books: children and common people can no more be brought to speak agreeably to any antiquated forms of the English language, than according to the imperishable models of Greek and Latin. He who traces the history of our vernacular tongue, will find it has either simplified or entirely dropped several of its ancient terminations; and that the st or est of the second person singular, never was adopted in any thing like the extent to which our modern grammarians have attempted to impose it. "Thus becoming unused to inflections, we lost the perception of their meaning and nature."--Philological Museum, i, 669. "You cannot make a whole people all at once talk in a different tongue from that which it has been used to talk in: you cannot force it to unlearn the words it has learnt from its fathers, in order to learn a set of newfangled words out of [a grammar or] a dictionary."--Ib., i, 650. Nor can you, in this instance, restrain our poets from transgressing the doctrine of Lowth and Murray:--
"Come, thou pure Light,--which first in Eden glowed. And threw thy splendor round man's calm abode."--Alonzo Lewis.
OBS. 14.--That which has passed away from familiar practice, may still be right in the solemn style, and may there remain till it becomes obsolete. But no obsolescent termination has ever yet been recalled into the popular service. This is as true in other languages as in our own: "In almost every word of the Greek," says a learned author, "we meet with contractions and abbreviations; but, I believe, the flexions of no language allow of extension or amplification. In our own we may write sleeped or slept, as the metre of a line or the rhythm of a period may require; but by no license may we write sleepeed."--Knight, on the Greek Alphabet, 4to, p. 107. But, if after contracting sleeped into slept, we add an est and make sleptest, is there not here an extension of the word from one syllable to two? Is there not an amplification that is at once novel, disagreeable, unauthorized, and unnecessary? Nay, even in the regular and established change, as of loved to lovedst, is there not a syllabic increase, which is unpleasant to the ear, and unsuited to familiar speech? Now, to what extent do these questions apply to the verbs in our language? Lindley Murray, it is presumed, had no conception of that extent; or of the weight of the objection which is implied in the second. With respect to a vast number of our most common verbs, he himself never knew, nor does the greatest grammarian now living know, in what way he ought to form the simple past tense in the second person singular, otherwise than by the mere uninflected preterit with the pronoun thou. Is thou sleepedst or thou sleptest, thou leavedst or thou leftest, thou feeledst or thou feltest, thou dealedst or thou dealtest, thou tossedst or thou tostest, thou losedst or thou lostest, thou payedst or thou paidest, thou layedst or thou laidest, better English than thou slept, thou left, thou felt, thou dealt, thou tossed, thou lost, thou paid, thou laid? And, if so, of the two forms in each instance, which is the right one? and why? The Bible has "saidst" and "layedst;" Dr. Alexander Murray, "laid'st" and "laidest!" Since the inflection of our preterits has never been orderly, and is now decaying and waxing old, shall we labour to recall what is so nearly ready to vanish away?
"Tremendous Sea! what time thou lifted up Thy waves on high, and with thy winds and storms Strange pastime took, and shook thy mighty sides Indignantly, the pride of navies fell."--Pollok, B. vii, l. 611.
OBS. 15.--Whatever difficulty there is in ascertaining the true form of the preterit itself, not only remains, but is augmented, when st or est is to be added for the second person of it. For, since we use sometimes one and sometimes the other of these endings; (as, saidst, sawest, bidst, knewest, lovedst, wentest;) there is yet need of some rule to show which we ought to prefer. The variable formation or orthography of verbs in the simple past tense, has always been one of the greatest difficulties that the learners of our language have had to encounter. At present, there is a strong tendency to terminate as many as we can of them in ed, which is the only regular ending. The pronunciation of this ending, however, is at least threefold; as in remembered, repented, relinquished. Here the added sounds are, first d, then ed, then t; and the effect of adding st, whenever the ed is sounded like t, will certainly be a perversion of what is established as the true pronunciation of the language. For the solemn and the familiar pronunciation of ed unquestionably differ. The present tendency to a regular orthography, ought rather to be encouraged than thwarted; but the preferring of mixed to mixt, whipped to whipt, worked to wrought, kneeled to knelt, and so forth, does not make mixedst, whippedst, workedst, kneeledst, and the like, any more fit for modern English, than are mixtest, whiptest, wroughtest, kneltest, burntest, dweltest, heldest, giltest, and many more of the like stamp. And what can be more absurd than for a grammarian to insist upon forming a great parcel of these strange and crabbed words for which he can quote no good authority? Nothing; except it be for a poet or a rhetorician to huddle together great parcels of consonants which no mortal man can utter,[244] (as lov'dst, lurk'dst, shrugg'dst,) and call them "words." Example: "The clump of subtonick and atonick elements at the termination of such words as the following, is frequently, to the no small injury of articulation, particularly slighted: couldst, wouldst, hadst, prob'st, prob'dst, hurl'st, hurl'dst, arm'st, arm'dst, want'st, want'dst, burn'st, burn'dst,
