[168] Murray says, “An adjective put without a substantive, with the definite article before it, becomes a substantive in sense and meaning, and is written as a substantive:  as, ’Providence rewards the good, and punishes the bad.’” If I understand this, it is very erroneous, and plainly contrary to the fact.  I suppose the author to speak of good persons and bad persons; and, if he does, is there not an ellipsis in his language?  How can it be said, that good and bad are here substantives, since they have a plural meaning and refuse the plural form?  A word “written as a substantive,” unquestionably is a substantive; but neither of these is here entitled to that name.  Yet Smith, and other satellites of Murray, endorse his doctrine; and say, that good and bad in this example, and all adjectives similarly circumstanced, “may be considered nouns in parsing.”—­Smith’s New Gram., p. 52.  “An adjective with the definite article before it, becomes a noun, (of the third person, plural number,) and must be parsed as such.”—­R.  G. Greene’s Grammatical Text-Book, p. 55.

[169] Here the word English appears to be used substantively, not by reason of the article, but rather because it has no article; for, when the definite article is used before such a word taken in the singular number, it seems to show that the noun language is understood.  And it is remarkable, that before the names or epithets by which we distinguish the languages, this article may, in many instances, be either used or not used, repeated or not repeated, without any apparent impropriety:  as, “This is the case with the Hebrew, French, Italian, and Spanish.”—­Murray’s Gram., i, p. 38.  Better, perhaps:  “This is the case with the Hebrew, the French, the Italian, and the Spanish.”  But we may say:  “This is the case with Hebrew, French, Italian, and Spanish.”  In the first of these forms, there appears to be an ellipsis of the plural noun languages, at the end of the sentence; in the second, an ellipsis of the singular noun language, after each of the national epithets; in the last, no ellipsis, but rather a substantive use of the words in question.

[170] The Doctor may, for aught I know, have taken his notion of this “noun,” from the language “of Dugald Dalgetty, boasting of his ’5000 Irishes’ in the prison of Argyle.”  See Letter of Wendell Phillips, in the Liberator, Vol. xi, p. 211.

[171] Lindley Murray, or some ignorant printer of his octavo Grammar, has omitted this s; and thereby spoiled the prosody, if not the sense, of the line: 

   “Of Sericana, where Chinese drive,” &c.
        —­Fourth American Ed., p. 345.

If there was a design to correct the error of Milton’s word, something should have been inserted.  The common phrase, “the Chinese,” would give the sense, and the right number of syllables, but not the right accent.  It would be sufficiently analogous with our mode of forming the words, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Scotchmen, Dutchmen, and Irishmen, and perhaps not unpoetical, to say: