ment, "a barbarous expression of late intrusion into our language, for which it is better to say will rather." In these remarks Johnson not only showed ignorance—which, considering the time he wrote, was pardonable—but he displayed obtuseness, which is not a characteristic he was wont to exhibit. Still, he was addressing a generation even more unintelligent in this matter than himself. It is therefore not particularly surprising that these almost ridiculous statements should have been approved by several later lexicographers; that Sheridan, for instance, a quarter of a century afterwards, should be found repeating them in his dictionary and informing us that had rather is a bad expression which ought to be replaced by will rather.
The other writer alluded to was Robert Lowth, who died in 1787 as bishop of London. In 1762 he brought out a small work entitled A Short Introduction to English Grammar. Lowth was a man of ability and an eminent scholar in many fields; though it is well to remark here that English scholarship, as we understand it, can hardly be said to have existed in his day. Accordingly, while he knew a great deal more than his predecessors of the historical development of our grammatical forms, what he knew was not itself a very great deal. The consequence was that though he corrected some misstatements and removed some misapprehensions, he added both misapprehensions and misstatements of his own. It is a question, indeed, whether in the long run he did not do more harm than good. For Lowth was perhaps the first person, and certainly the first person of any recognized learning and ability, who devoted himself to the practice of pointing out mistakes or supposed mistakes of usage in the writings of eminent authors. Undoubtedly there is some justification for the course. Every great writer is liable, through haste or carelessness, or even at times through ignorance, to commit errors. But the difficulty with those who assume the office of critic is that in nine cases out of ten the so-called errors they fancy they find are not errors of the author in violating good usage, but errors of the censor arising from lack of knowledge of what good usage actually is.
Lowth was no exception to this general rule. In the original edition of 1762 he had nothing to say of the particular locution here under consideration. But in a later one he took notice of it. He found it by no means reducible to any grammatical construction. He then proceeded to account for its origin, and promulgated the theory that it almost certainly sprang from a mere blunder. The proper form was I would rather. This had been contracted into I'd rather, and then erroneously expanded into I had rather. In this manner the corruption had crept into the language. This precious piece of etymology, for which there is not the slightest justification in fact, became during a good share of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a common, not to say the common, explanation of the origin of the locution. From Lowth's day down to Landor's it was fairly certain to be dragged into the discussion of the idiom by every one who objected to it. In truth, it was for so long time an accepted solution of the difficulty the expression presented that it is not unlikely that it may be found lingering still in some quarters, in spite of the not infrequent exposure which has been made of its falsity. In this country particularly it was adopted in the early editions of Webster's Dictionary—it has been discarded from the later ones—and owing to the great circulation of that work, was spread far and wide. From Worcester, too, it received a quasi-support.
In England, however, grammarians and lexicographers were, as a general rule, somewhat chary about committing themselves on the question of the propriety of the locution. This is true in particular of the early ones. Some of them clearly refrained from saying anything about it because they knew not what to say. On the one side was the adverse decision of the great literary autocrat of the times. On the other, they could not fail to observe that the expression had been regularly used by the best writers; and that even Dr. Johnson himself, four years after the denunciation of it in his dictionary, had fallen, during a temporary lapse into the English idiom, into the employment of it in his Rasselas. "I had rather hear thee than dispute," says the prince to Imlac, in the course of that not altogether exciting narrative. Men
