these great masters here contradict each other, in what every one who reads English, ought to know.  They agree, however, in requiring, as indispensable to grammar, what is not only inconvenient, but absolutely impossible.  For what “the measure of verse will not admit,” cannot be used in poetry; and what may possibly be crowded into it, will often be far from ornamental.  Yet our youth have been taught to spoil the versification of Pope and others, after the following manner:  “Who touch’d Isaiah’s hallow’d lips with fire.”  Say, “Who touchedst or didst touch.”—­Murray’s Key, 8vo, p. 180.  “For thee that ever felt another’s wo.”  Say, “Didst feel.”—­Ib. “Who knew no wish but what the world might hear.”  Say, “Who knewest or didst know.”—­Ib. “Who all my sense confin’d.”  Say, “Confinedst or didst confine.”—­Ib., p. 186.  “Yet gave me in this dark estate.”  Say, “Gavedst or didst give.”—­Ib. “Left free the human will.”—­Pope.  Murray’s criticism extends not to this line, but by the analogy we must say, “Leavedst or leftest.”  Now it would be easier to fill a volume with such quotations, and such corrections, than to find sufficient authority to prove one such word as gavedst, leavedst, or leftest, to be really good English.  If Lord Byron is authority for “work’dst,” he is authority also for dropping the st, even where it might be added:—­

    ——­“Thou, who with thy frown
    Annihilated senates.”
        —­Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto iv, st. 83.

OBS. 19.—­According to Dr. Lowth, as well as Coar and some others, those preterits in which ed is sounded like t, “admit the change of ed into t; as, snacht, checkt, snapt, mixt, dropping also one of the double letters, dwelt, past.”—­Lowth’s Gram., p. 46.  If this principle were generally adopted, the number of our regular verbs would be greatly diminished, and irregularities would be indefinitely increased.  What confusion the practice must make in the language, especially when we come to inflect this part of the verb with st or est, has already been suggested.  Yet an ingenious and learned writer, an able contributor to the Philological Museum, published at Cambridge, England, in 1832; tracing the history of this class of derivatives, and finding that after the ed was contracted in pronunciation, several eminent writers, as Spenser, Milton, and others, adopted in most instances a contracted form of orthography; has seriously endeavoured to bring us back to their practice.  From these authors, he cites an abundance of such contractions as the following:  1.  “Stowd, hewd, subdewd, joyd, cald, expeld, compeld, spoild, kild, seemd, benumbd, armd, redeemd, staind, shund, paynd, stird, appeard, perceivd, resolvd, obeyd,