."--_Barclay's Works_, i, 460. The following examples, among
others, are censured by Priestley, Murray, and the copyists of the latter,
without sufficient discrimination, and for a reason which I think
fallacious; namely, "because the ideas they represent seem not to be
sufficiently divided in the mind:"--"The court of Rome _were_ not without
solicitude."--_Hume_. "The house of Lords _were_ so much influenced by
these reasons."--_Id._ See _Priestley's Gram._, p. 188; _Murray's_, 152;
_R. C. Smith's_, 129; _Ingersoll's_, 248; and others.

OBS. 10.--In general, a collective noun, unless it be made plural in form,
no more admits a plural adjective before it, than any other singular noun.
Hence the impropriety of putting _these_ or _those_ before _kind_ or
_sort_; as, "_These kind_ of knaves I know."--_Shakspeare_. Hence, too, I
infer that _cattle_ is not a collective noun, as Nixon would have it to be,
but an irregular plural which has no singular; because we can say _these
cattle_ or _those cattle_, but neither a bullock nor a herd is ever called
_a cattle, this cattle_, or _that cattle_. And if "_cavalry, clergy,
commonalty_," &c., were like this word, they would all be plurals also, and
not "substantives which imply plurality in the singular number, and
consequently have no other plural." Whence it appears, that the writer who
most broadly charges others with not understanding the nature of a
collective noun, has most of all misconceived it himself. If there are not
_many clergies_, it is because _the clergy_ is one body, with one Head, and
not because it is in a particular sense many. And, since the forms of words
are not necessarily confined to things that exist, who shall say that the
plural word _clergies_, as I have just used it, is not good English?

OBS. 11.--If we say, "_these people_," "_these gentry_," "_these folk_," we
make _people, gentry_, and _folk_, not only irregular plurals, but plurals
to which there are no correspondent singulars; but by these phrases, we
must mean certain individuals, and not more than one people, gentry, or
folk. But these names are sometimes collective nouns singular; and, as
such, they may have verbs of either number, according to the sense; and may
also form regular plurals, as _peoples_, and _folks_; though we seldom, if
ever, speak of _gentries_; and _folks_ is now often irregularly applied to
persons, as if one person were _a folk_. So _troops_ is sometimes
irregularly, if not