[271] Education is a work of continuance, yet completed, like many others, as fast as it goes on.  It is not, like the act of loving or hating, so complete at the first moment as not to admit the progressive form of the verb; for one may say of a lad, “I am educating him for the law;” and possibly, “He is educating for the law;” though not so well as, “He is to be educated for the law.”  But, to suppose that “is educated” or “are educated” implies unnecessarily a cessation of the educating is a mistake.  That conception is right, only when educated is taken adjectively.  The phrase, “those who are educated in our seminaries,” hardly includes such as have been educated there in times past:  much less does it apply to these exclusively, as some seem to think. “Being,” as inserted by Southey, is therefore quite needless:  so it is often, in this new phraseology, the best correction being its mere omission.

[272] Worcester has also this citation:  “The Eclectic Review remarks, ’That a need of this phrase, or an equivalent one, is felt, is sufficiently proved by the extent to which it is used by educated persons and respectable writers.’”—­Gram. before Dict., p. xlvi.  Sundry phrases, equivalent in sense to this new voice, have long been in use, and are, of course, still needed; something from among them being always, by every accurate writer, still preferred.  But this awkward innovation, use it who will, can no more be justified by a plea of “need,” than can every other hackneyed solecism extant.  Even the Archbishop, if quoted right by Worcester, has descended to “uncouth English,” without either necessity or propriety, having thereby only misexpounded a very common Greek word—­a “perfect or pluperfect” participle, which means “beaten, struck, or having been beaten”—­G.  Brown.

[273] Wells has also the following citations, which most probably accord with his own opinions, though the first is rather extravagant:  “The propriety of these imperfect passive tenses has been doubted by almost all our grammarians; though I believe but few of them have written many pages without condescending to make use of them.  Dr. Beattie says, ’One of the greatest defects of the English tongue, with regard to the verb, seems to be the want of an imperfect passive participle.’  And yet he uses the imperfect participle in a passive sense as often as most writers.”—­Pickbourn’s Dissertation on the English Verb.

“Several other expressions of this sort now and then occur, such as the new-fangled and most uncouth solecism, ‘is being done,’ for the good old English idiomatic expression, ’is doing,’—­an absurd periphrasis, driving out a pointed and pithy turn of the English language.”—­N.  A. Review.  See Wells’s Grammar, 1850, p. 161.