objective case.”—­Text-Book of E. Gram., p. 33.  Thus he introduces a new class, unknown to his primary division of the pronouns, and not included in his scheme of their declension.  Fuller, too, in a grammar produced at Plymouth, Mass., in 1822, did nearly the same thing.  He called I, thou, he, she, and it, with their plurals, “antecedent pronouns;” took my, thy, his, her, &c., for their only possessive forms in his declension; and, having passed from them by the space of just half his book, added:  “Sometimes, to prevent the repetition of the same word, an antecedent pronoun in the possessive case, is made to represent, both the pronoun and a noun; as, ’That book is mine’—­i. e. ‘my book.’  MINE is a compound antecedent pronoun, and is equivalent to my book.  Then parse my, and book, as though they were both expressed.”—­Fuller’s Gram., p. 71.

OBS. 11.—­Amidst all this diversity of doctrine at the very centre of grammar, who shall so fix its principles that our schoolmasters and schoolmistresses may know what to believe and teach?  Not he that speculates without regard to other men’s views; nor yet he that makes it a merit to follow implicitly “the footsteps of” one only.  The true principles of grammar are with the learned; and that man is in the wrong, with whom the most learned will not, in general, coincide.  Contradiction of falsities, is necessary to the maintenance of truth; correction of errors, to the success of science.  But not every man’s errors can be so considerable as to deserve correction from other hands than his own.  Misinstruction in grammar has for this reason generally escaped censure.  I do not wish any one to coincide with me merely through ignorance of what others inculcate.  If doctors of divinity and doctors of laws will contradict themselves in teaching grammar, so far as they do so, the lovers of consistency will find it necessary to deviate from their track.  Respecting these pronouns, I learned in childhood, from Webster, a doctrine which he now declares to be false.  This was nearly the same as Lowth’s, which is quoted in the sixth observation above.  But, in stead of correcting its faults, this zealous reformer has but run into others still greater.  Now, with equal reproach to his etymology, his syntax, and his logic, he denies that our pronouns have any form of the possessive case at all.  But grant the obvious fact, that substitution is one thing, and ellipsis an other, and his whole argument is easily overthrown; for it is only by confounding these, that he reaches his absurd conclusion.