because the action implied by the verb visited WAS COMPLETED before the other past action returned.”—­Ib., p. 91.  See nearly the same thing in Wells’s School Grammar, 1st Edition, p. 151; but his later editions are wisely altered.  Since “visited and was completed” are of the same tense, the argument from the latter, if it proves any thing, proves the former to be right, and the proposed change needless, or perhaps worse than needless.  “I visited Europe before I returned to America,” or, “I visited Europe, and afterwards returned to America,” is good English, and not to be improved by any change of tense; yet here too we see the visiting “was completed before” the return, or HAD BEEN COMPLETED at the time of the return.  I say, “The Pluperfect Tense is that which expresses what had taken place at some past time mentioned:  as, ‘I had seen him, when I met you.’” Murray says, “The Pluperfect Tense represents a thing not only as past, but also as prior to some other point of time specified in the sentence:  as, I had finished my letter before he arrived.”  Hiley says, “The Past-Perfect expresses an action or event which was past before some other past action or event mentioned in the sentence, and to which it refers; as, I had finished my lessons before he came.”  With this, Wells appears to concur, his example being similar.  It seems to me, that these last two definitions, and their example too, are bad; because by the help of before or after, “the past before the past” may be clearly expressed by the simple past tense:  as, “I finished my letter before he arrived.”—­“I finished my lessons before he came.”  “He arrived soon after I finished the letter.”—­“Soon after it was completed, he came in.”

[64] Samuel Kirkham, whose grammar is briefly described in the third chapter of this introduction, boldly lays the blame of all his philological faults, upon our noble language itself; and even conceives, that a well-written and faultless grammar cannot be a good one, because it will not accord with that reasonless jumble which he takes every existing language to be!  How diligently he laboured to perfect his work, and with what zeal for truth and accuracy, may be guessed from the following citation:  “The truth is, after all which can be done to render the definitions and rules of grammar comprehensive and accurate, they will still be found, when critically examined by men of learning and science, more or less exceptionable. These exceptions and imperfections are the unavoidable consequence of the imperfections of the language.  Language as well as every thing else of human invention,