za^v^^ Class « PE l-HQ Hook » / A5" PRESENTED BY | m- A PLEA FOR THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH " Paedagoguli abite pestes, Istinc ferte pedem invecusti inepti, Invisi pueris bonis malisque, Abite in miseram crucem execrati ISeecli perniciesque litteranim." Niccol&, Contb d*Aroo. (See Preface). A PLEA FOR THE QUEEK'S ENGLISH JSirag gtatts on Speaking anb Spelling by HENRY ALFORD, d.i>. DEAN OF CANTERBURY TL3TTK THOUSAND GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS NEW YORK : 416 BROOME STREET 1874 P£74£o •As /S7t-^! he And first and foremost, let me notice that aspu'ate. ' worst of all faults, the leaving out of the as- pirate where it ought to be, and putting it in where it ought not to be. This is a vulgarism not confined to this or that province of Eng- land, nor especially prevalent in one county or another, but common throughout Eng- land to persons of low breeding and inferior education, principally to tht>se among the inhabitants of towns. Nothing so surely stamps a man as below the mark in intel- ligence, self-respect, and energy, as this un- fortunate habit : in intelligence, because, if he were but moderately keen in perception, he would see how it marks him; in self- respect and energy, because if he had these, he would long ago have set to work and cured it. Hundreds of stories are current about the absurd consequences of this vulgarism. We remember in Punch the barber who, while operating on a gentleman, expresses his opinion, that, after all, the THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH 41 cholera was in the hair. - " Then," observes the customer, "you ought to be very care- ful what brushes you use." " Oh, sir," replies the barber, laughing, " I didn't mean the air of the ed, but the hair of the hatmosphere" 52. As I write these lines, which I do while waiting in a refreshment-room at Eeading, between a Great- Western and a South- Eastern train, I hear one of two commercial gentlemen, from a neighbouring table, telling his friend that " his ed used to hate ready to burst." 53. The following incident happened at the house of friends of my own. They had asked to dinner some acquaintances who were not perfect in their aspirates. When they made their appearance somewhat late, imagine the consternation of my relative, on receiving from the lady an apology, that she was very sorry they were after their time, but they had some ale by the way. The well-known infirmity suggested the charitable explana- tion, that it was a storm, and not a tipple, which had detained them. 54. I had, shortly after the publication of my first paper in "Good Words," a very curious communication on the subject of the pronunciation of the aspirate. My correspon- 42 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. dent objected, that the portion of my Essay which treated of this matter conveyed no meaning to him, for that from a child he had never been able to tell the difference in pro- nunciation between a word beginning with an "A," and one beginning without: and he insisted that I ought to have adopted some method of making this plainer. He adds, " In all cases where the ' h ' is used, to me it appears superfluous." I adduce this without comment, to show how inveterate the habit of neglecting the aspirate must be : — even more so than I had ever imagined. 55. Still, I have known cases where it has been thoroughly eradicated, at the cost, it is true, of considerable pains and diligence. But there are certain words with regard to which the bad habit lingers in persons not otherwise liable to it. We still sometimes, even in good society, hear " ospital" " erb" and "umble" — all of them very offensive, but the last of them by far the worst, especially when heard from an officiating clergyman. The English Prayer-book has at once settled the pronunciation of this word for us, by causing us to give to God our " humble and hearty thanks " in the general thanksgiving. Umble and hearty few can THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 4S pronounce without a pain in the throat : and u umblanarty" we certainly never were meant to say j /tumble and hearty is the only pro- nunciation which will suit the alliterative style of the prayer, whicn has in it " not only with our lips, but in our lives." If it be urged that we have "an humble and contrite heart/' I answer, so have we " the strength of an horse;" but no one supposes that we were meant to say " a norse." The following are even more decisive : " holy and humble men of heart : " " thy humble servants," not " thine" It is difficult to believe that this pronunciation can long survive the satire of Dickens in David Copperfield : " I am well aware that I am the umblest person going," said Uriah Heep, modestly, " let the other be who he may. My mother is likewise a very umble person. We live in a numble abode, Master Copperfield, but have much to be thankful for. My father's former calling was umble ; he was a sexton." 56. As I might have expected, the remarks here made on the pronunciation of humble have given rise to much controversy. The tmaspirated pronunciation has been stoutly defended : partly on the ground of being borrowed from the Italian, partly by the alle- 41 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. gation that I have failed to prove from the Prayer-book the intention of the compilers of our Liturgy that the aspirate should be pro- nounced. 57. It has been asserted by one correspon- dent that the alliteration in the words, " humble and hearty," is as perfect without the aspirate on the former word, as with it ; and I am told that the fact of the occurrence of "thy humble servants" and "thine un- worthy servants" decides nothing, because we have "thy honour and glory" But be it observed, that in order to answer my argu- ment, an instance ought to have been pro- duced, not of a different unaspirated vowel with "thy" before it, but of the same unaspirated vowel; because some vowels have in themselves sounds more or less nearly approaching to the power of a con- sonant, and therefore enduring " thy" and "a" before them. The long "u" has this power ; we may say "a unit" " a university,' because the first syllable sounds as if it began with "you" and "y" has here the power of a consonant. But the short " u" as in "humble" is not one of those vowels which require a consonant to enunciate them : one could not say "a unlearned man:" and I THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 45 must therefore still maintain that the occur- rence of " thy humble,''' and " thine unworthy" shows that the " h " was meant to be aspi- rated in the former case, as we know it was not in the latter. 58. Another correspondent brings what is apparently a more formidable objection against my conclusion from "thy humble''' and "thine unworthy" "Were you," he says, "to find the words * my umbrella' in some standard work, would you at once exclaim, ' Oh, this writer calls it ' humbrella ? ' ' Here is an example of the short u" My answer is very simple. Mine is now almost universally disused : and my has taken its place before vowels. The translators of the Bible wrote "mi?ie eyes:" but if I found "my eyes" in a modern book, I certainly should not charge the writer with aspirating the substantive. I must still maintain that, when the same persons, in the same book, wrote " thy humble" and "thine univorthy" they meant to indicate a difference, in respect of the aspi- rate, between the pronunciation of the two words thus differently preceded. 59. Another correspondent, writing from Ireland, charges me with being in error for finding fault with those who drop the aspi- 46 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. rate in the word "hospital" "for," says he, " no one in Ireland, so far as I am aware. ever thinks of aspirating the h in that word. 1 ' This is certainly a curious, reason why we should not aspirate it in England. It re- minds me of an American friend of ours, who, after spending two or three days with us, ventured to tell us candidly, that we all "spoke with a strong English accent" The same correspondent states that he never met an Englishman who could pronounce the rela- tive pronoun " which" He charges us all with pronouncing it as if it were " witch" I may venture to inform him that it was his ear which was in fault. The ordinary English pronunciation " which " is as distinguishable from " witch? as it is from the coarse Irish and Scotch "wh-ich" "A" or go. What is our rule — or have we any — " an " be- ° foreavoweL respecting the use of a or an before words be- ginning with an aspirated h ? The rule com- monly given is this : that when the accent on the word thus beginning is on the first syllable, we must use a; when it is on the second or any following syllable, we may use an. This is reasonable enough, because the first syllable, by losing its accent, also loses some portion of the strength of its aspiration. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 4\ We cannot aspirate "with the same strength the first syllables in the words history and historian, and in consequence, we commonly say a history; but an historian. 61. Still, though this may define our modern practice, it is rather a reasonable description of it, than a rule recognised by our best writers. They do not scruple to use an before aspirated words, even when the accent falls on the first syllable. In the course of an examination through the letter h in the Concordance, verified by the text in all passages which seemed doubtful, I have found in the English version of the Bible very few instances of the article a used before a word beginning with h. We have an half, an hammer, an hand, an high hand, an hand- maid, an harp, an haven, an head, an heap, an heart, an hedge, an helmet, an help, an herdsman, an heretic, an heritage, an hill, an high hill, an hissing, an holy day, an holy man, an holy angel, an horn, an horrible thing (I may men- tion that Cruden has cited a horrible in every instance, but that in every instance it stands an, both in the edition of 1611 and in our present Bibles), an horse, an host, an house, an hundred, an husband, an hymn, an hypo- crite. The only exceptions which I have 43 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. found are, a hill, Josh. xxiv. 33: a holy solemnity, Isa. xxx. 29. So that the surprise of a correspondent at Archbishop Trench's having written an hero was hardly justified. I do not, of course, mean to say that the usage of the translators of the Bible should be our rule now : but in the absence of any general fixed rule, we can hardly find fault with writers who choose to follow a practice once so widely prevalent, and still kept before the public in the Book most read of all books. I must just remark, that the fact, that we are more particular about this matter than our ancestors were, seems to shew that, notwith- standing the very common vulgarism of dropping the aspirated h, the tendency of modern times has been rather to aspirate more, than less. "Such an 62. A correspondent questions the pro- priety of the common use of "an" before " one" in the phrase " such an one" 1 bring this forward not with any idea of deciding it, but because in my examination of the usage of our translators of the Bible, a curious circumstance has come to light. They uniformly used " such a one" the expression occurring about thirteen times. In the New Testament, the printers have one, THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 49 altered it throughout to " such an one : " in the Old Testament, they have as uniformly left it as it was. It seems to me that we may now, in writing, use either. In common talk, I should always naturally say " such a owe," not " such an one" which would sound formal and stilted. 