he singular pronoun, and inflect the verb with _st_ or _est_,
except in the imperative mood and the subjunctive present. This is the more
remarkable, because the author was a valued member of the Society of
Friends; and doubtless his own daily practice contradicted his doctrine, as
palpably as does that of every other member of the Society. And many a
schoolmaster, taking that work for his text-book, or some other as faulty,
is now doing precisely the same thing. But what a teacher is he, who dares
not justify as a grammarian that which he constantly practices as a man!
What a scholar is he, who can be led by a false criticism or a false
custom, to condemn his own usage and that of every body else! What a
casuist is he, who dares pretend conscience for practising that which he
knows and acknowledges to be wrong! If to speak in the second person
singular without inflecting our preterits and auxiliaries, is a censurable
corruption of the language, the Friends have no alternative but to
relinquish their scruple about the application of _you_ to one person; for
none but the adult and learned can ever speak after the manner of ancient
books: children and common people can no more be brought to speak agreeably
to any antiquated forms of the English language, than according to the
imperishable models of Greek and Latin. He who traces the history of our
vernacular tongue, will find it has either simplified or entirely dropped
several of its ancient terminations; and that the _st_ or _est_ of the
second person singular, _never was adopted_ in any thing like the extent to
which our modern grammarians have attempted to impose it. "Thus becoming
unused to inflections, we lost the perception of their meaning and
nature."--_Philological Museum_, i, 669. "You cannot make a whole people
all at once talk in a different tongue from that which it has been used to
talk in: you cannot force it to unlearn the words it has learnt from its
fathers, in order to learn a set of newfangled words out of [a grammar or]
a dictionary."--_Ib._, i, 650. Nor can you, in this instance, restrain our
poets from transgressing the doctrine of Lowth and Murray:--

"Come, thou pure Light,--which first in Eden _glowed._
And _threw_ thy splendor round man's calm abode."--_Alonzo Lewis_.

OBS. 14.--That which has passed away from familiar practice, may still be
right in the solemn style, and may there remain till it becomes obsolete.
But no obsolescent termi