How many grammars tell us, that, "The first person is the _person who speaks_;" that, "The second person is the _person spoken to_;" and that, "the third person is the _person spoken of_!" As if the three persons of a verb, or other part of speech, were so many _intelligent beings_! As if, by exhibiting a word in the three persons, (as _go, goest, goes_,) we put it first _into the speaker_, then _into the hearer_, and then _into somebody else_! Nothing can be more abhorrent to grammar, or to sense, than such confusion.

The things which are identified in each of these three definitions, are as unlike as Socrates and moonshine! The one is a thinking being; the other, a mere form peculiar to certain words.

But Chandler, of Philadelphia, ("the Grammar King," forsooth!) without mistaking the grammatical persons for rational souls, has contrived to crowd into his definition of _person_ more errors of conception and of language,--more insult to common sense,--than one could have believed it possible to put together in such space.

And this ridiculous old twaddle, after six and twenty years, he has deliberately re-written and lately republished as something "adapted to the schools of America." It stands thus: "_Person is a distinction which is made in a noun between its representation of its object, either as spoken to, or spoken of_."-- Chandler's E.Grammar; Edition of 1821, p.

16; Ed.