But this reason, as well as many other truths equally important and equally clear, our common grammarians, have, so far as I know, every man of them, overlooked.

Consequently, even when they were aiming at the right thing, they frequently fell into gross errors of expression; and, what is still more surprising, such errors have been entailed upon the very art of grammar, and the art of authorship itself, by the prevalence of an absurd notion, that modern writers on this subject can be meritorious authors without originality.

Hence many a school-boy is daily rehearsing from his grammar-book what he might well be ashamed to have written.

For example, the following definition from Murray's grammar, is found in perhaps a dozen other compends, all professing to teach the art of speaking and writing with propriety: "_Number_ is the _consideration of an object_, as _one_ or _more_." [70] Yet this short sentence, as I have before suggested, is a fourfold solecism.

_First_, the word "_number_" is wrong; because those modifications of language, which distinguish unity and plurality, cannot be jointly signified by it.