Page:The grammar of English grammars.djvu/358

 bark'st, bark'dst, bubbl'st, ''bubbl'dst, troubbl'st, troubbl'dst."--Kirkham's Elocution, p. 42. The word trouble may receive the additional sound of st, but this gentleman does not here spell'' so accurately as a great author should. Nor did they who penned the following lines, write here as poets should:--

"Of old thou build'st thy throne on righteousness." --Pollok's C. of T., B. vi, l. 638.

"For though thou work'dst my mother's ill." --Byron's Parasina.

"Thou thyself doat'dst on womankind, admiring." --Milton's P. R., B. ii, l. 175.

"But he, the sev'nth from thee, whom thou beheldst." --Id., P. L., B. xi, l. 700.

"Shall build a wondrous ark, as thou beheldst." --Id., ib., B. xi, l. 819.

"Thou, who inform'd'st this clay with active fire!" --Savage's Poems, p. 247.

"Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'dst it from me." --Shak., Coriol., Act iii.

"This cloth thou dipp'dst in blood of my sweet boy." --Id., Henry VI, P. i.

"Great Queen of arms, whose favour Tydeus won;   As thou defend'st the sire, defend the son." --Pope, Iliad, B. x, l. 337.

OBS. 16.--Dr. Lowth, whose popular little Grammar was written in or about 1758, made no scruple to hem up both the poets and the Friends at once, by a criticism which I must needs consider more dogmatical than true; and which, from the suppression of what is least objectionable in it, has become, her hands, the source of still greater errors: "Thou in the polite, and even in the familiar style, is disused, and the plural you is employed instead of it; we say, you have, not thou hast. Though in this case, we apply you to a single person, yet the verb too must agree with it in the plural number; it must necessarily be, you have, not you hast. You was is an enormous solecism,[245] and yet authors of the first rank have inadvertently fallen into it. * * * On the contrary, the solemn style admits not of you for a single person. This hath led Mr. Pope into a great impropriety in the beginning of his Messiah:--

'O thou my voice inspire, Who touch'd Isaiah's hallow'd lips with fire!'

The solemnity of the style would not admit of you for thou, in the pronoun; nor the measure of the verse touchedst, or didst touch, in the verb, as it indispensably ought to be, in the one or the other of those two forms; you, who touched, or thou, who touchedst, or ''didst touch.''

'Just of thy word, in every thought sincere; Who knew no wish, but what the world might hear.'--Pope.

It ought to be your in the first line, or knewest in the second. In order to avoid this grammatical inconvenience, the two distinct forms of thou and you, are often used promiscuously by our modern poets, in the same paragraph, and even in the same sentence, very inelegantly and improperly:--

'Now, now, I seize, I clasp thy charms; And now you burst, ah cruel! from my arms.'--Pope."       --Lowth's English Gram., p. 34.

OBS. 17.--The points of Dr. Lowth's doctrine which are not sufficiently true, are the following: First, it is not true, that thou, in the familiar style, is totally disused, and the plural you employed universally in its stead; though Churchill, and others, besides the good bishop, seem to represent it so. It is now nearly two hundred years since the rise of the Society of Friends: and, whatever may have been the practice of others before or since, it is certain, that from their rise to the present day, there have been, at every point of time, many thousands who made no use of you for thou; and, but for the clumsy forms which most grammarians hold to be indispensable to verbs of the second person singular, the beautiful, distinctive, and poetical words, ''thou, thyself, thy, thine, and thee'', would certainly be in no danger yet of becoming obsolete. Nor can they, indeed, at any rate, become so, till the fairest branches of the Christian Church shall wither; or, what should seem no gracious omen, her bishops and clergy learn to pray in the plural number, for fashion's sake. Secondly, it is not true, that, "thou, who touch'd," ought indispensably to be, "thou, who touchedst, or didst touch." It is far better to dispense with the inflection, in such a case, than either to impose it, or to resort to the plural pronoun. The "grammatical inconvenience" of dropping the st or est of a preterit, even in the solemn style, cannot be great, and may be altogether imaginary; that of imposing it, except in solemn prose, is not only real, but is often insuperable. It is not very agreeable, however, to see it added to some verbs, and dropped from others, in the same sentence: as,

"Thou, who didst call the Furies from the abyss,   And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss." --Byron's Childe Harold, Canto iv, st. 132.

"Thou satt'st from age to age insatiate,   And drank the blood of men, and gorged their flesh." --Pollok's Course of Time, B. vii, l. 700.