agreement than modern English has. Latin and Greek and the modern European languages also have more. The relations of words in Latin are shown by these agreements, but in English the logical relations are discovered by other means than word forms. Arrangement and emphasis have large, though subtle, effects in fixing these word relations. We must still recognize "concord" and "government" as facts of the English language. But we may wisely forbear to use so large a mould for holding our grammatical truths as the rules of agreement in the older grammars. XV PERSON Person is the foundation of the conception of the pronoun. It can only be attributed to nouns, of which it is no proper function. It belongs to verbs only by transfer from pronouns, the personal endings of the verbs being all originally affixed pronouns.-JOYNES. The want of the so-called verbal inflections for number and person can hardly be considered an imperfection in the English language; for inflection, though it may reduce the number of words, gives us no greater precision, but, on the contrary, less force in these respects than may be obtained by the use of auxiliary pronouns and other determinatives. -MARSH. It is no real wealth to a language to have needless and superfluous forms.-TRENCH. In an abridgment of Murray's Grammar in common use in the earlier half of the century, the subject of grammatical person is briefly treated as follows: "I is the first person. Thou is the second person. He, she, or it is the third person." This little text-book of a past generation has some elaborations which seem to darken counsel by an excess of grammatical illumination. But in the simplicity of its treatment of person, we believe that it might point a moral for some modern grammarians who wrestle with the disputed question whether per son is an "accident," a "distinction," a "property," an "inflection," or a what-not of certain parts of speech. After all, what is there of person in English besides the name of a small class of pronouns, and a few verbal forms which agree with these pronouns ? We might add that since the third person of the verb is also used with noun subjects and with the indeclinable pronouns, there is a remote sense in which these words also may be accredited with something of grammatical person. The three persons of the pronoun are not really an inflection of a part of speech. They are distinct words with which this personal idea is associated. The only inflection of person that exists in English is the small remnant that is found in verbs. There are two forms for the third person singular in the present tense, -a modern form ending in s, and an ancient one in th or eth. There is also a second person singular used with the subject thou in all tenses. Though too archaic for common use, this is still the approved form for prayer and for poetry, and should be thoroughly familiar. The verb be has more of person than other verbs; yet the number of its personal forms is not large. They are very important, however, as they are in constant use both as principal verbs and as auxiliaries. The syntax of the subject of person is chiefly contained in the following rule: "A verb and its subject must agree in person and in number, when both have the requisite person and number." The rule is an important and rigid one, but its applications are comparatively few, as verbs seldom have "the requisite person and number." There is another rule of syntax (or perhaps of politeness) less important than the other, which assigns the following order of precedence to the grammatical persons in compound phrases:— You, and he, and I. There is also a principle of agreement in case of a compound antecedent, which is illustrated by the following sentences: You and I will take our books. You and he will take your books. But the inflection and syntax of grammatical person is a short subject if we do not weigh it down by unnecessary rules and definitions. XVI NUMBER To Singular Nouns we always add an (s) (Ce) (ge) when they their softer sound express. -SIR RICHARD STEELE'S GRAMMAR, 1712, DEDICATED TO THE QUEEN. As there is a common gender so there ought to have been a common or neutral number.-BAIN. "Grammatical phenomena are of two kinds, living and dead. The living are still freely used to form new inflected and derived words on the pattern of those already existing, -as the plural s." English like most other languages has two numbers, the singular which expresses one-ness (or else leaves the number indefinite, as "The lion is the King of beasts") and the plural which expresses more-thanone-ness. A few languages have also a dual number expressing two-ness, and this was true of Old English. In languages having a dual number the plural expresses more-than-two-ness. Thus in Old English the plural we implied at least three persons, "we-two" being expressed by an ancient dual form "wit." A remnant of the old English dual number is found in the word |