Page 9 - English
P. 9
Author’s Preface
AS THE GREATEST COMPLIMENT that could be paid a writer
would be the assumption that the material contained in this little
volume was the product of that writer’s ingenuity or imagination, it
seems needless for the compiler to state that every line is just what it
purports to be,—bona fide answers to questions asked in the public
schools.
Mark Twain, with his inimitable drollery, comments in the
Century Magazine for April,1887, upon English As She Is Taught.
Even this master of English humor acknowledges his inability to
comprehend how such success in the literature of fun could be
attained, not only without effort or intention, but through heroic
struggles to set forth hard facts and sober statistics.
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