63. A student at one of our military aca- Only one hen in demies had copied a drawing of a scene in Venice. ■ Venice, and in copying the title, had spelt the name of the city Vennice. The drawing mas- ter put his pen through the superfluous letter, observing, " Don't you know, sir, there is but one hen 'in Venice?" On which the youth burst out laughing. Being asked what he was laughing about, he replied he was think- ing hoiv uncommonly scarce eggs must be there. The master, in wrath, reported him to the colonel in command, a Scotchman. He, on hearing the disrespectful reply, without in the least perceiving the point of the joke, observed, " An a varra naatural observaation too." 64. A worse fault even than dropping the " idear, aspirate, is the sounding words ending with a, or aw, as if they ended with ar. A corre- spondent, accustomed apparently to attend the Houses of Parliament, sends me a strong remonstrance against this practice. He says, 50 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. " Woe betide any unfortunate member if he strews the floor with 'ditches': the laughter is open and merciless : but honourable mem- bers may talk of the ' laivrr ' of the land, or 'scawn the idear, with perfect impunity. One of the greatest offenders in this matter is a well-known opposition speaker whom I shall not name. The startling way in which he brings out idear is enough to make the hair of any one but a well- seasoned Cockney stand on end." My correspondent goes on to say, "Amelia Ann is a great stumbling-block to people with this failing, becoming of course in their mouths Amelia ran. I remember once seeing a little elementary tract on French pronunciation, in which, opposite the French a, was placed ar, by way oi indicating to British youth the pronunciation thereof. I showed the curiosity to several Londoners, but they could not be made to see the point of the joke. 1 ' Calling "u" 65. There is a very offensive vulgarism, most common in the midland counties, but found more or less almost everywhere : giving what should be the sound of the u in certain words, as if it were oo : calling "duty" dooty ; "Tuesday" Toosday ; reading to us that "the clouds drop down the doo y" exhorting us 1 oo." THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 5A u clooly to do the clooties that are doo from us;" asking to "be allowed to see the " noos- paper." And this is not from incapacity to utter the sound ; for though many of these people call u new," noo, no one ever yet called "few" foo ; but it arises from defective edu- cation, or from gross carelessness. 66. A Scottish correspondent, speaking of "heritor "— 1 ' 1 ° "curator." some usages prevalent in the north, says : — " * Heritor,' proprietor of landed property, is most commonly pronounced ' eritor', which is manifestly inconsistent with ' heritage, ' here- ditary,' (fcc, in which the aspiration is always given. In our Scotch courts of law, we hear of entries being made on the ( record,' never record : but in other than law uses the word is always accented on the first syllable. This reminds me of another term in Scotch law — ' Curator,' pronounced curator, in violation, certainly, of the Latin analogy. It is told of a witty Scotch counsel, that when pleading before the House of Lords, and when cor- rected by one of their lordships for his false quantity in the pronunciation of this word, he replied, with a profound bow, that he must submit to the authority of so learned a sena- tor, and so eloquent an orator." 66a. In one letter sent to me, fault ia r. 2 £2 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. found with the pronunciations " decanal" " ruri-decanal" " optative" on the ground that it is the genius of our language always to throw back the accent to the first syllable of a tri-syllabic word, as in "senator" " orator" " minister" In such a case, custom is our only guide. It is not to be thought that, be- cause w T e say "senator" "orator" or " minis- ter" we have any objection to tri-syllabic w T ords with the accent on the penultima ; we have hundreds of them : witness " objector" " protector" " reflector" " assertor" &c. So that no rule can be laid down, except the " norma loqiiendi" c< manifold." 67. A correspondent asks for a comment on the pronunciation of the word "manifold" He thinks that we lose the idea of its original composition by calling it, as we generally do, " mannifold" and that it ought to be called "many-fold" as if it were two w T ords. My reply would be, that the end proposed is a praiseworthy one, but I am afraid it will not justify the means used in attaining it — viz., the violation of common usage, which has stamped " mannifold " with its approval. It may be that the mispronunciation first ori- ginated in the apparent analogy w r ith " mani : fssi" I vfould remind him, that this is not THE QUEEX'S ENGLISH. 53 the only word which suffers change of pro- nunciation when compounded. We call a " vine-yard" " vinyard :" the man would be deservedly set down as a pedant who should do otherwise. We call a "cup hoard" a "cub- bard" a "half -penny" a "kaepny" and we similarly contract many other compound words. The great rule, I take it, in all such cases of conventional departure from the pro- nunciation of words as spelt, is to do nothing which can attract attention. We naturally think somewhat less favourably than we otherwise should of a person who says " vic- tu-al" when the rest of the world say " vittal ; " " med-i-cine" when others say " med'cine ;" " ve-ni-son" where we thought we should hear "venson" We commonly expect that such a man will be strong-willed, and hard to deal with in ordinary life : and I think we are not often wrong. 68. A. correspondent complains of the stress "prophecy." laid on the final syllable of the substantive prophecy : and says, "What should we think of ecstasy, fallacy, phantasy, especially if put •in the plural J " But in this case, usage is right, and apparent analogy wrong. Ecstasy, as we haye already seen, is from the Greek tcstasis; phantasy, from the Greek phantasm; U THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. fallacy, from the Latin fallacia. But pro- p>hecy is from the Greek propheteia : and it is therefore not without reason that we lay the stress on the last syllable. The verb, to pro- phesy, we pronounce in the same way ; I sup- pose, by a double analogy : partly guided by the sound of the substantive, partly by that of the last syllable in other verbs ending in u y" to qualify, to amplify, to mystify, &c. "alms," &c. 69. Complaint has been made of the pro- nunciation of the words alms, psalms, calm, after the fashion of elm and film. No doubt the marked utterance of the "Z" in these words would savour of affectation ; at the same time, there is a subdued sound of it which should be heard in "alms :" even less audibly in "psalm" and hardly at all in " calm : " usage, as learnt in society, being in this, as in other uncertain pronunciations, the only safe guide. "Cowper." 70. There are two words, the pronunciation of the former of which can easily be settled, whereas that of the latter seems to defy all settlement. How are we to call the Christian poet who spells his name C-ow-p-e-r ? He himself has decided this for us. He makes his name rhyme with trooper. We must therefore call him Coo-per, not Cow-per ; THE QUEEN'S \ EXGL1SII. 6b seeing that a man's own usage is undeniably the rule for the pronunciation of his own name. I have had a letter from a correspon- dent, urging that this rhyme may have been only a poetical pronunciation of the name, not the usual one ; as Coleridge in one place makes his name rhyme to " polar ridge." But I have received an interesting testimony from Dr. Goddard Rogers, confirming the settle- ment of the pronunciation as given above.- " Cowper," he says, " not only decided the matter by ( making his name rhyme to trooper ;' but in conversation always begged his friends to call him Cooper. I have this from a very old gentleman whom I attended in his last illness. He was Thomas Palmer Bull, son of Cowper s friend, c smoke- inhaling Bull,' and had himself heard the poet make the remark." 71. Another word also brings into ques- "cucum- b 1 ber." tion the " coo " and " cow" but without any such chance of a settlement. It is the agree- . able but somewhat indigestible gourd spelt c-n-c-u-m-b-e-r. Is it to be coo-cumber? cow- cumber ] or /^w-cumber ? The point is one warmly debated : so warmly in certain circles, that when I had a house full of pupils, we were driven to legislation on it, merely to keep the peace of the household. Whenever fcS THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. the unfortunate word occurred at table, which was almost every day during the summer months, a fierce fray invariably set in. At last we abated the nuisance by euacting that in future the first syllable should be dropped, and the article be called for under the undebat cable name of " cumber." Perhaps, of the three, the strongest claim might be set up for keiv, or Q- cumber : seeing that the Latin name, cucumis, can hardly by English lips be otherwise pronounced. Mis-pro- 72. I cannot abstain from saying a few of scripture words on the mispronunciation of Scripture proper names by our clergy. This, let me remind them, is quite inexcusable. It shows a disregard and absence of pains in a matter, about the least part of which no pains ought to be spared. To take it on no other ground, is it justifiable in them to allow themselves to offend by their ignorance or carelessness the ears of the most intelligent of their hearers ? This was not the spirit of one who said he would not eat meat while the world lasted, if it scandalized his neighbour. But this is not all. b When I hear a man flounder about among St. Paul's salutations, calling half of them wrongly, I am sure that that man does not know his Bible. The same THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 57 carelessness is sure to show itself in misap- propriation of texts, wrong understanding of obsolete phrases, and the like. The man who talks of Aristobiilus in the Lesson, is as likely as not to preach from St. Paul's " I know nothing by myself," to show us that the Apostle toanted divine teaching, and not to be aware that he meant, he was not con- scious of any fault* 73. Three Sundays before this was written, Examples, Jan. 18, 1863, we had the crucial chapter, Rom. xvi., for the evening lesson. A friend writes to me from a distant city in Italy : — u In the afternoon a stranger officiated ; but as he saluted J.ssyncritus and Patrobas, I knew what to expect in the sermon, and so it was." Another writes from London, that he . was on that day at a fashionable London church, and heard Epenetus and Patrobas' introduced to the congregation. A clergy- man in the West of England found on his breakfast- table one Monday morning a note from his congregation to this effect : — To-day you said, " ye know Stephanas ;" This misconception, sir, doth pain us : For it is Stephanas we know, And beg that you will call him so.