[451] The “idea” which is here spoken of, Dr. Blair discovers in a passage of Addison’s Spectator.  It is, in fact, as here “brought out” by the critic, a bald and downright absurdity.  Dr. Campbell has criticised, under the name of marvellous nonsense, a different display of the same “idea,” cited from De Piles’s Principles of Painting.  The passage ends thus:  “In this sense it may be asserted, that in Rubens’ pieces, Art is above Nature, and Nature only a copy of that great master’s works.”  Of this the critic says:  “When the expression is stript of the absurd meaning, there remains nothing but balderdash.”—­Philosophy of Rhet., p, 278.

[452] All his rules for the comma, Fisk appears to have taken unjustly from Greenleaf.  It is a double shame, for a grammarian to steal what is so badly written!—­G.  BROWN.

[453] Bad definitions may have other faults than to include or exclude what they should not, but this is their great and peculiar vice.  For example:  “Person is that property of nouns and pronouns which distinguishes the speaker, the person or thing addressed, and the person or thing spoken of.”—­Wells’s School Gram., 1st Ed., p. 51; 113th Ed., p. 57.  See nearly the same words, in Weld’s English Gram., p. 67; and in his Abridgement, p. 49.  The three persons of verbs are all improperly excluded from this definition; which absurdly takes “person” to be one property that has all the effect of all the persons; so that each person, in its turn, since each cannot have all this effect, is seen to be excluded also:  that is, it is not such a property as is described!  Again:  “An intransitive verb is a verb which does not have a noun or pronoun for its object.”—­Wells, 1st Ed., p. 76.  According to Dr. Johnson, “does not have,” is not a scholarly phrase; but the adoption of a puerile expression is a trifling fault, compared with that of including here all passive verbs, and some transitives, which the author meant to exclude; to say nothing of the inconsistency of excluding here the two classes of verbs which he absurdly calls “intransitive,” though he finds them “followed by objectives depending upon them!”—­Id., p. 145.  Weld imitates these errors too, on pp. 70 and 153.

[454] S. R. Hall thinks it necessary to recognize “four distinctions” of “the distinction occasioned by sex.”  In general, the other authors here quoted, suppose that we have only “three distinctions” of “the distinction of sex.”  And, as no philosopher has yet discovered more than two sexes, some have thence stoutly argued, that it is absurd to speak of more than two genders.  Lily makes it out, that in Latin there are seven:  yet, with no great consistency, he will have a gender to be a or the distinction of sex.