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220 "grammatic members of society" do not seem to under- stand much about it: so after telling us (p. l6l) that shall "is, we believe, merely a diversity of will" and talking about the " perplexity caused by it,"" he exclaims that, " if the collective wisdom of the grammatic world were deified with legislative omnipotence, English would in time be rendered as invincibly difficult as Greek." This sentence was perhaps designed as a sample how invincibly easy English might become, were it not for the troublesome shackles of grammar and logic and sense. A writer in the Edinburgh Review too (Vol. p. 492), who has collected a number of instances to shew that the ancient usage did not coincide with the modern, and who, if he chose, might collect almost as many to prove that the Athenians in the time of Demos- thenes did not talk Homeric Greek, inveys against " this unlearnable system of speaking," as " one of the most capricious and inconsistent of all imaginary irregularities :" assuring us, as a Boeotian might have assured Menander, that we " value ourselves on a strange anomaly," which " is comparatively of recent introduction, and has not been fully establisht for so much as two centuries." But even our more intelligent grammarians are by no means satisfactory on this point. Johnson in his Grammar says nothing about the matter : and his account of shall and will in his Dictionary is clumsy and far from precise. The generality on the other hand follow Waliis, in laying down that " will in the first person promises or threatens, in the second and third only foretells," and that " shall on the contrary in the first person simply foretells, in the second and third promises, commands, or threatens." Yet no attempt is made to give any explanation of this inconsistency. That the one suggested above is correct, seems to be confirmed by the fact that in interrogative and dependent sentences, when the use of shall does not convey any appearance of infringing on another's free will, it is still employed in the old way to express futurity. We say. Shall you he at the play this evening? and John does not think he shall he there. With such nicety however do we guard against what we look upon as an offensive encroachment, that, if John's thought bad related to another person, we should say John