OBS. 4.—­Public opinion is now clear in the decision, that it is expedient to assign to English nouns three cases, and no more; and, in a matter of this kind, what is expedient for the purpose of instruction, is right.  Yet, from the works of our grammarians, may be quoted every conceivable notion, right or wrong, upon this point.  Cardell, with Tooke and Gilchrist on his side, contends that English nouns have no cases.  Brightland averred that they have neither cases nor genders.[162] Buchanan, and the author of the old British Grammar, assigned to them one case only, the possessive, or genitive.  Dr. Adam also says, “In English, nouns have only one case, namely, the genitive, or possessive case.”—­Latin and Eng.  Gram., p. 7.  W. B. Fowle has two cases, but rejects the word case:  “We use the simple term agent for a noun that acts, and object for the object of an action.”—­Fowle’s True Eng.  Gram., Part II, p. 68.  Spencer too discards the word case, preferring “form,” that he may merge in one the nominative and the objective, giving to nouns two cases, but neither of these.  “Nouns have two Forms, called the Simple and [the] Possessive.”—­Spencer’s E. Gram., p. 30.  Webber’s Grammar, published at Cambridge in 1832, recognizes but two cases of nouns, declaring the objective to be “altogether superfluous.”—­P. 22.  “Our substantives have no more cases than two.”—­Jamieson’s Rhet., p. 14.  “A Substantive doth not properly admit of more than two cases:  the Nominative, and the Genitive.”—­Ellen Devis’s Gram., p. 19.  Dr. Webster, in his Philosophical Grammar, of 1807, and in his Improved Grammar, of 1831, teaches the same doctrine, but less positively.  This assumption has also had the support of Lowth, Johnson, Priestley, Ash, Bicknell, Fisher, Dalton, and our celebrated Lindley Murray.[163] In Child’s or Latham’s English Grammar, 1852, it is said, “The cases in the present English are three:—­1.  Nominative; 2.  Objective; 3.  Possessive.”  But this seems to be meant of pronouns only; for the next section affirms, “The substantives in English have only two out of the three cases.”—­See pp. 79 and 80.  Reckless of the current usage of grammarians, and even of self-consistency, both author and reviser will have no objective case of nouns, because this is like the nominative; yet, finding an objective set after “the adjective like,” they will recognize it as “a dative still existing in English!”—­See p. 156.  Thus do they forsake their own enumeration of cases, as they had before, in all their declensions, forsaken the new order in which they had at first so carefully set them!