Goold Brown’s The Grammar of English Grammars is a monumental nineteenth-century compendium that surveys and critiques the grammatical authorities of its age. Brown gathered the rules, definitions, and disputes of dozens of earlier grammarians, weighing them against one another in exhaustive detail.
The result is both a grammar and a history of grammar, prized for its thoroughness and its often pointed commentary on the errors of rival authors. For students of the English language and its scholarship, the work offers an unrivaled record of how usage was codified and contested in the era before modern linguistics. It remains a remarkable monument of grammatical learning.