present participle to the auxiliary verb to be, through all its variations.”—­Kirkham’s Gram., p. 159. “Be is an auxiliary whenever it is placed before the perfect participle of another verb, but in every other situation, it is a principal verb.”—­Ib., p. 155. (15.) “A verb in the imperative mood, is always of the second person.”—­Kirkham’s Gram., p. 136.  “The verbs, according to an idiom of our language, or the poet’s license, are used in the imperative, agreeing with a nominative of the first or third person.”—­Ib., p. 164. (16.) “Personal Pronouns are distinguished from the relative, by their denoting the person of the nouns for which they stand.”—­Kirkham’s Gram., p. 97.  “Pronouns of the first person, do not agree in person with the nouns they represent.”—­Ib., p. 98. (17.) “Nouns have three cases, nominative, possessive, and objective.”—­Beck’s Gram., p. 6.  “Personal pronouns have, like nouns, two cases, nominative and objective.”—­Ib., p. 10. (18.).  “In some instances the preposition suffers no change, but becomes an adverb merely by its application:  as, ‘He was near falling.’”—­Murray’s Gram., p. 116. (19.) “Some nouns are used only in the plural; as, ashes, literati, minutiae, SHEEP, DEER.”—­Blair’s Gram., p. 43.  “Some nouns are the same in both numbers, as, alms, couple, DEER, series, species, pair, SHEEP.”—­Ibid. “Among the inferior parts of speech there are some pairs or couples”—­Ib., p. 94. (20.) “Concerning the pronominal adjectives, that can and can not, may and may not, represents its noun.”—­O.  B. Peirce’s Gram., p. 336. (21.) “The article a is in a few instances employed in the sense of a preposition; as, Simon Peter said I go a [to] fishing.”—­Weld’s Gram., 2d Ed., p. 177; Abridg., 128. “’To go a fishing;’ i.e. to go on a fishing voyage or business.”—­Weld’s Gram., p. 192. (22.) “So also verbs, really transitive, are used intransitively, when they have no object.”—­Bullions’s Analyt. and Pract.  Gram., p. 60.

(23.) “When first young Maro, in his boundless mind,
       A work t’ outlast immortal Rome design’d.”
        —­Pope, on Crit., l. 130.

UNDER CRITICAL NOTE VIII.—­OF SENSELESS JUMBLING.

“Number distinguishes them [viz., nouns], as one, or many, of the same kind, called the singular and plural.”—­Dr. Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric, p. 74.

[FORMULE.—­Not proper, because the words of this text appear to be so carelessly put together, as to make nothing but jargon, or a sort of scholastic balderdash.  But, according to Critical Note 8th, “To jumble together words without care for the sense, is an unpardonable negligence, and an abuse of the human understanding.”  I think the learned author should rather have said:  “There are two numbers called the singular and the plural, which distinguish nouns as signifying either one thing, or many of the same kind.”]