The new version of ECCO is now readily accessible at the University of Leiden. It contains eleven (!) more editions of Lowth's grammar, including ...

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At the moment I am transcribing and analysing nineteenth- century family letters from New England. In one of the letters a schoolboy mentions Wild’s grammar. So far I have not succeeded in finding details about this book. It may have been printed in America, but at the time grammars were also often imported from Great Britain. If anyone can give me more information about this book I would be much obliged.

Bas van Elburg

ECCO Part II, a new version of Eighteenth Century Collections Online was released earlier this year. It has everything that was in ECCO, plus nearly fifty thousand additional titles and a new interface. One of the great additions for this group for instance is the two volumes of the first edition (1755) of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (in folio). This all sounds great, but it seems that not everything is improved.

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To my suprise, I found two additions this morning to the publications by Robert Baker listed in ECCO. Surprisingly, though, they don't show up every time, but I can't work out why this is.

Robert Baker is the author of Reflections on the English Language (1770, 2nd ed. 1779), and various other works in ECCO. His Reflections is the first ...

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On 26 July 2009, a short piece appeared on the "all-purpose pronoun", which was first written about by Ann Fisher in her New Grammar (1745). You will find the link to the article here.