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.