+ * See the text explained, in paragraph 319 below. + I have had a very amusing letter, written anoa^- 68 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. A friend of mine heard the following in London church, and, strange to say, from a schoolmaster : — " Trophlmus have I left at Miletum sick." But it perhaps may be said to me, with the beautiful inconsequence 01 the logic of the present day, Is a man a per-^ feet Christian minister, because he knows how to pronounce these names 1 To which I fearlessly answer, " No, by no means ; but he is, at all events, as near to it as if he did not know how to pronounce them." I am *' Johnny p U £ m mind, by this question, of "Johnny Stittle," a redoubtable preacher who used to hold forth at Cambridge, in a chapel in Green Street. The tradition of him and his Sayings was yet a living thing, when I went up as an under-graduate in 1828. His wont was to rail at the studies of the Uni- versity ; and in doing so on one occasion, after having wound himself up to the re- quisite pitch of fervour, he exclaimed, in a mously, from the clergyman in the West of England to whom these verses were sent. He comes to a rather curions conclusion from the fact of my having told the story. He infers that I was present, and that I made the verses. As this may be my only means of com- municating with him, let me assure him # this was not the case. I merely tell the tale as 'twas told to THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. & voice of thunder, "D'ye think Fowl knew Greek?"* 74. A writer in the " English Churchman" * I have had two interesting communications from Cambridge, giving accurate details respecting ■ ' Johnny Stittle." He is mentioned in the Rev. Abner Brown's "Recol- lections of Rev. Chas. Simeon," Introduction, p. xiii., where he is described as a " day labourer, " and it is said that Mr. Simeon thought well enough of him to encourage him by pecuniary assistance. In a memoir of Rowland Hill, by Mr. Jones, are the following notices of Stittle : — "During Mr. Hill's residence at Cambridge he was much attached to ' Johnny Stittle,' one of Mr. Berridge's converts. He was naturally a gifted man, though, like his patron, he moved in his own orbit. He preached for many years in Green Street, Cambridge, and died in 1813, in his 87th yeai. "As Mr. Hill was on his way to Duxford to preach for the Missionary Society, he suddenly exclaimed, 'I must go to Cambridge, and see the widow of an old clergyman who is living there, for I have a message to leave with her.' On being asked if the message was important, he replied, ■ Yes, sir, I want the old lady— who will soon be in heaven — to give my love to Johnny * Stittle, and to tell him I shall soon see him again.' " Another correspondent says, ' * I am old enough to re- member, and to have actually heard, Johnny Stittle at Cambridge. He compared eternity, in one of his ser- mons, to a great clock, which said 'tick' in one century, and ' tack ' in the next. Then suddenly turning to some gownsmen, he said, 'Now go home, and calculate the length of the pendulum." One must acknowledge that if there was eccentricity here, there was something very like genius also. 60 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. adds the following to many instances of mis- pronunciation of Scripture proper names. " Too well," says the writer in the " Church- man," " do I remember the city of Colosse pronounced Coloss, as if it were a word of only two syllables; the epistle to Philemon; 6 the gainsaying of Gore ' (one syllable), betray- ing that the speaker had no conception he was talking of the person who in the 16th chapter of Numbers is designated ' Koran.' " I have also a complaint sent me of a clergy- man who insists on always saying "Achaicus;" and an anecdote of a remark being made, how well the Venite exult emus was chanted. 75. A correspondent requests me to endea- vour to correct the very common mispro- nunciation Timotheus, into the proper sound, Timothe-iis. On the other hand, one of my Censors expresses a hope that as I so strongly advocate our following the Greeks in the pro- nunciation of their proper names, I shall be consistent, and never again, in reading the riamaria lessons, call those ancient cities, Samaria and deipma. Philadelphia, otherwise than Samaria and Philadelphia. The answer to this is very simple — viz., that I do not advocate the following of the Greeks in the pronunciation of their proper names, in any case where THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 63 English usage has departed from their pro- nunciation. It is in cases where there is no such usage, and where the reader is thrown back on what ought to be his own knowledge of the form and composition of the name, that we are pained at discovering that one who ought to be able rightly to divide the Word of Truth, is not in the habit of consulting his New Testament in the original Greek. 76. But there is more to be said about the two rather unfortunate instances given by my critic. The tendency of our language has been universally to shorten the last syllable but one, in those names of cities which in Greek ended in la. Alexandria is now called Alexandria ; Seleucia, Seleucia ; and Samaria and Philadelphia, Samaria and Philadelphia. But no such usage infringes the proper Greek pronunciation of Epcenetus, Asyncriius, Patr&~ has, Aristobulus, and the like. Of course, usage is not immutable. We now say Zabu- lon, but the day may come when the stricter scholars may have overborne common usage, and we may say Zabulon, which is right according to the Hebrew and the Greek. We now say Sennacherib; and so universal is this usage, that a correspondent writes in strong terms, stigmatising the strictly accurate pro- a THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. nuneiation, Sennacherib, as a blunder. When I was at school, the common practice was to pronounce the names of two of the Greek letters, as " Epsilon" and " Omicron ;" now, such sounds are unknown in schools, and the right pronunciation, "Epsilon" and "Omicron" is universal. Urbane, 77. Three correspondents have written about another Scripture name. It is that of a person saluted in Rom. xvi. 9, and in our present Bibles spelt U-r-b-a-n-e. The common idea respecting this name is that it belongs to a woman, and most readers pro- nounce it as three syllables, Urbane. But it is simply the English for the Latin name Urbanus, in English Urbane, or, as we now call it, Urban. The assumed name of the Editor of " The Gentleman's Magazine " has been, time out of mind, Sylvanus Urban. The royal printers, who have made so many unauthorised alterations in the text of our Bibles, might with advantage drop oat the final " e" from this word, and thus prevent the possibility of confusion. juntos. 78. I may mention that in verse 7 of the same chapter, Jwria, who is mentioned with Andronicus, is not a woman, but a man, Junior THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 63 79. While treating of the pronunciation of " covetous." those who minister in public, two other words occur to me which are very commonly mangled by our clergy. One of these is "covetous," and its substantive, " covetousness." I hope that some of my clerical readers will be induced to leave off pronouncing them " covetious" and " covetiousness." I can assure them, that when they do thus call the words, one at least of their hearers has his appreciation of their teaching disturbed. 80. The other hint I would venture to give theReveia- ° tion. them is, that the mysterious concluding book of Scripture is the Revelation* of St. John, not the Revelations. I imagine this very common mistake must have arisen from our being accustomed to speak of the Lamentafaows of Jeremiah, in which case the word is plural. 80a. A complaint respecting slovenly pro- " A ? T ? ',', f ? r nunciation has been sent me, which seems to bring before us a matter of some delicacy and uncertainty. A correspondent blames * I had a strong letter of remonstrance for having called this book the " Revelation of St. John," where- as it is, by ch. i. 1, "the Revelation of Jesus Christ." Here we have a misapprehension of the meaning of the preposition ; so puerile, as not to be worth recording, were it not to illustrate a point hereafter to be treated of. 64 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. rightly the slovenly habit of pronouncing " Abel," " Mabel,". " Ethel," as if they were "Able" "Mable," " EtMe ;" and speaks with proper severity of Walker, who, in his " Pronouncing Dictionary," has set down u evle" as the pronunciation of " evil." So far seems clear. But, when we come to the question, whether all words in -el or -il are to be rigidly pronounced in full, we are, I think, compelled to yield somewhat to custom. Nay, custom has, as matter of fact, prevailed in some cases, even to the altera- tion of our conventional spelling. What was once " battail," then " battel," -has now be- come " battle ;" " ehattail," or "chattel," has become " cattle ; " " subtile," or " sub- til," has become "" subtle*; " " castell," or " castel," has become " castle." The word " devil" is far more frequently pronounced " devvle," than " de-vill ;" indeed, this latter pronunciation, in the mouth of an affected precisian, is offensive. Good taste, and the observance of usage, must in such matters be our guides. Criticism in 81. A very curious and choice bit of a news- paper, newspaper criticism on these "notes" was sent me the other day. The writer says : " There seems, to our mind, something small, THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 65 not to say ludicrous and absurd, about the notion of a dignitary of the Church of Eng- land constituting himself the censor and. reporter of small slips of pronunciation, such as Sojj/iametus for So-plwenetus, and the like. We should think none the worse of a man for tripping once, or even twice, in those long Pauline lists of salutations. Not to trip at all would, except in the case of practised and familiar scholars, suggest to us the notion that rather more pains and time had been bestowed upon the matter than it deserved." Where this critic found the name Sojrficenetus among the Pauline salutations, I am at a loss to say : at all events it shews that he prac- tised his own advice, arid had not bestowed more time nor pains on th*e matter than it deserved. But it is his doctrine, that in knowledge of the proprieties of these minute points in Scripture, inaccuracy is better than accuracy, that I would especially hold up for reprobation. Very little time and pains are really required in the matter. Every clergyman is, or ought to be, familiar with his Greek Testament : two minutes' reference to that will show him how every one of these names ought to be pronounced ; or if he is in the practice of regular reading in the original, F m 66 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. he will not want even this two minutes' reference. And those who cannot refer to the original will be kept right without any pains at all, if the clergy are right; for the}' will simply follow their leaders. Surely this doc- trine of the writer in the newspaper cannot represent the general opinion among those bodies who have of late years been making such remarkable advance in the accurate study of the original text of the Scriptures, and have by the results of the training in some of their admirable colleges done so much for the credit of biblical scholarship in England. 