48] It is not a little strange, that some men, who _never have seen or
heard_ such words as their own rules would produce for the second person
singular of many hundreds of our most common verbs, will nevertheless
pertinaciously insist, that it is wrong to countenance in this matter any
departure from the style of King James's Bible. One of the very rashest and
wildest of modern innovators,--a critic who, but for the sake of those who
still speak in this person and number, would gladly consign the pronoun
_thou_, and all its attendant verbal forms, to utter oblivion,--thus treats
this subject and me: "The Quakers, or Friends, however, use _thou_, and its
attendant form of the _asserter_, in conversation. FOR THEIR BENEFIT,
_thou_ is given, in this work, in all the varieties of inflection; (in some
of which it could not properly be used in an address to the Deity;) for
THEY ERR MOST EGREGIOUSLY in the use of _thou_, with the form of the
_asserter_ which follows _he_ or _they_, and are countenanced in their
errors by G. Brown, who, instead of 'disburdening _the language_ of 144,000
useless _distinctions, increases_ their number just 144,000."--_Oliver B.
Peirce's Gram._, p. 85 Among people of sense, converts are made by
teaching, and reasoning, and proving; but this man's disciples must yield
to the balderdash of a _false speller, false quoter_, and _false assertor!_
This author says, that "_dropt_" is the past tense of "_drop_;" (p. 118;)
let him prove, for example, that _droptest_ is not a clumsy _innovation_,
and that _droppedst_ is not a formal archaism, and then tell of the
egregious error of adopting neither of these forms in common conversation.
The following, with its many common contractions, is the language of POPE;
and I ask this, or any other opponent of my doctrine, TO SHOW HOW SUCH
VERBS ARE RIGHTLY FORMED, either for poetry or for conversation, _in the
second person singular_.

"It _fled_, I _follow'd_; now in hope, now pain;
It _stopt_, I _stopt_; it _mov'd_, I _mov'd_ again.
At last it _fix't_,'twas on what plant it _pleas'd_,
And where it _fix'd_, the beauteous bird I _seiz'd_."
--_Dunciad_, B. IV, l. 427.

[249] The Rev. W. Allen, in his English Grammar, p. 132, says: "_Yth_ and
_eth_ (from the Saxon laeth [sic--KTH]) were formerly, _plural terminations_;
as, 'Manners _makyth_ man.' William of Wykeham's motto. 'After long
advisement, they _taketh_ upon them to try the matter.' Sta