“Ruddiman is dead,” said Dr. Samuel Johnson to Boswell, when Boswell botched a Latin passage.
Thanks to Evan Millner, I came across Thomas Ruddiman’s “Rudiments of the Latin Tongue.” It’s quite good. His grammar contains rules stated in English and Latin.
“Rudiments” can be found at Archive.org. I like the 1867 version published by Murphy and Sons.
https://archive.org/search.php?query=rudiments%20of%20the%20latin%20tongue
Ruddiman’s “Introduction to Latin Syntax” was re-published with additional text by John Mair in 1813. It’s available at Google Books:
His Introduction to Syntax contains nice examples from antiquity of the rules he presents. Some of the material added by Mair and others is so-so, but the original Ruddiman material is great.
I searched Textkit for “Ruddiman” but didn’t see any posts. I was surprised by that.
Does anyone have any thoughts on Ruddiman and his methods?