82. For my own part, I was disposed to put together this critique and a letter which I received from a friend, saying that he had heard a person, not a clergyman, read Arc- turus and Orion and the Pleiades. I could not help imagining that I had tracked my critic tripping twice or even more in what I daresay he believes to be some more of these Pauline salutations.* Serious 83. The really serious aspect of the matter accompani- ments of < comes before us, when we hear what my friend ignorance in this matter, adds, that the man thus reading proceeded to expound the chapter. An error in pronuncia- * See note B at end of book. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 67 tion may be, in an ordinary person, a trifle; but when a teacher makes it, it is no longer a trifle : and for this reason, that a teacher is bound to be acquainted with the real meaning of that which he expounds, and enforces ; with the context of the passages, and with the spirit and force of the sacred word as the Spirit has given it to us. And when we find a teacher ignorant of even outward matters of common information respecting the text, we are not led to hope much for his power of rightly dividing the word. of truth. That it may please Him who is the fountain of wisdom, to make exceptions, and to endow even ignorant men with insight into the meaning of His word, no one would deny ; still, it is not our business to take such excep- tions for granted, but rather to take for granted His ordinary course of proceeding on our part, and to provide for its success as we best may. He who feels this, will not think correctness even in the lists of Pauline saluta- tions a trifling matter. 8-1. I now come to that which must form a Usage and construc- principal part of my little work, — some notes tion. on the usage of words and construction of sentences. And let me premise, in order to prevent mistakes, that my object in these f 2 6S THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. notes is not to lay down nor to exemplify mere rules of grammar, — though of course the consideration of such rules must often come before us, — but to illustrate the usages and tendencies of our common language, as matter of fact, by the discussion of questions arising out of doubtful words and phrases. One of the most interesting subjects connected with a language is its tendencies : the cur- rents, so to speak, which set in for or against certain modes of speech or thought. These are to be discovered in all languages, and in none more notably than our own. We are a mixed race, and our tongue everywhere bears traces of the fact. We have gone through more crises of religious and political strife than most ' nations, and thought and speech ' have ever been freer in England than in other countries. From these, and from other circumstances, the English language has be- come more idiomatic than most others ; and the tendency is still going on among us, to set aside accurate grammatical construction, and to speak rather according to idiom than according to rule. Idiom. So. Let me explain my&elf : and to this end let me say something rxbout that which is known as the idiom of a language, as distin- THE QUEEX'S ENGLISH. m gaished from strictness of grammatical con- struction. This word "idiom," then, is de- rived from the Greek, and properly signifies a thing or habit peculiar to one person or set of persons, and forming an exception to general rules. Our usage of the term has confined this its meaning in English to matters of language. ' When we speak of an idiom, we mean some saying, or some way of speaking, peculiar to some one language or family of languages, which can only be accounted for by the peculiar tendency, or habit of thought, of those who use it. When we say that a phrase is idiomatic, we mean that it bears this character. 86. Now let us see to what this amounts. Such expressions, if judged by strict rules. will commonly fail to satisfy them. In so far as they are idiomatic, they are depar- tures from the beaten track of that gram- matical construction, and that critical analogy, which are common to all languages. For the rules of grammar and of logic, being depen- dent not on local usage, but on the con- stitution of the human mind, are common to all nations. And when any nation sets up, so to speak, for itself, and indulges in the peculiarities which we call idioms, it 7C THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. takes a course which these general rules do not justify. Idioinakc 87. Let us show this by some examples. mode of ad- dress. It is the habit of modern European nations to avoid the second person singular in addressing individuals. Some languages use the second person plural instead : some the third person. The English, the French, and others, say " you " for "thou" the Germans, and those cognate to them, say "they" for "thou" the Italians, still more strangely, say " she" meaning " your excellency." These are the idioms or idio- matic usages of these languages respectively. Every one speaking any of those languages must use the idiomatic expression, or he would render himself ridiculous. * * Nay, the consequences may sometimes be much more serious. A correspondent sends me the follow- ing story : "My friend, a student in the University of Heidelberg, acquired his first knowledge of German chiefly by colloquial exercise with his fellow-students, who habitually addressed each other in the second person singular, * duS Having thus acquired enough of the language to blunder through a conversation, he was present at a party, where he danced with the sister of one of his fellow-students, and entertained her with the choicest German at his command, but unfortunately always addressed her as * du.\ This (to a German ear) impertinent familiarity was either overheard by, or re- ported to, the young lady's brother, who deemed it impossible to wipe out the scandal by any other means THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 71 88. But, if we judge such expressions by strict rules, they cannot be defended. It cannot be correct to address one person as if he were many : it cannot be' correct to look at and address one person as if he were not present, and, being absent, were more than one. "We all know this : notwithstanding we do not criticise and carp at every such usage, but simply acquiesce in it as being the common custom. 89. Let us take another instance. Some Elliptic usages. languages are more elliptic than others : that is, the habits of thought of some nations will bear the omission of certain members of a sentence, better than the habits of thought of other nations. In English we should say, "At the Equinox the sun rises at six and sets at six" But if we were speaking in French, we should say, " At the Equinox, the sun rises at six hours of the morning, and sets at six hours of the evening." Now here there is than a duel. In vain my friend explained his ignorance of the German conventional mode of address. The offence had been committed in public, and if the culprit wished to remain at Heideli)erg in peace in future, he must fight there. They fought accordingly, and the skilful German cleverly inflicted a slight wound which drew blood ; honour was satisfied, and the affair ended in pipes, friendship, and beer." 72 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. no doubt that the Frenchman has the advan- tage in fulness and propriety of expression. Any one disposed to cavil at our English sentence, and to treat it as some of my sen- tences have been treated, might say, " rises at six and sets at six ! Six what 1 Six miles, or six minutes, or six occasions 1 " But we do not in practice thus cavil, because we are in the enjoyment of common sense, and we are prepared, in the daily use of our language, to omit that which the thought would natu- rally supply.* caprice 5f 90. One more example. In English, our idiom. x ° common mode of salutation to one another is, " How d'ye do ?" Now of course we all under- stand, that in this phrase we use the verb a do " in a neuter sense : in the same sense which it bears in the reply of the disciples concerning Lazarus : " Lord, if he sleep, he shall do w r ell." But suppose a person were to insist on this usage being carried throughout our converse, and to make it an objection to the question "How d'ye do?" that one can- not say in the same sense, " I went to see A or B, and he did well." We should at once reply, if we thought on the matter, that while * See note C. at the end of the volume. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. the verb admits of being thus used in certain tenses, and in certain connexions, it does not admit of being thus used in certain other tenses, and in certain other connexions ; and that the account to be given of this is, that the English people will have it so : it is an idiom, or arbitrary usage, of their language. 91. The capricious character of idiomatic usage is admirably illustrated by this very example. For though it is admissible to say, " I went to see A or B, and he was doing very well," the words would not carry the sense, that I was able to say to him " How dije do?" and he to reply, "Very well, thank you;" but would convey the impression that he had lately met with an accident, and was going on favourably. 92. Some idiomatic expressions seem to ^^ defy any attempt to give a satisfactory ac- count of them. Take the phrase " metlvinlcs" It is believed to have arisen from a strange impersonal use of the verb, and the trans- position of the pronoun, which should come after it. We have the simlar phrase, " me- seems," which can more easily be resolved : viz., into "it seems to me." That this is the account to be given of both, appears plain, seeing that in both cases we find in use the 74 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. other and more formal third person, "me- thinketh" and "me-seemeth." But what an expression to come under the ferule of the strict grammarian ! Example 93. J wa nt yet one more example for the from the J L Greek. purpose I have in view, and I mast get it from a dead language. In the Greek, — which is perhaps the finest and most subtle vehicle ever formed for human thought, — it is the practice to join a plural noun of the neuter gender to a verb in the singular number* Now, of course, according to the rules of uni- versal grammar, this is wrong. A plural noun should be joined to a plural verb. But the Greek had his reason, and a very good one it was. He felt, that things without life, when spoken of in the plural, formed but one mass, and might be treated as one thing. And so the tendency of the national thought, which was to define and to express the subtle dis- tinctions of thought, prevailed over the rule of grammar, and the usage became idio- matic. Spoken and 94. Let another thing also be remem- written English. bered. Yve must distinguish between the English which we speak, and that which we write. Many expressions are not only tole- rated but required in conversation, which are THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 75 not usually put on paper. Thus, for instance, everyone says "cant" for cannot, "wont" for v)ill not, "isn't" for is not, in conversation; but we seldom see these contractions in books, except where a conversation is related, This is a difference which the foreigner is generally slow in apprehending. He says " / will not" "I cannot," u I must not," " I shall not" "I am" for "I'm" "they are" for "they* re : " and he often may be detected by his precision in these matters, even after he has mastered the pronunciation and construction of our language. This difference between our spoken and our written language should always be borne in mind, when we are treat- ing of expressions commonly found in collo- quial English. Many persons, in judging of them, bring them to the test of the stricter rule of written composition, to which they are not fairly amenable. 