recognized as such by the popular apprehension. From that time, it began to exhibit a tendency to extend its sphere of application at the expense of the more ancient modes of forming the preterit tense—the same tendency which shows itself so noticeably now in every child who learns the English language, inclining him to say I bringed, I goed, I seed, until with much pains he is taught the various "irregular" forms, and is made to employ them as prevailing usage directs. Prevailing usage has in our language already ratified a host of such blunders; a large portion of the ancient Germanic verbs, formerly inflected after the analogy of sing, come, bind, give, and their like, we now conjugate "regularly." One instance we have had occasion to notice above—the verb help, of which the ancient participle holpen, instead of helped, is still to be found in our English Bibles: others are bake, creep, fold, leap, laugh, smoke, starve, wade, wield.
Further examples of the same tendency toward extension of prevailing analogies beyond their historically correct limits are to be seen in the present declension of our nouns. The letter s is, with us, the sign of all possessive cases, not in the singular number alone, but in the plural also of such words as do not form their plural in s; thus, man's, men's; child's, children's. In the Anglo-Saxon, it was the genitive ending of the singular only, and by no means in all nouns: the feminines, without exception, and many masculines and neuters, formed their genitives in other ways. But it was the possessive sign in a majority of substantives, and there was no other distinctive ending which had the same office; and accordingly, it came to be so associated with the relation of possession in the minds of English speakers, that, in the great change and simplification of grammatical apparatus which attended the transition of Anglo-Saxon into English, its use was gradually extended, till at last no exceptions were left. A like treatment has given our plural suffix the range of application which it now exhibits. Less than half the Anglo-Saxon nouns had plurals in s: it was restricted to a single gender, the masculine, nor did it even form all the masculine plurals; while, in our usage, it is almost universal, the only exceptions being the anomalous forms already
