air's Lectures_, p. 153; _Murray's Grammar_, p. 352.

OBS. 15.--Milton's word, in the fourth line above, is _deep_, and not
_depth_, as these authors here give it: nor was it very polite in them, to
use a phraseology which comes so near to saying, the devil was in the poet.
Alas for grammar! accuracy in its teachers has become the most rare of all
qualifications. As for Murray's correction above, I see not how it can
please any one who chooses to think Hell a place of great depth. A descent
into his "_lower_ deep" and "_other_ deep," might be a plunge less horrible
than two or three successive slides in one of our western caverns! But
Milton supposes the arch-fiend might descend to the lowest _imaginable_
depth of Hell, and there be liable to a still further fall of more
tremendous extent. Fall whither? Into the horrid and inconceivable
profundity of the _bottomless pit_! What signifies it, to object to his
language as "_unintelligible_" if it conveys his idea better than any other
could? In no human conception of what is infinite, can there be any real
exaggeration. To amplify beyond the truth, is here impossible. Nor is there
any superlation which can fix a limit to the idea of more and more in
infinitude. Whatever literal absurdity there may be in it, the duplication
seems greatly to augment what was even our greatest conception of the
thing. Homer, with a like figure, though expressed in the positive degree,
makes Jupiter threaten any rebel god, that he shall be thrown down from
Olympus, to suffer the burning pains of the Tartarean gulf; not in the
centre, but,

"As _deep_ beneath th' infernal centre hurl'd,
As from that centre to th' ethereal world."
--_Pope's Iliad_, B. viii, l. 19.

REGULAR COMPARISON.

Adjectives are regularly compared, when the comparative degree is expressed
by adding _er_, and the superlative, by adding _est_ to them: as, Pos.,
_great_, Comp., _greater_, Superl., _greatest_; Pos., _mild_, Comp.,
_milder_, Superl., _mildest_.

In the variation of adjectives, final consonants are doubled, final _e_ is
omitted, and final _y_ is changed to _i_, agreeably to the rules for
spelling: as, _hot, hotter, hottest; wide, wider, widest; happy, happier,
happiest_.

The regular method of comparison belongs almost exclusively to
monosyllables, with dissyllables ending in _w_ or _y_, and such others as
receive it and still have but one syllable after the accent: as, _fierce,
fiercer, f