95. Let me further illustrate this ten- "those kind of dency of nations by another usage now al- things." most become idiomatic, and commonly found in the talk of us all. I mean the expression "these" or "those kind of things." At first sight, this seems incorrect and indefensible. It would appear as if we ought to say "this hind of things" " that kind of things." It 76 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. becomes then an interesting inquiry, as it was in the other case, why this should be so. And here again my readers must excuse me if I go to a dead language for my illustration —-not for my reason : the reason will be found in the laws of thought : but it will be best illustrated by citing the usage of that language in which, more than in any other, the laws of thought have found their expression, "attrac- 96. In the Greek language, there is an idiomatic usage called attraction. It may be thus described. If an important noun in a sentence is- in a certain case, say the genitive or dative, a relative pronoun referring to it is put in the same case, though by the construc- tion of the sentence it ought to be in another. Thus, if I wanted to put into Greek the sen- tence, " I gave it to the man whom I saw]'' the relative pronoun "whom" would not be in the accusative case, as it ought to be, governed by the verb " saw" but in the same case as "man" viz., dative, and the sentence would be roughly represented, as far as the mere form of it is concerned, by the English " / gave it to the man, to whom I saw" 97. Now in the way of 'speaking of which I treat, it is evident that this same tendency, to draw the less important word into simi- THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 77 Iarity to the more important one, is suffered to prevail over strict grammatical exactness. We are speaking of "things" in the plural, Our pronoun " this " really has reference to " hind" not to " things ;" but the fact of " things" being plural, gives a plural com- plexion to the whole, and we are tempted to put " this" into the plural. That this is the account to be given, appears still more plainly from the fact that not unfrequentiy we find a rival attraction prevails, and the clause takes a singular complexion from the other substantive, "kind" We often hear people say, " this kind of thing" " that sort of thing" It must be confessed that the phrases, " this kind of things" " that sort of things" have a very awkward sound ; and we find that our best writers have the popular expression, These kind, those sort* 98. One word on "this" and "that" as we "^"""d ; " that." pass onward. "This" and "these" refer to per- sons and things present, or under immediate consideration; "that" and " those" to per- sons and things not present, nor under im- mediate consideration ; or if either of these, one degree further removed than the others * See note D, at the end of the volume. ?S THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. of which are used "this" and " these" We find this rule sometimes curiously violated in conversation and in writing. A barrister tells me that the confusion is common in the Irish law courts : " Those arguments I now use/' &c. Another Irish correspondent is often greeted with, " That's a could day, yer riv'rence." I have a Scottish friend, who always designates the book which he has in his hand as " that book;" the portfolio of drawings which he is turning over as " those drawings" 99. We have this usage in England, but it carries another meaning. If I have a book in my hand, and say, " that book will make a great sensation" I mean to remove my own and my hearer's attention from the particular volume, or even the present consideration of its contents, and to describe it in its general, and as it were historical, effect on the world. 100. The oddest departure from the com- mon usage of "this" and "that" which I remember to have observed, was in a notice which I repeatedly saw, in the summer of « to-day," 1863, posted on houses in Devonshire, "Those houses to let" "That house for sale" 100a. In "this day" "this night" the THE QU BEX'S EXGL1SH. ' 78 somewhat stiff and formal demonstrative pronoun is curiously abbreviated. " To day" " to-night f are universally used. In the dialect of the western counties, " this year" is commonly expressed by " to-year" In Scotland and Ireland, " the day" " the night f " the year" are the ordinary expressions : " it'll no rain the day," kc. 101. Confusion sometimes arises in our Triple n • meaning of language from the triple meaning of "that, "that." which, with us, is a demonstrative pronoun, a relative pronoun, and a conj unction.' It is possible to use six " thats" consecutively in the same sentence. Take the sentence, "He said, that the meaning which the report which that man told him had been thought to bear was more than had been intended." Here I have already "that" conjunction ; and I may express "the meaning," by "that" demon- strative pronoun ; "which" by "that" relative pronoun ; " the report" by " that" demon- strative pronoun ; " which" again, by " that" relative pronoun ; and then I end with " that man" " that " being in this last case again a demonstrative pronoun. So that I get the following sentence, with, as I said, six " thats" occurring consecutively : " He said, that that that that that that man told him had been §0 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. thought to mean, was more than had been intended." * 102. From this threefold import of the ■word it sometimes is not apprehended which . of its. meanings it bears in a given sentence. Ps. xc. 4$ in the Prayer-book version runs thus — y- A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that is past as a watch in the nighty Here,, of course, that is the de- monstrative pronoun, and refers to "yester- day" which has just been spoken of; and it ought, in reading, to have a certain emphasis laid on it. But not unfrequently w 7 e hear it read in the responses of the congregation, as if it were the conjunction : " Seeing that is past as a watch in the night." I remember having some trouble in curing our choristers at Canterbury of singing it thus. "this 103. What are we to think of the very "that common expressions, " this much" "that much. " much ? ' We continually hear and read, " This much I know," " Of that much I am * Seven u thats" may be used together, if one of them is a mere citation. "I assert that that 'that,' that that that that person told me contained, was im- properly emphasized." And this use may be carried eyen further yet : "I assert, that that, that that 'that,' that that that that person told me contained, implied, has been misunderstood." THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 81 certain," and the like. It might be 'supposed at first sight that this way of speaking was indefensible. "Much" is an adjective of quantity, and requires, in order to define it, not a pronoun, but an adverb. We may say very much, pretty much (where "pretty" is used in its colloquial adverbial sense of tolerably, . moderately), as much, so much, or thus much; but from such a view it would appear that we must not say " this much," or " that much." Still, may not another view be taken 1 High, deep, long, broad, are adjectives of measure; but we may say a ■foot high, a yard long, an ell broad. And if we choose to designate with the hand, or otherwise, the measure of a foot, yard, or ell, we may substitute the demonstrative pronoun for the substantive, and say with precisely the same construction of the sentence, " this high," " this long,''' " that broad." Now, how is this with " much ?" If I may use this and that to point out the extent of length, height, and breadth which I want to indicate, why not also to point out the extent of quantity which I want to indicate 1 When I say " Of this much I am certain," I indicate, by the pro- noun this, something which I am about to state, and which is the extent of my cer- S2 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. tainty. When I say " That much I knew he/ore" I indicate, by the pronoun " that" the piece of intelligence which my friend supposed to be new to me. But it may be replied, I might have said, a Of this I am oertain,*' " That I kneiv before" True : but then I should express nothing as to the extent of my certainty or previous knowledge. I believe both expressions to be correct; not so elegant perhaps as " Thus much" but at the same time more fitted for colloquial use. "that m." 104. There is one use of that, which is quite indefensible, and, indeed, is not found except as a provincialism. I mention it, because some might suppose that what I have said might be cited in defence of it likewise. I mean, when it is used as a qualifying word with adjectives not denoting extent, and when itself must be explained by " to that extent." I have heard in the midland and eastern counties, " I was that ill, that I coidd not go to work :" " He was that drunk, that he didn't know what he was about." * or e "nev°er ^^* Are W<3 t0 Sa ^ " €VeT S0 " 0V " never so " in expressions like " be he ever (never) so old, n * An Irish correspondent informs me that "which?' is used in Ireland as equivalent to our "what?" 01 i ' what did you say ? " BO?" THE QUEEN' 8 ENGLISH. and the like 1 Usage seems divided. In fa- miliar speech we mostly say " ever so : " in writing, and especially in the solemn and ele- vated style, we mostly find " never so." We say to a troublesome petitioner, " If you ask me ever so much, I won't give it you :" but we read, " Which refuseth to hear the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely." Can we give any account of this 1 What is the difference between the expressions ? Be- cause one would think there must be some difference, when two such words are con- cerned, which are the very opposites of one another. Sentences similarly constructed with these two words are as different in meaning as possible. " Had he ever loved at all," and "Had he never loved at all," are opposite in meaning to one another. And so, actually and literally, are the two which we are now considering : but in the general sense they both convey the meaning which is intended. This may be made plain as follows : u Be it ever so large,' means, 4 'though it attain every imaginable degree of size : " " be it never so large," means, "though there be no imaginable degree of size which it does not attain." The former. is inclusively affirmative ; the latter is ex- g 2 64 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. clusively negative : and these two amount to the same, "what 106. There are some curious phenomena was, ""what . was not." coming under the same head as this last. I may say, "What was my astonishment/' and I may say, " What was not my astonishment," and I may convey the same meaning. By the former I mean, " how great was my astonish- ment ;" by the latter, that no astonishment could be greater than mine was. "no" and 107. Another correspondent mentions a same. curious fact about negatives and affirmatives. If we were to ask the question, " Had you only the children with you?" a person south of the Tweed would answer " no" and a per- son north of the Tweed a y^s,"'both meaning the same thing — viz., that only the children were there. I think I should myself, though a Southron, answer yes. But there is no doubt that such questions are answered in the two ways when the same meaning is intended to be conveyed. The account to be given of this seems to be, that "only" is "none but." " Had you none but the children with you 1 " and the answer is "None" affirming the ques- tion. So that the negative form naturally occurs to the mind in framing its answer, and " none" becomes "m" Whereas in the other THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 85 case this form does not occur to the mind, but simply to affirm the matter inquired of, viz., the having only the children : and the answer is " Even .so," or " Yes" 108. In some sentences unobiectionablv " oldest " mmate. ' expressed, it is impossible to be sure of the . meaning. An estabhshment has been founded fifty years. A person tells me that he is "one of its oldest inmates.'' Am I to under- stand that he is one of the few survivors of those who came to it at or near its first foun- dation, in which case he may be any age above fifty \ or am I to understand that he is at the present moment one of the oldest in age of the inmates there, which would bring his age up to between eighty and uinety % In other words, does the term " oldest " qualify him absolutely, or only as an inmate of that establishment ? 109. The mention of degrees of compa- "lesser." rison leads me to another point, which I have been requested to notice by more than one correspondent. It is the use of lesser in certain combinations, instead of less. Are we to stigmatise this as an impropriety, or to regard it as an idiomatic irregularity which we must be content to tolerate ? It seems to me that the latter must be our course. 66 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. The usage is sanctioned by our best writers, and that not here and there, but uniformly. " God made two great lights : the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night." 110. The account to be given of it seems to be somewhat like that which we gave of a former irregularity : that it has arisen origi- nally by the force of attraction to another word, greater, which in such sentences pre- cedes it. For example, when we have spoken of " the greater light" 6i the less light " sounds halting and imperfect ; and the termination er is added to balance the sentence. Some- times the usage occurs where the other word is not expressed : as when we say " the lesser of two evils : " but still the com- parison is in the mind, though not on the tongue. It may be too, that it is not only the sound of the one word u greater" which is usually the companion of " lesser" but that of almost every other comparative in the language, which has produced the effect ; for they are almost without exception dis- syllables. It is a confirmation of the account which we have been giving of this usage, that no one thinks of attaching the addi- tional syllable to " less " when it is combined THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 87 with "more;" more and less being already well balanced. 111. We may notice the growing practice "replace." of using the word " replace" to signify just the opposite of its real meaning. "Lord Derby went out of office, and was replaced by Lord Palmerston." This, as now used, conveys the meaning, "was succeeded by Lord Palmerston." But put the sentence before our grandfathers, and they would have understood it to mean that Lord Derby went out of office, and Lord Palmerston put him in again; he was replaced by Lord Palmerston. 112. I need not say that the usage is bor- rowed from that of the French " remplacer? But there is this difference, that the French verb does not mean to replace, in our sense, nor has it in its derivation anything to do with " replace" but is " remplir la place" " to fill the place" and thus has for its proper meaning that which it is now attempted to give the English word replace. Lord Derby went out of office, and was "remplace," i.e., his place was filled, by Lord Palmerston ; but he was not replaced, i.e., put bach again, by his rival. 113. The "enclosure" of a letter, what is "enclo- sure." it? Is it that which encloses the letter, viz., BS THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. the envelope % or is it something enclosed in the letter, as a dried" flower, or a lock of hair i or is it something enclosed with the letter, as another letter of the same size, or a map or . plan of a larger size ? 114. Strictly speaking, I suppose the nonn is an abstract one, signifying the act of en- closing, as exposure means the act of exposing. In this sense we might say " the enclosure of letters in envelopes, before the pemry postage was established, incurred the payment of double postage." Then, wdien we pass from the abstract to the concrete use of the word, i.e. 9 use it to signify not the act of enclosing, but something which is the instrument, or object, or result of that act, the question arises, ought it to signify the thing en- closing, or the thing enclosed ? There are examples both ways. Cincture is properly the act of girding. A cincture is the thing which girds, not the thing which is girded. But on the other hand, a fissure is the rift produced by cleaving, not the thing which cleaves it. There seems no reason why enclo- sure may not be used in both senses, that which encloses, and that which is enclosed. We may say of sheep in a fold, < " the flock was all within the enclosure," meaning, THE QUEEN'S EXGL1SH. 8.9 within the hurdles surrounding the square ; or we may say that " the flock occupied the whole of the enclosure." meaning the whole of the square enclosed. In the case in question, usage seems to have fixed the meaning in the latter of these two senses, viz., the thing en- closed. An envelope is not said to be the enclosure of the letter, but the letter is said to be the enclosure of the envelope. If I write to the Committee of Council on Educa- tion, I receive printed directions as to our correspondence, the first of which is, " Every letter containing enclosures should enumerate them specially." 11-5. Clearly however, in strict propriety, the word ought to apply to matter enclosed in, and not merely with, the letter. But when this is departed from, when we write on a sheet of note-paper, and speak of a ■ drawing three times its size as the enclosed, or the en- closure of this letter, we may say that we are using the word letter in its wider sense, as meaning the envelope as it is received un- opened from the post. 116. A curious extension of this license is sometimes found. I remember some years ago receiving a letter from my tailor to the following effect: — " Rev. Sir, the enclosed to 90 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. your kind order, which hope will give satis- faction, and am, respectfully and obliged/' - Now " the enclosed " in this case was a suit of clothes, sent by coach, and arriving some two days after the letter. "who" and 117. ■ It will be well to attempt some expla- i{ wliicli " nation of the usages of "who" and "which" especially in our older writers. It may per- haps serve to clear up a matter which may have perplexed some, and to show that there is reason and meaning, where all has . appeared confusion and caprice. The common modern distinction between these two forms of the relative pronoun is, that "who" is used of persons, "which" of things. And this, if borne in mind, will guide us safely through- out. It may be well to notice that what I am about to say does not apply to colloquial English ; indeed, hardly to modern English at all : for this reason, that now we do not commonly use either the one or the other of these pronouns, but make the more conve- nient one, " that" do duty for both. We do not say, " the man who met me," nor " the cattle which I saw grazing," but "the man that met me," " the cattle that I saw." We must take care, however, to remember that ivhich was not always accounted the neuter of THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 91 who, nor is it so in grammar. Dr. Latham says : " To follow the ordinary grammarians, and to call tvJiich the neuter of who, is a blunder. It is no neuter at all, but a com- pound word." It is made up of who and like : and this he shows by tracing it through the various Gothic and German forms, till we come to the Scottish whilk and the English which. 118. Both ivho and. -which are in our older writers used of persons. When this is so, is there any distinction in meaning, and if so, what is it 1 I think we shall find that the composition of the word which, out of ivho and like, will in some measure guide us to the answer ; and I think, without presuming tc say that every case may be thus explained, that the general account of the two ways is this: " who" merely identifies, whereas "which" classifies. Let us quote in illustration one of the most important and well-known instances. If, in the solemn address, " Our Father which art in heaven," "who" had been use{? instead, then we should have been taught to express only the fact that HE, whom we address as our Father, dwelleth in heaven. But as the sentence now stands, if I under- stand it rightly, we are taught to express the fact that the relation of Father in which He 02 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. stands to us is not an earthly but a heavenly one \ that whereas there is a fatherhood which is on earth, His is a Fatherhood which is in heaven. And herein I believe that our trans- lators have best followed the mind of Him who gave us the prayer. The bare construc- tion of the clause in the original does not determine for us whether the relative pronoun applies to the person only of Him whom we address, or to His title of Father. But from our Lord's own use so frequently of the term "your heavenly Father," I think they were right in fixing the reference to the relationship, rather than to the Person only. «?i$ 119 - There is a use of the word " hut " principally to be found in our provincial newspapers, but now and then " leaking up- wpoxIs" into our more permanent literature. It is when that conjunction is made the con- necting link between two adjectives which do not require any such disjoining. We may say that a man is old, but vigorous, because vigour united with age is something unex- pected ; but we have no right to say old but respectable, because respectability with old age is not something unexpected.