“number,” “train” and the like, are collective nouns; and, as such, they often have plural verbs in agreement with them.  To say, “A number of men and women were present,” is as correct as to say, “A very great number of our words are plainly derived from the Latin.”—­Blair’s Rhet., p. 86.  Murray’s criticism, therefore, since it does not exempt these examples from the censure justly laid upon Webster’s rule, will certainly mislead the learner.  And again the rule, being utterly wrong in principle, will justify blunders like these:  “The truth of the narratives have never been disputed;”—­“The virtue of these men and women are indeed exemplary.”—­Murray’s Gram., p. 148.  In one of his notes, Murray suggests, that the article an or a before a collective noun must confine the verb to the singular number; as, “A great number of men and women was collected.”—­Ib., p. 153.  But this doctrine he sometimes forgot or disregarded; as, “But if a number of interrogative or exclamatory sentences are thrown into one general group.”—­Ib., p. 284; Comly, 166; Fisk, 160; Ingersoll, 295.

OBS. 17.—­Cobbett, in a long paragraph, (the 245th of his English Grammar,) stoutly denies that any relative pronoun can ever be the nominative to a verb; and, to maintain this absurdity, he will have the relative and its antecedent to be always alike in case, the only thing in which they are always independent of each other.  To prove his point, he first frames these examples:  “The men who are here, the man who is here; the cocks that crow, the cock that crows;” and then asks, “Now, if the relative be the nominative, why do the verbs change, seeing that here is no change in the relative?” He seems ignorant of the axiom, that two things severally equal to a third, are also equal to each other:  and accordingly, to answer his own question, resorts to a new principle:  “The verb is continually varying.  Why does it vary?  Because it disregards the relative and goes and finds the antecedent, and accommodates its number to that.”—­Ibid. To this wild doctrine, one erratic Irishman yields a full assent; and, in one American grammatist, we find a partial and unintentional concurrence with it.[389] But the fact is, the relative agrees with the antecedent, and the verb agrees with the relative:  hence all three of the words are alike in person and number.  But between the case of the relative and that of the antededent [sic—­KTH], there never is, or can be, in our language, any sort of connexion or interference.  The words belong to different clauses; and, if both be nominatives, they must be the subjects of different verbs:  or, if the noun be sometimes put absolute in the nominative, the pronoun is still left to its own verb.  But Cobbett concludes his observation thus:  “You will observe, therefore, that, when I, in the etymology and syntax as relating to relative pronouns, speak of relatives as being in the nominative case, I mean, that they relate to nouns or to personal pronouns, which are in that case.  The same observation applies to the other cases.”—­Ib., 245.  This suggestion betrays in the critic an unaccountable ignorance of his subject.