Note 83 — DISSERTATION III.

Sheridan, as an improver of the language, stands among the first writers of the British nation, and deservedly. His Lectures on Elocution and on Reading, his Treatises on Education, and for the most part his Rhetorical Grammar, are excellent and almost unexceptionable performances. In these, he encountered practice and prejudices, when they were found repugnant to obvious rules of propriety. But in his Dictionary he seems to have left his only defensible ground, propriety, in pursuit of that phantom, fashion. He deserted his own principles, as the Reviewers observe: and where he has done this, every rational man should desert his standard.