* Even while ] * The expression " allow me respectfully, but ear- nestly to represent to you," is objected to. Yet here 1 so. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. write, my train stops at a station on the Great Western E ail way, where passengers are invited to take a trip to Glasgow, "to witness the wild but grand scenery of Scotland." Now, because scenery is wild, there is* no reason why it shonld not be also grand ; nay, wilclness in scenery is most usually an accompaniment of grandeur. Wild but not grand would be far more reason- able, because wildness raises an expectation of grandeur, which the " but " contradicts. 120. A correspondent writes : " Many, espe- " as " snd cially I think ladies, say, ' He is not as tall as his brother.' Am I not right in saying that after a negative ( so ' should be used— 4 He is not so tall as his brother 9 ? " Such certainly appears to be the usage of our language, how- ever difficult it may be to account for it. Tie say, " one way of speaking is as good as the other ; " but when we deny this propo- sition, we are obliged to say, " one way of speaking is not so good as the other." So cannot be used in the affirmative proposition, nor as in the negative. Change the form of we seem to require the disjunctive particle. A respect- ful representation carries with it the idea of a certain distance and formality, with which the zeal implied in earnestness is at first sight inconsistent : and the dis- junctive particle seems to show that though the latter i3 present, the former is not forgotten. 94 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. the sentence into one less usual and still allowable, "the one way of speaking is equally good with the other," and the same adverb will serve for both affirmative and negative : " the one is equally good with the other ; " " the one is not equally good with the other." 120a. The accuracy of this rule has been called in question by one of my censors, and he gives as his example " There are few artists who draw horses as well as Mr. Leech": in which sentence he rightly observes that " so well " ought to have been used. But why? Simply because the sentence is not affirmative, as he designates it, but negative. There are few ( = not many), denies the existence of many : there are a few, affirms the existence of some. It never could be said " There are a few artists, who draw horses so well as Mr. Leech." His example confirms the rule, instead of impugning it. Garry the negative a little further, and we have " There are no artists who draw horses so well as Mr. Leech ." 121. A question has been asked about the expressions " I had rather," " I had as soon" or "as lief* What is the "had" in these sentences 1 Is it really part of the verb THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 5 " have '" at all ? If it is, how do we explain it ? We cannot use " to have rather " in any other tense : it is no recognised phrase in our language. And therefore it has been sug- gested, that the expression "I had rather" 'has, originated with erroneous filling up of the abbreviated Td rather, which is short not for I had rather, but I would rather. ."I would rather be" is good English, because " I would be " is good English ; but " / had rather be " is not good English, because " / had be " is not good English. 122. One word with regard to the colloquial Colloquial contract contractions which I just now mentioned. tions - We occasionally hear some made use of, which cannot be defended. For instance, u I ain't certain" "I aint going" This latter, in the past tenses, degenerates still further into the mere vulgarism, "I ivarnt going" This latter is heard only as a vulgarism ; but the other two are very frequently used, even by highly educated persons. The main objection to them is that they are proscribed by usage ; but exception may also be taken to them on their own account. A contraction must surely retain some trace of the resolved form from vvhich it is abbreviated. What, then, is ain't ? " It cannot be a contraction of 96 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. "am not" What " arnH" is contracted from is very plain ; it once was " are not" which, of course, cannot be constructed with the first person singular. The only legitimate colloquial contraction of " I am not" is " V m not : " " Tm not going ; " " I'm not quite sure." The same way of contracting is used in the case of "are not" It is usually contracted by attaching the verb to the personal pro- noun, not by combining it with the negative particle. We say " You re not in time" not "you arnH; " " they're not coming" not " they arnH" or " ain't"* 123. A few remarks may be made on the use in English of feminine substantives. Certain names of occupations and offices seem to require them, and others to forbid them. We say " emperor" and "empress;" but we do not in the same sense say "governor" and Feminine " governess" In this latter case the feminine substan- tives, form has acquired a meaning of its own, and refuses to part with it. I remember, during the first weeks of our present Queen's reign, * A correspondent complains of the use, by some of our "best writers, of the subjunctive u thou wert" as equivalent to the indicative " thou wast." I own I had not observed it. Of course there can be no doubt that it is wrong, wherever it may occur. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 97 hearing a clergyman pray for " Alexandrina, our most gracious Queen and governess." Very many, indeed most names of occupations and offices, are common to both sexes, and it savours of pedantry to attempt by adding the feminine termination, to make a differ- ence. The description "pilgrim" for in- stance, may include both men and women ; yet I saw the other day advertised, " The Wanderings of a pilgrimess" &c. "Porter" is another of these words. When we are told to apply to the porter, we are not surprised to see "her that keeps the gate" answer to our knock. But in many public establish- ments we see the "portress" announced as the person to whom we are to apply.* I expect we shall soon see u groceress and tea- dealeress, and licenced vendress of stamps." A rule regarding the classification of both sexes together is sometimes forgotten. When both are spoken of under one head, the mas- culine appellation is used. Thus, though some of the European rulers may be females, they may be correctly classified, when spoken * The word " portress " is legitimate enough. "We have in Milton "the portress of hell gate." But it does not follow, because it is used in poetry, that we may use it in our common discourse. H 98 THE QUEERS ENGLISH. of altogether, under the denomination "kings" It has been pointed out that Lord Bacon * does this even in the case of two, " Ferdi- nand and Isabella, kings of Spain." This would hardly be said now ; and in ordinary language, we should perhaps rather choose to call the European rulers "sovereigns." But this is no reason why the rule should be forgotten, nor why sentences, when it is observed, should be charged with incorrect- ness, or altered to suit modern ears. A correspondent writes that his clergyman, in the following sentence in the prayer for the Queen, in the Communion service, " We are taught that the hearts of kings are in Thy rule and governance," alters the word Icings into sovereigns. Punctua- 124. From speaking of the forms of words, tion. . . we will come to punctuation, or stopping. I remember when I was young in printing, once correcting the punctuation of a proof-sheet, * A correspondent has charged me with falling into the blunder of calling this distinguished philosopher Lord Bacon, which he never was. Surely one who is contending for usage against pedantry stands acquitted here. How far the title, " Lord Bacon," has prevailed, may be seen in the lettering of the backs of the volumes of the only good edition of his works, that by Heath, Ellis, and Spedding. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 99 and complaining of the liberties which had been taken with ray manuscript. The pub- lisher quietly answered me, that punctuation ahcays left to the compositors. And a pre- cious mess they make of it. The great enemies to understanding anything printed in our lan- guage are the commas. And these are inserted by the compositors, without the slightest com- punction, on every possible occasion. Many words are by rule always hitched off with two commas \ one before and one behind; nursed, as the Omnibus Company would call it. "Too" is one of these words ; " however" another ; "also" another; the sense in almost every such case being disturbed, if not destroyed by the process. I remember beginning a sentence with — " However true this may be." When it came in proof, the inevitable comma was after the "however" thus of course making nonsense of my unfortunate sentence. I have some satisfaction in reflecting, that, in the course of editing the Greek text of the New Testament, I believe I have destroyed more than a thousand commas, which prevented the text being properly understood. 1 2o. One very pr se is that where comma two adjectives come together, belonging to adjectives. the same noun-substantive. Thus, in print- h 2 100 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH, ing a nice young man, a comma is placed after nice, giving, -we may observe, a very- different sense from that intended : bringing before ns the fact that a man is both nice and young, whereas the original sentence introduced to us a young man that was nice. Thus too in the expression "a great Hack dog? printed without commas, every- body knows what we mean ; but this would be printed " a great, black dog." Take again the case where meaning is intensified by adjectives being repeated — as in "the wide tvicle ivorlcl, 99 "the deep deep sea." Such expressions you almost invariably find printed " the wide, wide world, 99 " the deep, deep sea, 99 thereby making them, if judged by any rule at all, absolute nonsense. Too few 126. Still, though too many commas are bad, commas. ° J too few are not without inconvenience also. I saw the other day a notice of " the Society for Promoting the Observance of the Lord's- day which was founded in 1831," giving the notion that the day, not the society, was founded in that year. Had the date been 1631, instead of 18, an awkward interpre- tation might have been possible. 