OBS. 17.—­The points of Dr. Lowth’s doctrine which are not sufficiently true, are the following:  First, it is not true, that thou, in the familiar style, is totally disused, and the plural you employed universally in its stead; though Churchill, and others, besides the good bishop, seem to represent it so.  It is now nearly two hundred years since the rise of the Society of Friends:  and, whatever may have been the practice of others before or since, it is certain, that from their rise to the present day, there have been, at every point of time, many thousands who made no use of you for thou; and, but for the clumsy forms which most grammarians hold to be indispensable to verbs of the second person singular, the beautiful, distinctive, and poetical words, thou, thyself, thy, thine, and thee, would certainly be in no danger yet of becoming obsolete.  Nor can they, indeed, at any rate, become so, till the fairest branches of the Christian Church shall wither; or, what should seem no gracious omen, her bishops and clergy learn to pray in the plural number, for fashion’s sake.  Secondly, it is not true, that, “thou, who touch’d,” ought indispensably to be, “thou, who touchedst, or didst touch.”  It is far better to dispense with the inflection, in such a case, than either to impose it, or to resort to the plural pronoun.  The “grammatical inconvenience” of dropping the st or est of a preterit, even in the solemn style, cannot be great, and may be altogether imaginary; that of imposing it, except in solemn prose, is not only real, but is often insuperable.  It is not very agreeable, however, to see it added to some verbs, and dropped from others, in the same sentence:  as,

   “Thou, who didst call the Furies from the abyss,
    And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss.”
        —­Byron’s Childe Harold, Canto iv, st. 132.

   “Thou satt’st from age to age insatiate,
    And drank the blood of men, and gorged their flesh.”
        —­Pollok’s Course of Time, B. vii, l. 700.

OBS. 18.—­We see then, that, according to Dr. Lowth and others, the only good English in which one can address an individual on any ordinary occasion, is you with a plural verb; and that, according to Lindley Murray and others, the only good English for the same purpose, is thou with a verb inflected with st or est.  Both parties to this pointed contradiction, are more or less in the wrong.  The respect of the Friends for those systems of grammar which deny them the familiar use of the pronoun thou, is certainly not more remarkable, than the respect of the world for those which condemn the substitution of the plural you.  Let grammar be a true record of existing facts, and all such contradictions must vanish.  And, certainly,