he parses any noun that is uttered with an interjection.  In short, he applies his principle to nothing but the word me in the phrases, “Ah me!” “Oh me!” and “Me miserable!” and even these he parses falsely.  The second person used in the vocative, or the nominative put absolute by direct address, whether an interjection be used or not, he rightly explains as being “in the nominative case independent;” as, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!”—­Kirkham’s Gram., p. 130.  “O maid of Inistore!”—­Ib., p. 131.  But he is wrong in saying that, “Whenever a noun is of the second person, it is in the nominative case independent;” (Ib., p. 130;) and still more so, in supposing that, “The principle contained in the note” [which tells what interjections require,] “proves that every noun of the second person is in the nominative case.”—­Ib., p. 164.  A falsehood proves nothing but the ignorance or the wickedness of him who utters it.  He is wrong too, as well as many others, in supposing that this nominative independent is not a nominative absolute; for, “The vocative is [generally, if not always,] absolute.”—­W.  Allen’s Gram., p. 142.  But that nouns of the second person are not always absolute or independent, nor always in the nominative case, or the vocative, appears, I think, by the following example:  “This is the stone which was set at nought of you builders.”—­Acts, iv, II.  See Obs. 3d on Rule 8th.

OBS. 8.—­The third person, when uttered in exclamation, with an interjection before it, is parsed by Kirkham, not as being governed by the interjection, either in the nominative case, according to his own argument and own rule above cited, or in the objective, according to Nixon’s notion of the construction; nor yet as being put absolute in the nominative, as I believe it generally, if not always is; but as being “the nominative to a verb understood; as, ‘Lo,’ there is ‘the poor Indian!’ ‘0, the pain’ there is! ‘the bliss’ there is ‘IN dying!’”—­Kirkham’s Gram., p. 129.  Pope’s text is, “Oh the pain, the bliss of dying!” and, in all that is here changed, the grammarian has perverted it, if not in all that he has added.  It is an other principle of Kirkham’s Grammar, though a false one, that, “Nouns have but two persons, the second and [the] third.”—­P. 37.  So that, these two being disposed of agreeably to his own methods above, which appear to include the second and third persons of pronouns also, there remains to him nothing but the objective of the pronoun of the first person to which he can suppose his other rule to apply; and I have shown that there is no truth in it, even in regard to this.  Yet, with the strongest professions of adhering to the principles, and even to “the language” of Lindley Murray, this gentleman, by copying somebody else in preference to “that eminent philologist,”