Obs. 23d, 24th, &c., on the Classes of Pronouns.

[384] Murray imagined this sentence to be bad English. He very strangely
mistook the pronoun _he_ for the object of the preposition _with_; and
accordingly condemned the text, under the rule, "Prepositions govern the
objective case." So of the following: "It is not I he is engaged
with."--_Murray's Exercises_, R. 17. Better: "It is not I _that_ he is
engaged with." Here is no violation of the foregoing rule, or of any other;
and both sentences, with even Murray's form of the latter, are quite as
good as his proposed substitutes: "It was not _with him_, that they were so
angry."--_Murray's Key_, p. 51. "It is not _with me_ he is engaged."--_Ib._
In these fancied corrections, the phrases _with him_ and _with me_ have a
very awkward and questionable position: it seems doubtful, whether they
depend on _was_ and _is_, or on _angry_ and _engaged_.

[385] In their speculations on the _personal pronouns_, grammarians
sometimes contrive, by a sort of abstraction, to reduce all the persons to
the _third_; that is, the author or speaker puts _I_, not for himself in
particular, but for any one who utters the word, and _thou_, not for his
particular hearer or reader, but for any one who is addressed; and,
conceiving of these as persons merely spoken of by himself, he puts the
verb in the third person, and not in the first or second: as, "_I is_ the
speaker, _thou_ [_is_] the hearer, and _he, she_, or _it_, is the person or
thing spoken of. All denote _qualities of existence_, but such qualities as
make different impressions on the mind. _I is_ the being of _consciousness,
thou_ [_is_ the being] of _perception_, and _he_ of _memory_."--_Booth's
Introd._, p. 44. This is such syntax as I should not choose to imitate; nor
is it very proper to say, that the three persons in grammar "denote
_qualities_ of existence." But, supposing the phraseology to be correct, it
is no _real_ exception to the foregoing rule of concord; for _I_ and _thou_
are here made to be pronouns of the _third_ person. So in the following
example, which I take to be bad English: "I, or the person who speaks, _is_
the first person; you, _is_ the second; he, she, or it, is the third person
singular."--_Bartlett's Manual_, Part ii, p. 70. Again, in the following;
which is perhaps a little better: "The person '_I_' _is spoken of_ as acted
upon."--_Bullions, Prin. of E. Gram._, 2d Edition, p. 29. But there is a
manifest abs