of the pronoun thou; and is also in accordance with the canons of criticism: "The first canon on this subject is, All words and phrases which are remarkably harsh and unharmonious, and not absolutely necessary, should be rejected." See Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric, B. ii, Ch. ii, Sec. 2, Canon Sixth, p. 181. See also, in the same work, (B. hi, Ch. iv, Sec. 2d,) an express defence of "those elisions whereby the sound is improved;" especially of the suppression of the "feeble vowel in the last syllable of the preterits of our regular verbs;" and of "such abbreviations" as "the eagerness of conveying one's sentiments, the rapidity and ease of utterance, necessarily produce, in the dialect of conversation."--Pages 426 and 427. Lord Kames says, "That the English tongue, originally harsh, is at present much softened by dropping many redundant consonants, is undoubtedly true; that it is not capable of being further mellowed without suffering in its force and energy, will scarce be thought by any one who possesses an ear."--Elements of Criticism, Vol. ii, p. 12.
OBS. 26.--The following examples are from a letter of an African Prince, translated by Dr. Desaguillier of Cambridge, England, in 1743, and published in a London newspaper: "I lie there too upon the bed thou presented me;"--"After thou left me, in thy swimming house;"--"Those good things thou presented me;"--"When thou spake to the Great Spirit and his Son." If it is desirable that our language should retain this power of a simple literal version of what in others may be familiarly expressed by the second person singular, it is clear that our grammarians must not continue to dogmatize according to the letter of some authors hitherto popular. But not every popular grammar condemns such phraseology as the foregoing. "I improved, Thou improvedst, &c. This termination of the second person preterit, on account of its harshness, is seldom used, and especially in the irregular verbs."--Harrison's Gram., p. 26. "The termination est, annexed to the preter tenses of verbs, is, at best, a very harsh one, when it is contracted, according to our general custom of throwing out the e; as learnedst, for learnedest; and especially, if it be again contracted into one syllable, as it is commonly pronounced, and made learndst. * * * I believe a writer or speaker would have recourse to any periphrasis rather than say keptest, or keptst. * * * Indeed this harsh termination est is generally quite dropped in common conversation, and sometimes by the poets, in writing."--Priestley's Gram., p. 115. The fact is, it never was added with much uniformity. Examples: "But like the hell hounde thou waxed fall furious, expressing thy malice when thou to honour stied."--FABIAN'S CHRONICLE, V. ii, p. 522: in Tooke's Divers., T. ii, p. 232.
"Thou from the arctic regions came. Perhaps
Thou noticed on thy way a little orb,
Attended by one moon--her lamp by night."
--Pollok, B. ii, l. 5.
"'So I believ'd.'--No, Abel! to thy grief,
So thou relinquish'd all that was belief."
--Crabbe, Borough, p. 279.
OBS. 27.--L. Murray, and his numerous copyists, Ingersoll, Greenleaf, Kirkham, Fisk, Flint, Comly, Alger, and the rest; though they insist on it, that the st of the second person can never be dispensed with, except in the imperative mood and some parts of the subjunctive; are not altogether insensible of that monstrous harshness which their doctrine imposes upon the language. Some of them tell us to avoid this by preferring the auxiliaries dost and didst: as dost burst, for burstest; didst check, for checkedst. This recommendation proceeds on the supposition that dost and didst are smoother syllables than est and edst; which is not true: didst learn is harsher than either learnedst or learntest; and all three of them are intolerable in common discourse. Nor is the "energy, or positiveness," which grammarians ascribe to these auxiliaries, always appropriate. Except in a question, dost and didst, like do, does, and did, are usually signs of emphasis; and therefore unfit to be substituted for the st, est, or edst, of an unemphatic verb. Kirkham, who, as we have seen, graces his Elocution with such unutterable things, as "prob'dst, hurl'dst, arm'dst, want'dst, burn'dst, bark'dst, bubbl'dst, troubbl'dst," attributes the use of the plural for the singular, to a design of avoiding the raggedness of the latter. "In order to avoid the disagreeable harshness of sound, occasioned by the frequent recurrence of the termination est, edst, in the adaptation of our verbs to the nominative thou, a modern innovation which substitutes you for thou, in familiar style, has generally been adopted. This innovation contributes greatly to the harmony of our colloquial style. You was formerly restricted to the plural number; but now it is employed to represent either a singular or a plural noun."--Kirkham's Gram., p. 99. A modern innovation, forsooth! Does not every body know it was current four hundred years ago, or more? Certainly, both ye and you were applied in this manner, to the great, as early as the fourteenth century.
