OBS. 3.—­In the figurative use of the present tense for the past or imperfect, the vulgar have a habit of putting the third person singular with the pronoun I; as, “Thinks I to myself.”—­Rev. J. Marriott.  “O, says I, Jacky, are you at that work?”—­Day’s Sandford and Merton.  “Huzza! huzza!  Sir Condy Rackrent forever, was the first thing I hears in the morning.”—­Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, p. 97.  This vulgarism is to be avoided, not by a simple omission of the terminational s, but rather by the use of the literal preterit:  as, “Thought I to myself;”—­“O, said I;”—­“The first thing I heard.”  The same mode of correction is also proper, when, under like circumstances, there occurs a disagreement in number; as, “After the election was over, there comes shoals of people from all parts.”—­Castle Rackrent, p. 103.  “Didn’t ye hear it? says they that were looking on.”—­Ib., p. 147.  Write, “there came,”—­“said they.”

OBS. 4.—­It has already been noticed, that the article a, or a singular adjective, sometimes precedes an arithmetical number with a plural noun; as, “A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday.”—­Psalms, xc, 4.  So we might say, “One thousand years are,”—­“Each thousand years are”—­“Every thousand years are,” &c.  But it would not be proper to say, “A thousand years is,” or, “Every thousand years is;” because the noun years is plainly plural, and the anomaly of putting a singular verb after it, is both needless and unauthorized.  Yet, to this general rule for the verb, the author of a certain “English Grammar on the Productive System,” (a strange perversion of Murray’s compilation, and a mere catch-penny work, now extensively used in New England,) is endeavouring to establish, by his own bare word, the following exception:  “Every is sometimes associated with a plural noun, in which case the verb must be singular; as, ’Every hundred years constitutes a century.’”—­Smith’s New Gram., p. 103.  His reason is this; that the phrase containing the nominative, “signifies a single period of time, and is, therefore, in reality singular.”—­Ib. Cutler also, a more recent writer, seems to have imbibed the same notion; for he gives the following sentence as an example of “false construction:  Every hundred years are called a century.”—­Cutler’s Grammar and Parser, p. 145.  But, according to this argument, no plural verb could ever be used with any definite number of the parts of time; for any three years, forty years, or threescore years and ten, are as single a period of time, as “every hundred years,” “every four years,” or “every twenty-four hours.”  Nor is it true, that, “Every is sometimes associated with a plural noun;” for “every years” or “every hours,” would be worse than nonsense.  I, therefore, acknowledge no such exception; but, discarding the principle of the note, put this author’s pretended corrections among my quotations of false syntax.