apply in the correct use of language. Formerly it was never dreamed that grammar depended on any higher authority than the books put into our hands. And learners were not only dissuaded, but strictly forbidden to go beyond the limits set them in the etymological and syntactical rules of the authors to whom they were referred. If a query ever arose in their minds, and they modestly proposed a plain question as to the why and wherefore things were thus, instead of giving an answer according to common sense, in a way to be understood, the authorities were pondered over, till some rule or remark could be found which would apply, and this settled the matter with “proof as strong as holy writ.” In this way an end may be put to the inquiry; but the thinking mind will hardly be satisfied with the mere opinion of another, who has no evidence to afford, save the undisputed dignity of his station, or the authority of books. This course is easily accounted for. Rather than expose his own ignorance, the teacher quotes the printed ignorance of others, thinking, no doubt, that folly and nonsense will appear better second-handed, than fresh from his own responsibility. Or else on the more common score, that “misery loves company.”
It seems also (on very brief reading) that Balch was an early semiotician. Though perhaps “philosopher of language” is more appropriate.
Words are the signs of ideas. Ideas are the impressions of things. Hence, in all our attempts to investigate the important principles of language, we shall employ the sign as the means of coming at the thing signified.
Can’t you just imagine a thirty-year-old minister lecturing on how we all are taught grammar wrongly?
Thanks to Amy Cunningham for post-processing this text. I’m sure it had quite a few challenges!