35.  But this reason, as well as many other truths equally important and equally clear, our common grammarians, have, so far as I know, every man of them, overlooked.  Consequently, even when they were aiming at the right thing, they frequently fell into gross errors of expression; and, what is still more surprising, such errors have been entailed upon the very art of grammar, and the art of authorship itself, by the prevalence of an absurd notion, that modern writers on this subject can be meritorious authors without originality.  Hence many a school-boy is daily rehearsing from his grammar-book what he might well be ashamed to have written.  For example, the following definition from Murray’s grammar, is found in perhaps a dozen other compends, all professing to teach the art of speaking and writing with propriety:  “Number is the consideration of an object, as one or more.” [70] Yet this short sentence, as I have before suggested, is a fourfold solecism. First, the word “number” is wrong; because those modifications of language, which distinguish unity and plurality, cannot be jointly signified by it. Secondly, the word “consideration” is wrong; because number is not consideration, in any sense which can be put upon the terms:  condition, constitution, configuration, or any other word beginning with con, would have done just as well. Thirdly, “the consideration of an object as one,” is but idle waste of thought; for, that one thing is one,—­that an object is one object,—­every child knows by intuition, and not by “consideration.” Lastly, to consider “an object as more” than one, is impossible; unless this admirable definition lead us into a misconception in so plain a case!  So much for the art of “the grammatical definer.”

36.  Many other examples, equally faulty and equally common, might, be quoted and criticised for the further proof and illustration of what I have alleged.  But the reader will perhaps judge the foregoing to be sufficient.  I have wished to be brief, and yet to give my arguments, and the neglected facts upon which they rest, their proper force upon the mind.  Against such prejudices as may possibly arise from the authorship of rival publications, or from any interest in the success of one book rather than of an other, let both my judges and me be on our guard.  I have intended to be fair; for captiousness is not criticism.  If the reader perceives in these strictures any improper bias, he has a sort of discernment which it is my misfortune to lack.  Against the compilers of grammars, I urge no conclusions at which any man can hesitate, who accedes to my preliminary remarks upon them; and these may be summed up in the following couplet of the poet Churchill: 

   “To copy beauties, forfeits all pretence
    To fame;—­to copy faults, is want of sense.”