deny the existence of
such a mood altogether. On this point, the instructions published by
Lindley Murray, however commended and copied, are most remarkably vague and
inconsistent.[231] The early editions of his Grammar gave to this mood _six
tenses_, none of which had any of the personal inflections; consequently
there was, in all the tenses, _some difference_ between it and the
indicative. His later editions, on the contrary, make the subjunctive
exactly like the indicative, except in the present tense, and in the choice
of auxiliaries for the second-future. Both ways, he goes too far. And while
at last he restricts the _distinctive form_ of the subjunctive to narrower
bounds than he ought, and argues against, "If thou _loved_, If thou
_knew_," &c., he gives to this mood not only the last five tenses of the
indicative, but also all those of the potential, with its multiplied
auxiliaries; alleging, "that as the indicative mood _is converted_ into the
subjunctive, by the expression of a condition, motive, wish, supposition,
&c.[232] being superadded to it, so the potential mood may, in like manner,
_be turned into_ the subjunctive."--_Octavo Gram._, p. 82. According to
this, the subjunctive mood of every regular verb embraces, in one voice, as
many as one hundred and thirty-eight different expressions; and it may
happen, that in one single tense a verb shall have no fewer than fifteen
different forms in each person and number. Six times fifteen are ninety;
and so many are the several phrases which now compose Murray's pluperfect
tense of the subjunctive mood of the verb _to strow_--a tense which most
grammarians very properly reject as needless! But this is not all. The
scheme not only confounds the moods, and utterly overwhelms the learner
with its multiplicity, but condemns as bad English what the author himself
once adopted and taught for the imperfect tense of the subjunctive mood,
"If thou _loved_, If thou _knew_," &c., wherein he was sustained by Dr.
Priestley, by Harrison, by Caleb Alexander, by John Burn, by Alexander
Murray, the schoolmaster, and by others of high authority. Dr. Johnson,
indeed, made the preterit subjunctive like the indicative; and this may
have induced the author to change his plan, and inflect this part of the
verb with _st_. But Dr. Alexander Murray, a greater linguist than either of
them, very positively declares this to be wrong: "When such words as _if,
though, unless, except, whether_, and