et, assumed to be himself the sole authority for all his
doctrines and illustrations; satisfying his own mind with making, some
years afterwards, that general apology which we are now criticising. For if
he so mutilated and altered the passages which he adopted, as to make it
improper to add the names of their authors, upon what other authority than
his own do they rest? But if, on the other hand, he generally copied
without alteration; his examples are still anonymous, while his first
reason for leaving them so, is plainly destroyed: because his position is
thus far contradicted by the fact.

11. In his later editions, however, there are two opinions which the
compiler thought proper to support by regular quotations; and, now and
then, in other instances, the name of an author appears. The two positions
thus distinguished, are these: _First_, That the noun _means_ is
necessarily singular as well as plural, so that one cannot with propriety
use the singular form, _mean_, to signify that by which an end is attained;
_Second_, That the subjective mood, to which he himself had previously
given all the tenses without inflection, is not different in form from the
indicative, except in the present tense. With regard to the later point, I
have shown, in its proper place, that he taught erroneously, both before
and after he changed his opinion; and concerning the former, the most that
can be proved by quotation, is, that both _mean_ and _means_ for the
singular number, long have been, and still are, in good use, or sanctioned
by many elegant writers; so that either form may yet be considered
grammatical, though the irregular can claim to be so, only when it is used
in this particular sense. As to his second reason for the suppression of
names, to wit, "the _uncertainty to whom_ the passages originally
belonged,"--to make the most of it, it is but partial and relative; and,
surely, no other grammar ever before so multiplied the difficulty in the
eyes of teachers, and so widened the field for commonplace authorship, as
has the compilation in question. The origin of a sentiment or passage may
be uncertain to one man, and perfectly well known to an other. The
embarrassment which a _compiler_ may happen to find from this source, is
worthy of little sympathy. For he cannot but know from what work he is
taking any particular sentence or paragraph, and those parts of a
_grammar_, which are new to the eye of a great grammarian, may very w