had occurred: as, "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died."--John, xi, 32. "If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin; but now they have no cloak for their sin."--John, xv, 22. "If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! But now they are hid from thine eyes."--Luke, xix, 42. The supposition is sometimes indicated by a mere transposition of the verb and its subject; in which case, the conjunction if is omitted; as, "Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me."--John, v, 46.
"Had I but fought as wont, one thrust Had laid De Wilton in the dust."--Scott
OBS. 9.--In the language of prophecy we find the past tenses very often substituted for the future, especially when the prediction is remarkably clear and specific. Man is a creature of present knowledge only; but it is certain, that He who sees the end from the beginning, has sometimes revealed to him, and by him, things deep in futurity. Thus the sacred seer who is esteemed the most eloquent of the ancient prophets, more than seven hundred years before the events occurred, spoke of the vicarious sufferings of Christ as of things already past, and even then described them in the phraseology of historical facts: "Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and by his stripes we are healed."--Isaiah, liii, 4 and 5. Multiplied instances of a similar application of the past tenses to future events, occur in the Bible, especially in the writings of this prophet.
PERSONS AND NUMBERS.
The person and number of a verb are those modifications in which it agrees
with its subject or nominative.
In each number, there are three persons; and in each person, two numbers: thus,
Singular. Plural. 1st per. I love, 1st per. We love, 2d per. Thou lovest, 2d per. You love, 3d per. He loves; 3d per. They love.
Definitions universally applicable have already been given of all these things; it is therefore unnecessary to define them again in this place.
Where the verb is varied, the second person singular is regularly formed by adding st or est to the first person; and the third person singular, in like manner, by adding s or es: as, I see, thou seest, he sees; I give, thou givest, he gives; I go, thou goest, he goes; I fly, thou fliest, he flies; I vex, thou vexest, he vexes; I lose, thou losest, he loses.
Where the verb is not varied to denote its person and number, these properties are inferred from its subject or nominative: as, If I love, if thou love, if he love; if we love, if you love, if they love.
OBSERVATIONS.
OBS. 1.--It is considered a principle of Universal Grammar, that a finite verb must agree with its subject or nominative in person and number. Upon this principle, we ascribe to every such verb the person and number of the nominative word, whether the verb itself be literally modified by the relation or not. The doctrine must be constantly taught and observed, in every language in which the verbs have any variations of this kind. But suppose an instance, of a language in which all the verbs were entirely destitute of such inflections; the principle, as regards that language, must drop. Finite verbs, in such a case, would still relate to their subjects, or nominatives, agreeably to the sense; but they would certainly be rendered incapable of adding to this relation any agreement or disagreement. So the concords which belong to adjectives and participles in Latin and Greek, are rejected in English, and there remains to these parts of speech nothing but a simple relation to their nouns according to the sense. And by the fashionable substitution of you for thou, the concord of English verbs with their nominatives, is made to depend, in common practice, on little more than one single terminational s, which is used to mark one person of one number of one tense of one mood of each verb. So near does this practice bring us to the dropping of what is yet called a universal principle of
