he second person,
plural. _They_ is the third person, plural."--_L. Murray's Grammar_, p. 51;
_Ingersoll's_, 54; _D. Adams's_, 37; _A. Flint's_, 18; _Kirkham's_, 98;
_Cooper's_, 34; _T. H. Miller's_, 26; _Hull's_, 21; _Frost's_, 13;
_Wilcox's_, 18; _Bacon's_, 19; _Alger's_, 22; _Maltby's_, 19; _Perley's_,
15; _S. Putnam's_, 22. Now there is no more propriety in affirming, that
"_I is the first person_," than in declaring that _me, we, us, am,
ourselves, we think, I write_, or any other word or phrase _of_ the first
person, _is_ the first person. Yet Murray has given us no other definitions
or explanations of the persons than the foregoing erroneous assertions;
and, if I mistake not, all the rest who are here named, have been content
to define them only as he did. Some others, however, have done still worse:
as, "There are _three_ personal pronouns; so called, because they denote
the three persons, _who_ are the subjects of a discourse, viz. 1st. _I, who
is_ the person _speaking_; 2d _thou, who is_ spoken to; 3d _he, she_, or
_it, who_ is spoken of, and their plurals, _we, ye_ or _you,
they_."--_Bingham's Accidence_, 20th Ed., p. 7. Here the two kinds of error
which I have just pointed out, are jumbled together. It is impossible to
write _worse English_ than this! Nor is the following much better: "Of the
personal pronouns there are five, viz. _I_, in the first person, speaking;
_Thou_, in the second person, spoken to; and _He, she, it_, in the third
person, spoken of."--_Nutting's Gram._, p. 25.

OBS. 5.--In _written_ language, the _first person_ denotes the writer or
author; and the _second_, the reader or person addressed: except when the
writer describes not himself, but some one else, as uttering to an other
the words which he records. This exception takes place more particularly in
the writing of dialogues and dramas; in which the first and second persons
are abundantly used, not as the representatives of the author and his
reader, but as denoting the fictitious speakers and hearers that figure in
each scene. But, in discourse, the grammatical persons may be changed
without a change of the living subject. In the following sentence, the
three grammatical persons are all of them used with reference to one and
the same individual: "Say ye of _Him whom_ the Father hath sanctified and
sent into the world, _Thou blasphemest_, because _I said I am_ the _Son_ of
_God?_"--_John_, x, 36.

OBS. 6.-The speaker seldom refers to