Here tanquam expectem are rendered very justly, "as if I were expecting;" now, in present time, agreeable to the original. The words carry a negative: if I were expecting, implying, that I do not expect.
[119] This tense is not admitted to be good English; yet is often used in speaking; the have being contracted or corrupted into a, had a written, if he had a received.
[120] We have derived our substantive verb from two radical verbs; beon, whence come the English be, and the German bist; and weorthan, to be or become, fieri; from which probably, the Danes have their varer, and the English their were.
[121] The great source of these errors is this: Grammarians have considered that as a conjunction, and supposed that "conjunctions couple like cases and modes;" a Latin rule that does not always hold in English. But Mr. Horne Tooke has clearly proved the word that to be always a relative pronoun: It always relates to a word or sentence; and the reason why grammarians have called it a conjunction, may be this; they could not find any word to govern it as a relative, and therefore did not know what to do with it. But it is in fact a relative word, thus, "two men have made a discovery;" this is one assertion. What discovery? "that or this is the discovery;" the word that carrying the force of a complete affirmation; "there was a God." Here we see the absurdity of Swift's declaration and the common notions of a subjunctive mode. There is no subjunctive; in strictness of speech, all sentences are resolvable into distinct declaratory phrases. "There is a God;" "two young men have discovered that;" so the sentence should be written to show the true construction.
[122] A passage in Dr. Middleton's Life of Cicero, is remarkably accurate; "The celebrated orator, L. Cassius, died of the same disease (the pleurisy,) which might probably be then, as I was told in Rome it is now, the peculiar distemper of the place." Was refers to time completely past; but is declares a fact that exists generally, at all times; the verb is therefore in the present tense, or as Harris terms it,[123] the aorist of the present. So also in Dr. Reid's Essays, vol. 1. p. 18. "Those philosophers held, that there are three first principles of all things;" which is correct English. "Aristotle thought every object of human understanding enters at first by the senses."—Page 110. The following passage is equally correct. "There is a courage depending on nerves and blood, which was improved to the highest pitch among the Greeks."——Gillies, Hist. of Greece, vol. 1. p. 248. This courage is derived from the constitution of the human body; it exists therefore at all times; and had our author said, "there was a courage depending on nerves and blood, which the Greeks improved to the highest pitch," the sense would have been left imperfect. Here then we see the indefinite use of this form of the present tense; for were the verb is, in the foregoing example, limited to time now present, it would make the author write nonsense; it being absurd to say, "the Greeks 2000 years ago improved a courage which exists only at the present time." So that verbs, in the present tense, express facts that have an uninterrupted existence in past, present, and future time.
[123] Hermes, page 123.
[124] Previous may be vindicated on another principle; viz. by considering it as qualifying the whole subsequent member of the sentence. "The resolutions of Congress could not be enforced by legal penalties; this fact was previous to the establishment," &c. But the other is the real construction.
