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posed compounds the signification of a pronoun and its governing noun, reassumes, in parsing them, the very principle of error, on which he condemns their common classification. He says, "They should be parsed _as two words_." He also supposes them to represent the nouns _which govern them_--nouns with which they do not agree in any respect! Thus is he wrong in almost every thing he says about them. See _Kirkham's Gram._, p. 99, p. 101, and p. 104. Goodenow, too, a still later writer, adopts the major part of all this absurdity. He will have _my, thy, his, her, its, our, your, their_, for the possessive case of his personal pronouns; but _mine, thine, hers, ours, yours, theirs_, he calls "_compound possessive pronouns_, in the subjective or [the] objective case."--_Text-Book of E. Gram._, p. 33. Thus he introduces a new class, unknown to his primary division of the pronouns, and not included in his scheme of their declension. Fuller, too, in a grammar produced at Plymouth, Mass., in 1822, did nearly the same thing. He called _I, thou, he, she_, and _it_, with their plurals, "_antecedent_ pronouns;" took _my, thy, his, her_, &c., for their _only_ possessive forms in his declension; and, having passed from them by the space of just half his book, added: "Sometimes, to prevent the repetition of the same word, an _antecedent pronoun in the possessive case_, is made to represent, both the pronoun and a noun; as, 'That book is _mine_'--i. e. '_my book_.' MINE is a _compound antecedent pronoun_, and is equivalent to _my_ book. Then parse _my_, and _book_, as though they were both expressed."--_Fuller's Gram._, p. 71. OBS. 11.--Amidst all this diversity of doctrine at the very centre of grammar, who shall so fix its principles that our schoolmasters and schoolmistresses may know _what to believe and teach_? Not he that speculates without regard to other men's views; nor yet he that makes it a merit to follow implicitly "the footsteps of" _one only_. The true principles of grammar are with the learned; and that man is in the wrong, with whom the _most_ learned will not, in general, coincide. Contradiction of falsities, is necessary to the maintenance of truth; correction of errors, to the success of science. But not every man's errors can be so considerable as to deserve correction from other hands than his own. Misinstruction in grammar has for this reason generally escaped censure. I do not wish any one to coincide with me mere
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