[48] The author of this specimen, through a solemn and sublime poem in ten books, generally simplified the preterit verb of the second person singular, by omitting the termination st or est, whenever his measure did not require the additional syllable.  But his tuneless editors have, in many instances, taken the rude liberty both to spoil his versification, and to publish under his name what he did not write.  They have given him bad prosody, or unutterable harshness of phraseology, for the sake of what they conceived to be grammar.  So Kirkham, in copying the foregoing passage, alters it as he will; and alters it differently, when he happens to write some part of it twice:  as,

   “That morning, thou, that slumberedst not before,
    Nor slept, great Ocean! laidst thy waves at rest,
    And hushed thy mighty minstrelsy.”—­Kirkham’s Elocution, p. 203.

Again: 

   “That morning, thou, that slumberedst not before,
    Nor sleptst, great Ocean, laidst thy waves at rest,
    And hush’dst thy mighty minstrelsy.”—­Kirkham’s Elocution, p. 44.

[49] Camenes, the Muses, whom Horace called Camaenae.  The former is an English plural from the latter, or from the Latin word camena, a muse or song.  These lines are copied from Dr. Johnson’s History of the English Language; their orthography is, in some respects, too modern for the age to which they are assigned.

[50] The Saxon characters being known nowadays to but very few readers, I have thought proper to substitute for them, in the latter specimens of this chapter, the Roman; and, as the old use of colons and periods for the smallest pauses, is liable to mislead a common observer, the punctuation too has here been modernized.

[51] Essay on Language, by William S. Cardell, New York, 1825, p. 2.  This writer was a great admirer of Horne Tooke, from whom he borrowed many of his notions of grammar, but not this extravagance.  Speaking of the words right and just, the latter says, “They are applicable only to man; to whom alone language belongs, and of whose sensations only words are the representatives.”—­Diversions of Purley, Vol. ii, p. 9.

[52] CARDELL:  Both Grammars, p. 4.

[53] “Quoties dicimus, toties de nobis judicatur.”—­Cicero.  “As often as we speak, so often are we judged.”

[54] “Nor had he far to seek for the source of our impropriety in the use of words, when he should reflect that the study of our own language, has never been made a part of the education of our youth.  Consequently, the use of words is got wholly by chance, according to the company that we keep, or the books that we read.”  SHERIDAN’S ELOCUTION, Introd., p. viii, dated “July 10, 1762,” 2d Amer.  Ed.