Horne Tooke has shewn, with considerable felicity of illustration, that all the parts of speech may be resolved into the noun and the verb; but he has not pointed out so clearly that every verb may be resolved into a noun and the single primitive verb is or was, which, in this sense, may be said to be the only essential verb in any language; as we find, indeed, in the Coptic, that almost every noun becomes a verb, either by the addition of PE, or sometimes even without it. Thus, _the morning_ BLUSHES is synonymous with _the morning_ IS _red_; _he loves justice_, with _he_ IS _a lover of justice_; and _I_ AM _an Englishman_, with _the person now speaking_ IS _an Englishman_. But this must be understood of is, was, or will be, in all its tenses; the idea of time, if expressed, being an essential part of the verbal sense.
I confess that some of these reflections have occurred to me in looking over a very singular work, which I had the curiosity [p096] to take up, in order to see what kind of information could be possessed by a person notoriously and professedly ignorant of the origin and relations of the language which he attempts to teach; and, in short, what kind of light could be diffused by an apostle of darkness. Blunders, and some of them ridiculous enough, must, of course, be found in the works of such a person, but most of them are such as every schoolboy might correct; and there really is so much of sagacity in some of Mr. Cobbett’s remarks on the errors of others, that they well deserve the attention of such as are ambitious to write or speak with perfect accuracy.
I shall not attempt to enter into a regular criticism of this _Grammar_; I shall merely make a few miscellaneous observations, as they have occurred to me in reading it, several of which would be equally applicable to the best of the existing works of a similar nature.
In Letter III we are told that _long_ and _short_, though adjectives, do not express _qualities_, but merely dimension or duration; from a singular misconception of the proper sense of the word _quality_. We find, in Letter IV, the rule given by most grammarians, though not by all, that the article A becomes AN, when it is followed by any word beginning with a vowel; but it is surely more natural to follow the sound than the spelling, and, as we should never think of saying an _youthful_ bride, it seems equally incorrect to say an _useful_ piece of furniture; for the initial sound is precisely the same. In the same manner A _unit_ and A _European_, seems to sound more agreeable than AN; and the best speakers appear to adopt this custom.