If that seems presumptuous, realize this: literacy (particularly formal education) was booming in the eighteenth century, and it wasn’t too long before “good grammar” became the dividing line between the educated, well poised, polite, and morally upright and the ignorant, vulgar, and morally compromised. English, the grammarians claimed, was a system that could be reduced to a set of logical rules and expectations, and these logical rules expressed right thinking.
