being practised”—­“am being smitten”—­and the like.  Were there no danger that petty writers would one day seize upon it with like avidity, an other innovation, exactly similar to this in every thing but tense—­similar in awkwardness, in tautology, in unmistakeableness—­might here be uttered for the sake of illustration.  Some men conceive, that “The perfect participle is always compound; as, having seen, having written;”—­and that the simple word, seen or written, had originally, and still ought to have, only a passive construction.  For such views, they find authorities.  Hence, in lieu of the common phrases, “had we seen,” “we have written,” they adopt such English as this; “Had we having seen you, we should have stopped.”—­“We have having written but just now, to our correspondent.”  Now, “We are being smitten,” is no better grammar than this;—­and no worse:  “The idea intended” is in no great jeopardy in either case.

OBS. 20.—­J.  R. Chandler, of Philadelphia, in his Common School Grammar of 1847, has earnestly undertaken the defence of this new and much-mooted passive expression:  which he calls “the Definite Passive Voice,” or “the Passive Voice of the Definite Form.”  He admits it, however, to be a form that “does not sound well,”—­a “novelty that strikes the ear unpleasantly;” but he will have the defect to be, not in the tautologous conceit of “is being,” “was being,” “has been being,” and the like, but in everybody’s organ of hearing,—­supposing all ears corrupted, “from infancy,” to a distaste for correct speech, by “the habit of hearing and using words ungrammatically!”—­See p. 89.  Claiming this new form as “the true passive,” in just contrast with the progressive active, he not only rebukes all attempts “to evade” the use of it, “by some real or supposed equivalent,” but also declares, that, “The attempt to deprive the transitive definite verb of [this] its passive voice, is to strike at the foundation of the language, and to strip it of one of its most important qualities; that of making both actor and sufferer, each in turn and at pleasure, the subject of conversation.”—­Ibid. Concerning equivalents, he evidently argues fallaciously; for he urges, that the using of them “does not dispense with the necessity of the definite passive voice.”—­P. 88.  But it is plain, that, of the many fair substitutes which may in most cases be found, if any one is preferred, this form, and all the rest, are of course rejected for the time.