OBS. 5.—­In regard to the number and form of the tenses which should constitute the subjunctive mood in English, our grammarians are greatly at variance; and some, supposing its distinctive parts to be but elliptical forms of the indicative or the potential,[230] even deny the existence of such a mood altogether.  On this point, the instructions published by Lindley Murray, however commended and copied, are most remarkably vague and inconsistent.[231] The early editions of his Grammar gave to this mood six tenses, none of which had any of the personal inflections; consequently there was, in all the tenses, some difference between it and the indicative.  His later editions, on the contrary, make the subjunctive exactly like the indicative, except in the present tense, and in the choice of auxiliaries for the second-future.  Both ways, he goes too far.  And while at last he restricts the distinctive form of the subjunctive to narrower bounds than he ought, and argues against, “If thou loved, If thou knew,” &c., he gives to this mood not only the last five tenses of the indicative, but also all those of the potential, with its multiplied auxiliaries; alleging, “that as the indicative mood is converted into the subjunctive, by the expression of a condition, motive, wish, supposition, &c.[232] being superadded to it, so the potential mood may, in like manner, be turned into the subjunctive.”—­Octavo Gram., p. 82.  According to this, the subjunctive mood of every regular verb embraces, in one voice, as many as one hundred and thirty-eight different expressions; and it may happen, that in one single tense a verb shall have no fewer than fifteen different forms in each person and number.  Six times fifteen are ninety; and so many are the several phrases which now compose Murray’s pluperfect tense of the subjunctive mood of the verb to strow—­a tense which most grammarians very properly reject as needless!  But this is not all.  The scheme not only confounds the moods, and utterly overwhelms the learner with its multiplicity, but condemns as bad English what the author himself once adopted and taught for the imperfect tense of the subjunctive mood, “If thou loved, If thou knew,” &c., wherein he was sustained by Dr. Priestley, by Harrison, by Caleb Alexander, by John Burn, by Alexander Murray, the schoolmaster, and by others of high authority.  Dr. Johnson, indeed, made the preterit subjunctive like the indicative; and this may have induced the author to change his plan, and inflect this part of the verb with st.  But Dr. Alexander Murray, a greater linguist than either of them, very positively declares this to be wrong:  “When such words as if, though, unless, except, whether, and the like, are used before verbs, they lose their terminations of est, eth, and s, in those persons which commonly have them.  No speaker of good English, expressing himself conditionally, says, Though thou fallest, or Though he falls, but, Though thou fall, and Though he fall; nor, Though thou camest, but, Though, or although, thou came.”—­History of European Languages, Vol. i, p. 55.