OBS. 12.—­From the erroneous conception, that a perfect participle must, in every connexion, express “action finished,” action past,—­or perhaps from only a moiety of this great error,—­the notion that such a participle cannot, in connexion with an auxiliary, constitute a passive verb of the present tense,—­J.  W. Wright, above-mentioned, has not very unnaturally reasoned, that, “The expression, ‘I am loved,’ which Mr. Murray has employed to exhibit the passive conjugation of the present tense, may much more feasibly represent past than present time.”—­See Wright’s Philosophical Gram., p. 99.  Accordingly, in his own paradigm of the passive verb, he has formed this tense solely from what he calls the participle present, thus:  “I am being smitten, Thou art being smitten,” &c.—­Ib., p. 98.  His “Passed Tense,” too, for some reason which I do not discover, he distinguishes above the rest by a double form, thus:  “I was smitten, or being smitten; Thou wast smitten, or being smitten;” &c.—­P. 99.  In his opinion, “Few will object to the propriety of the more familiar phraseology, ’I am in the ACT,—­or, suffering the ACTION of BEING SMITTEN;’ and yet,” says he, “in substance and effect, it is wholly the same as, ‘I am being smitten,’ which is THE TRUE FORM of the verb in the present tense of the passive voice!”—­Ibid. Had we not met with some similar expressions of English or American blunderers, “the act or action of being smitten,” would be accounted a downright Irish bull; and as to this ultra notion of neologizing all our passive verbs, by the addition of “being,”—­with the author’s cool talk of “the presentation of this theory, and [the] consequent suppression of that hitherto employed,”—­there is a transcendency in it, worthy of the most sublime aspirant among grammatical newfanglers.

OBS. 13.—­But, with all its boldness of innovation, Wright’s Philosophical Grammar is not a little self-contradictory in its treatment of the passive verb.  The entire “suppression” of the usual form of its present tense, did not always appear, even to this author, quite so easy and reasonable a matter, as the foregoing citations would seem to represent it.  The passive use of the participle in ing, he has easily disposed of:  despite innumerable authorities for it, one false assertion, of seven syllables, suffices to make it quite impossible.[269] But the usual passive form, which, with some show of truth, is accused of not having always precisely the same meaning as the progressive used passively,—­that is, of not always denoting continuance in the state of receiving continued action,—­and which is, for that remarkable reason, judged worthy of rejection, is nevertheless admitted to have, in very many instances, a conformity to this idea,