rapidly—­or is formed rapidly.”—­Here, with little difference of meaning, is the appearance of both voices, the Active and the Passive; while “is forming,” which some will have for an example of “the Middle voice,” may be referred to either.  If the following passive construction is right, is wanting or are wanting may be a verb of three or four different sorts:  “Reflections that may drive away despair, cannot be wanting by him, who considers,” &c.—­Johnson’s Rambler, No. 129:  Wright’s Gram., p. 196.

[267] Dr. Bullions, in his grammar of 1849, says, “Nobody would think of saying, ‘He is being loved’—­’This result is being desired.’”—­Analyt. and Pract.  Gram., p. 237.  But, according to J. W. Wright, whose superiority in grammar has sixty-two titled vouchers, this unheard-of barbarism is, for the present passive, precisely and solely what one ought to say!  Nor is it, in fact, any more barbarous, or more foreign from usage, than the spurious example which the Doctor himself takes for a model in the active voice:  “I am loving.  Thou art loving, &c; I have been loving, Thou hast been loving, &c.”—­A. and P. Gr., p. 92.  So:  “James is loving me.”—­Ib., p 235.

[268] “The predicate in the form, ‘The house is being built,’ would be, according to our view, ‘BEING BEING built,’ which is manifestly an absurd tautology.”—­Mulligan’s Gram., 1852, p. 151.

[269] “Suppose a criminal to be enduring the operation of binding:—­Shall we say, with Mr. Murray,—­’The criminal is binding?’ If so, HE MUST BE BINDING SOMETHING,—­a circumstance, in effect, quite opposed to the fact presented.  Shall we then say, as he does, in the present tense conjugation of his passive verb,—­’The criminal is bound?’ If so, the action of binding, which the criminal is suffering, will be represented as completed, —­a position which the action its self will palpably deny.”  See Wright’s Phil.  Gram., p. 102.  It is folly for a man to puzzle himself or others thus, with fictitious examples, imagined on purpose to make good usage seem wrong.  There is bad grammar enough, for all useful purposes, in the actual writings of valued authors; but who can show, by any proofs, that the English language, as heretofore written, is so miserably inadequate to our wants, that we need use the strange neologism, “The criminal is being bound,” or any thing similar?

[270] It is a very strange event in the history of English grammar, that such a controversy as this should have arisen; but a stranger one still, that, after all that has been said, more argument is needed.  Some men, who hope to be valued as scholars, yet stickle for an odd phrase, which critics have denounced as follows:  “But the history of the language scarcely affords a parallel to the innovation, at once unphilosophical and hypercritical, pedantic and illiterate, which has lately appeared in the excruciating refinement ‘is being’ and its unmerciful variations.  We hope, and indeed believe, that it has not received the sanction of any grammar adopted in our popular education, as it certainly never will of any writer of just pretensions to scholarship.”—­The True Sun.  N. Y., April 16, 1846.