ay
be referred to either. If the following passive construction is right, _is
wanting_ or _are wanting_ may be a verb of three or four different sorts:
"Reflections that may drive away despair, _cannot be wanting by him_, who
considers," &c.--_Johnson's Rambler_, No. 129: _Wright's Gram._, p. 196.

[267] Dr. Bullions, in his grammar of 1849, says, "Nobody would think of
saying, 'He is being loved'--'This result is being desired.'"--_Analyt. and
Pract. Gram._, p. 237. But, according to J. W. Wright, whose superiority in
grammar has sixty-two titled vouchers, this unheard-of barbarism is, for
the present passive, precisely and solely what one _ought_ to say! Nor is
it, in fact, any more barbarous, or more foreign from usage, than the
spurious example which the Doctor himself takes for a model in the active
voice: "I _am loving_. Thou _art loving_, &c; I _have been loving_, Thou
_hast been loving_, &c."--_A. and P. Gr._, p. 92. So: "James _is loving_
me."--_Ib._, p 235.

[268] "The predicate in the form, '_The house is being built_,' would be,
according to our view, 'BEING BEING _built_,' which is manifestly an absurd
tautology."--_Mulligan's Gram._, 1852, p. 151.

[269] "Suppose a criminal to be _enduring_ the operation of binding:--Shall
we say, with Mr. Murray,--'The criminal is binding?' If so, HE MUST BE
BINDING SOMETHING,--a circumstance, in effect, quite opposed to the fact
presented. Shall we then say, as he does, in the _present tense_
conjugation of his passive verb,--'The criminal is bound?' If so, the
_action_ of binding, which the criminal is suffering, will be represented
as completed, --a position which the _action its self_ will palpably deny."
See _Wright's Phil. Gram._, p. 102. It is folly for a man to puzzle himself
or others thus, with _fictitious examples_, imagined on purpose to make
_good usage seem wrong_. There is bad grammar enough, for all useful
purposes, in the actual writings of valued authors; but who can show, by
any proofs, that the English language, as heretofore written, is so
miserably inadequate to our wants, that we need use the strange neologism,
"The criminal _is being bound_," or any thing similar?

[270] It is a very strange event in the history of English grammar, that
such a controversy as this should have arisen; but a stranger one still,
that, after all that has been said, more argument is needed. Some men, who
hope to be valued as scholars, yet stickle for an odd phrase, whi