OBS. 26.—­The following examples are from a letter of an African Prince, translated by Dr. Desaguillier of Cambridge, England, in 1743, and published in a London newspaper:  “I lie there too upon the bed thou presented me;”—­“After thou left me, in thy swimming house;”—­“Those good things thou presented me;”—­“When thou spake to the Great Spirit and his Son.”  If it is desirable that our language should retain this power of a simple literal version of what in others may be familiarly expressed by the second person singular, it is clear that our grammarians must not continue to dogmatize according to the letter of some authors hitherto popular.  But not every popular grammar condemns such phraseology as the foregoing.  “I improved, Thou improvedst, &c.  This termination of the second person preterit, on account of its harshness, is seldom used, and especially in the irregular verbs.”—­Harrison’s Gram., p. 26.  “The termination est, annexed to the preter tenses of verbs, is, at best, a very harsh one, when it is contracted, according to our general custom of throwing out the e; as learnedst, for learnedest; and especially, if it be again contracted into one syllable, as it is commonly pronounced, and made learndst. * * * I believe a writer or speaker would have recourse to any periphrasis rather than say keptest, or keptst. * * * Indeed this harsh termination est is generally quite dropped in common conversation, and sometimes by the poets, in writing.”—­Priestley’s Gram., p. 115.  The fact is, it never was added with much uniformity.  Examples:  “But like the hell hounde thou waxed fall furious, expressing thy malice when thou to honour stied.”—­FABIAN’S CHRONICLE, V. ii, p. 522:  in Tooke’s Divers., T. ii, p. 232.

   “Thou from the arctic regions came.  Perhaps
    Thou noticed on thy way a little orb,
    Attended by one moon—­her lamp by night.”
        —­Pollok, B. ii, l. 5.

    “’So I believ’d.’—­No, Abel! to thy grief,
    So thou relinquish’d all that was belief.”
        —­Crabbe, Borough, p. 279.

OBS. 27.—­L.  Murray, and his numerous copyists, Ingersoll, Greenleaf, Kirkham, Fisk, Flint, Comly, Alger, and the rest; though they insist on it, that the st of the second person can never be dispensed with, except in the imperative mood and some parts of the subjunctive; are not altogether insensible of that monstrous harshness which their doctrine imposes upon the language.  Some of them tell us to avoid this by preferring the auxiliaries dost and didst:  as dost burst, for burstest; didst check, for checkedst. This recommendation proceeds on the supposition that dost and didst are smoother syllables than est and edst; which is not true:  didst learn is harsher than either learnedst