appear to be used indefinitely, without a nominative; as, let there be light; There required haste in the business; There needs no argument for proving, &c.  There wanted not men who would, &c.  The last expressions have an active form with a passive sense, and should perhaps rather be considered elliptical than wanting a nominative; as, haste is required, no argument is needed, &c.”—­Weld’s English Grammar Illustrated, p. 143.  Is there anywhere, in print, viler pedantry than this?  The only elliptical example, “Let there be light,”—­a kind of sentence from which the nominative is usually suppressed,—­is here absurdly represented as being full, yet without a subject for its verb; while other examples, which are full, and in which the nominative must follow the verb, because the adverb “there” precedes, are first denied to have nominatives, and then most bunglingly tortured with false ellipses, to prove that they have them!

(3.) The idea of a command wherein no person or thing is commanded, seems to have originated with Webster, by whom it has been taught, since 1807, as follows:  “In some cases, the imperative verb is used without a definite nominative.”—­Philos.  Gram., p. 141; Imp.  Gram., 86; Rudiments, 69.  See the same words in Frazee’s Gram., p. 133.  Wells has something similar:  “A verb in the imperative is sometimes used absolutely, having no direct reference to any particular subject expressed or implied; as, ‘And God said, Let there be light.’”—­School Gram., p. 141.  But, when this command was uttered to the dark waves of primeval chaos, it must have meant, “Do ye let light be there.” What else could it mean?  There may frequently be difficulty in determining what or who is addressed by the imperative let, but there seems to be more in affirming that it has no subject.  Nutting, puzzled with this word, makes the following dubious and unsatisfactory suggestion:  “Perhaps it may be, in many cases, equivalent to may; or it may be termed itself an imperative mode impersonal; that is, containing a command or an entreaty addressed to no particular person.”—­Nutting’s Practical Gram., p. 47.

(4.) These several errors, about the “Imperative used Absolutely,” with “no subject addressed,” as in “Let there be light,” and the Indicative “verbs NEED and WANT, employed without a nominative, either expressed or implied,” are again carefully reiterated by the learned Professor Fowler, in his great text-book of philology “in its Elements and Forms,”—­called, rather extravagantly, an “English Grammar.”  See, in his edition of 1850, Sec.597, Note 3 and Note 7; also Sec.520, Note 2.  Wells’s authorities for “Imperatives Absolute,” are, “Frazee, Allen and Cornwell, Nutting, Lynde, and Chapin;” and, with reference to “NEED and WANT,” he says, “See Webster, Perley, and Ingersoll.”—­School Gram., 1850, Sec.209.