couldst, wouldst, and shouldst, as words of one syllable; and also observes, in a marginal note, “Some writers begin to say, ’Thou may, thou might,’ &c.”—­Ib., p. 36.  Examples of this are not very uncommon:  “Thou shall want ere I want.”—­Old Motto; Scott’s Lay, Note 1st to Canto 3.  “Thyself the mournful tale shall tell.”—­Felton’s Gram., p. 20.

   “One sole condition would I dare suggest,
    That thou would save me from my own request.”—­Jane Taylor.

OBS. 13.—­In respect to the second person singular, the grammar of Lindley Murray makes no distinction between the solemn and the familiar style; recognizes in no way the fashionable substitution of you for thou; and, so far as I perceive, takes it for granted, that every one who pretends to speak or write grammatically, must always, in addressing an individual, employ the singular pronoun, and inflect the verb with st or est, except in the imperative mood and the subjunctive present.  This is the more remarkable, because the author was a valued member of the Society of Friends; and doubtless his own daily practice contradicted his doctrine, as palpably as does that of every other member of the Society.  And many a schoolmaster, taking that work for his text-book, or some other as faulty, is now doing precisely the same thing.  But what a teacher is he, who dares not justify as a grammarian that which he constantly practices as a man!  What a scholar is he, who can be led by a false criticism or a false custom, to condemn his own usage and that of every body else!  What a casuist is he, who dares pretend conscience for practising that which he knows and acknowledges to be wrong!  If to speak in the second person singular without inflecting our preterits and auxiliaries, is a censurable corruption of the language, the Friends have no alternative but to relinquish their scruple about the application of you to one person; for none but the adult and learned can ever speak after the manner of ancient books:  children and common people can no more be brought to speak agreeably to any antiquated forms of the English language, than according to the imperishable models of Greek and Latin.  He who traces the history of our vernacular tongue, will find it has either simplified or entirely dropped several of its ancient terminations; and that the st or est of the second person singular, never was adopted in any thing like the extent to which our modern grammarians have attempted to impose it.  “Thus becoming unused to inflections, we lost the perception of their meaning and nature.”—­Philological Museum, i, 669.  “You cannot make a whole people all at once talk in a different tongue from that which it has been used to talk in:  you cannot force it to unlearn the words it has learnt from its fathers, in order to learn a set of newfangled words out of [a grammar or] a dictionary.”—­Ib., i, 650.  Nor can you, in this instance, restrain our poets from transgressing the doctrine of Lowth and Murray:—­