istinguished by a particular case, must
necessarily constitute that modification itself. Many also will have
participles, infinitives, phrases, and sentences, to be occasionally "_in
the objective case_:" whereas it must be plain to every reader, that they
are, all of them, _indeclinable_ terms; and that, if used in any relation
common to nouns or pronouns, they assume that office, as participles, as
infinitives, as phrases, or as sentences, and not as _cases_. They no more
take the nature of cases, than they become nouns or pronouns. Yet Nixon, by
assuming that _of_, with the word governed by it, constitutes a _possessive
case_, contrives to give to participles, and even to the infinitive mood,
_all three of the cases_. Of the infinitive, he says, "An examination of
the first and second methods of parsing this mood, must naturally lead to
the inference that _it is a substantive_; and that, if it has the
nominative case, it must also have the possessive and objective cases of a
substantive. The fourth method proves its [capacity of] being in the
possessive case: thus, 'A desire _to learn_;' that is, '_of learning_.'
When it follows a participle, or a verb, as by the fifth or [the] seventh
method, it is in the objective case. Method sixth is analogous to the Case
Absolute of a substantive."--_Nixon's Parser_, p. 83. If the infinitive
mood is really a _declinable substantive_, none of our grammarians have
placed it in the right chapter; except that bold contemner of all
grammatical and literary authority, Oliver B. Peirce. When will the cause
of learning cease to have assailants and underminers among those who
profess to serve it? Thus every new grammatist, has some grand absurdity or
other, peculiar to himself; and what can be more gross, than to talk of
English infinitives and participles as being in the _possessive case_?

OBS. 3.--It was long a subject of dispute among the grammarians, what
number of cases an English noun should be supposed to have. Some, taking
the Latin language for their model, and turning certain phrases into cases
to fill up the deficits, were for having _six_ in each number; namely, the
nominative, the genitive, the dative, the accusative, the vocative, and the
ablative. Others, contending that a case in grammar could be nothing else
than a terminational inflection, and observing that English nouns have but
one case that differs from the nominative in form, denied that there were
more than two, th