ainly very many examples like these,
in which it is neither convenient nor necessary to suppose an ellipsis of
the nominative before the latter verb, or before all but the first, as most
of our grammarians do, whenever they find two or more finite verbs
connected in this manner. It is true, the nominative may, in most
instances, be repeated without injury to the sense; but this fact is no
proof of such an ellipsis; because many a sentence which is not incomplete,
may possibly take additional words without change of meaning. But these
authors, (as I have already suggested under the head of conjunctions,) have
not been very careful of their own consistency. If they teach, that, "Every
finite verb has its own separate nominative, either expressed or implied,"
which idea Murray and others seem to have gathered from Lowth; or if they
say, that, "Conjunctions really unite sentences, when they appear to unite
only words," which notion they may have acquired from Harris; what room is
there for that common assertion, that, "Conjunctions connect the same moods
and tenses of verbs," which is a part of Murray's eighteenth rule, and
found in most of our grammars? For no agreement is usually required between
verbs that have separate nominatives; and if we supply a nominative
wherever we do not find one for each verb, then in fact no two verbs will
ever be connected by any conjunction.

OBS. 13.--What agreement there must be, between verbs that are in the same
construction, it is not easy to determine with certainty. Some of the Latin
grammarians tell us, that certain conjunctions connect "sometimes similar
moods and tenses, and sometimes similar moods but different tenses." See
_Prat's Grammatica Latina, Octavo_, Part ii, p. 95. Ruddiman, Adam, and
Grant, omit the concord of tenses, and enumerate certain conjunctions which
"couple like cases and moods." But all of them acknowledge some exceptions
to their rules. The instructions of Lindley Murray and others, on this
point, may be summed up in the following canon: "When verbs are connected
by a conjunction, they must either agree in mood, tense, and form, or have
separate nominatives expressed." This rule, (with a considerable exception
to it, which other authors had not noticed.) was adopted by myself in the
Institutes of English Grammar, and also retained in the Brief Abstract of
that work, entitled, The First Lines of English Grammar. It there stands as
the thirteenth in the series o