127. I take the following, verbatim and punctuatim, from a religious newspaper of THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 1CJ this present year: "Education — In a Ladies' School conducted on Evangelical principles about nine in number, good in- struction is given, &c." 128. While I am upon stops, a word is Notes of ■*- x adiiiiratioa* necessary concerning notes of admiration, A note of admiration consists, as we know, of a point with an upright line suspended over it, strongly suggestive of a gentleman jumping off the ground with amazement. These shrieks, as they have been called, are scattered up and down the page by the com- positors without mercy. If one has written the words " sir" as they ought to be written, and are written in Genesis xliii. 20, viz., with the plain capital " " and no stop, and then a comma after " Sir" our friend the compositor is sure to write " Oh " with a shriek (!) and to put another shriek after "Sir" Use, in writing, as few as possible of these nuisances. They always make the sense weaker, where you can possibly do without them. The only case I know of where they are really necessary, is where the language is pure exclamation, as in "How beautiful is night ! " or, " that I might find him ! " 129. The very simple and intelligible word " centr* " centre" comes in for a good deal of mal- SOS THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. treatment in our days. Centre is from the Greek word " Eentron" meaning merely a point : the point of a needle, or of a sting, or of anything else : and hence is used in geometry to denote that point round which a circle or any other symmetrical curve is drawn. And in accordance with this its ori- ginal meaning ought its use always to be : a centre should always designate a point, never a line, nor, except as presently defined, a middle space. But we see this often departed from. " A gangway will be left down the centre of the room," is a clear case of such departure. I do not of course mean to advo- cate absolute strictness in this or in any other usage. Accuracy is one thing, punctilious- ness is another. The one should be always observed, the other always avoided. While I should take care not to say that I walked up and down the centre of the lawn, I should not object to say that there is a large bed of geraniums in the centre, although strictly speaking the centre of the lawn is in the bed, not the bed in the centre. * * A correspondent informs me, that a parliamentary notice to landowners, which has been in use for the last seventeen years, and is issued to the number of hun- dreds of thousands at once, contains the words ' ' within THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 103 130. And in the figurative use of this word, and of all words, intelligent common sense, rather than punctiliousness, ought to be our guide. Centre, and its adjective central, are often used in speaking of objects of thought, as well as of sight. Let it be borne in mind, when this is done, that these words apply only to a principal object round which others group themselves, and not to one which happens to be pre-eminent amongst others. To say that some conspicuous person in an assembly was the centre of attraction, is perfectly correct ; but to say that some subject of conversation, merely because it happened to occupy more of the time than other subjects, was the central topic of the evening, is incorrect and unmeaning. 131. Ought we to write by and by, or by" by *ad and bye ? by the by, or by the bye ? There is a tendency to add a vowel, by way of giving emphasis in pronunciation, when a preposition is used as an adverb. Thus " too " is only the preposition " to," emphasized ■ a " bye " eleven yards, or thereabouts, of the centre-line of the proposed work." This is not absolutely wrong : for the centre-line is the line which passes through the centre, as the Chatham-line is the line which passes through Chatham. 104 THE QUEEJS'S ENGLISH. ball, at cricket, is only a ball that runs by. In this latter case the added "e" is universal : but not so in byplay, by-end, which are sometimes spelt with it and sometimes without it. And we never add it when " by " is used as an adverb in construction in a sentence, as in passing by. This being so, it is better, perhaps, to confine this way of spelling to the only case where it seems needed, the bye ball, and to write " by and by" " by the b y r "endeavour 132. A mistake is very generally made by ourselves." J ° J J our clergy in reading the collect for the second Sunday after Easter. We there pray, with reference to Our Lord's death for us, and His holy example, " that we may thank- fully receive that his inestimable benefit, and also daily endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life." This is often read with an emphasis on the word " ourselves," as if it were in the nominative case, and to be distinguished from some other person. But no other persons have been men- tioned ; and the sense thus becomes confused for the hearer. The fact is, that " ourselves " is not in the nominative case at all, but in the accusative after the verb " endeavour," which at the time of the compiling of our THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 105 Prayer-book was used as a reflective verb. To endeavour myself, is to consider myself in duty bound. That this is so, appears clearly from the answer given in the Ordina- tion service, where the Bishop asks, " Will you be diligent in prayers and in reading of the Holy Scriptures, and in such studies as help to the knowledge of the same . . . V 9 And the candidate replies, "I will endea- vour myself so to do, the Lord being my helper." 133. The usas:e of the verb to mistake is"tobemia« ° taken." somewhat anomalous. Its etymology seems simple enough — to take amiss. And by the analogy of " misunderstand," " misinterpret," "mislead," "misinform," "miscalculate," it ought to be simply an active verb, as in the phrases, "you mistook my meaning," "he had mistaken the way." This would give as its passive use, "my meaning was mistaken by you." But our English usage is different ; we have these phrases, it is true, but we far more commonly use the verb in the pas- sive, to carry what should be its active mean- ing. To be mistaken is not, with us, to be misapprehended by another, but to commit a mistake oneself. This is a curious transla- tion of meaning, but it is now rooted in the 106 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. language and become idiomatic. "I thought bo, but I was mistaken," is universally said, not "I mistook." We expect to hear "you are mistaken/' and should be surprised at hearing asserted "you are mistaking," or "you mistake," unless followed by an accu- sative, "the meaning," or "me." When we hear the former of these, we begin to con- sider whether we were right or wrong ; when the latter, we at once take the measure of our friend, as one who has not long escaped from the study of the rules of the lesser grammarians, by which, and not by the usages of society, circumstances have com- pelled him to learn his language. *grood ^ 134. A correspondent asks me, good looking "well look- or we ii looking? Here is another instance of ing. 4 ' #> J # m idiom versus accuracy. And idiom decidedly has it. To speak of a well-looking man would be to make oneself ridiculous : all usage is against the word. But, at the same time, to be good looking is not to look good. It is, in one sense, to look well ; or, if we will, to have good looks. So that the whole matter seems to be left to usage, which in this case is decisive. "latter," of 135. One point made very much of by the more than x J J two ; ''last," precisians is, the avoiding of the use of " latter" of only two. x ' ° THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 107 when we have spoken of more than two things, and of " last " when we have spoken of only two. Is this founded in any neces- sity or propriety of the laws of thought • or is it a mere arbitrary regulation laid down by persons who know little and care little about those laws ? 136. Let us inquire into the matter. The notion is, that in speaking of two things, we can have only positive and comparative; that for a superlative we require three or more ; and when we have three or more, we must use the superlative. Thus if I speak of two invasions of Great Britain, I must call the earlier the former, not the first, and the se- cond the latter, not the last. But if I speak of three invasions, I must call the third, in re- ferring to it, the last, not the latter. Is there reason in this ? Let us look at it in this light. Of two invasions, the earlier is undoubtedly the first, the later the second. Now "first" is a superlative ; and if of two, one is designated by a superlative, why not the other ? 137. Still, this is not digging to the root of the matter ; it is only arguing from the acknowledged use of a form in one case, to its legitimate use in an analogous one. Let us take it in another point of view. "First" 108 TIIL QUEEN'S' ENGLISH. is unavoidably used of that one in a series with which we begin, whatever be the, number which follow \ whether many or few. Why should not " last " be used of that one in a series with which we end, whatever be the number which preceded, whether many or few ? The second invasion, when we spoke of only two, was undoubtedly the last men- tioned ; and surely therefore may be spoken of in referring back to it, as the last, without any violation of the laws of thought. 138. Nor does the comparative of neces- sity suggest that only two are concerned, though it may be more natural to speak of the greatest of more than two, not of the greater. For that which is greatest of any number, is greater than the rest. " superior," 139. There is an expression creeping into "inferior." . general use which cannot be justified m grammar, "a superior man ; 5 ' "a very inferior person." We all know what is meant : and a certain sort of defence may be set up for it by calling it elliptical : by saying that the comparatives are to be filled up by inserting "to most men," or the like. But with all its convenience, and all the defence which can be set up for it, this way of speaking is not desirable ; and if followed out as a precedent, THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. K9 cannot but vulgarize and deteriorate our language. 140. We seem rather unfortunate in our "talented.* designations for our men of ability. For another term by which we describe them, " talented" is about as bad as possible. What is it % It looks like a participle. From what verb 1 Fancy such a verb as " to talent ! " Coleridge somewhere cries out against this newspaper word, and says, Imagine other par- ticiples formed by this analogy, and men being said to be pennied, shillinged, or pounded. He perhaps forgot that, by an equal abuse, men are said to be " moneyed " men, or as we sometimes see it spelt (as if the word itself were not bad enough without making n worse by false orthography), " monied." 14L Another formation of this kind, "gifted." "gifted" is at present very much in vogue. Every man whose parts are to be praised, is a gifted author, or speaker, or preacher. Nay, sometimes a very odd transfer is made, and the pen with which the author writes is said to be "gifted" instead of himself. 142. Exception has been taken to what has "to leave, * absolute. iDeen called the neuter use of the verb to leave : "I shall not leave before December 1." But it is not uorrect to. describe this as a 110 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. neuter use ; it is rather the absolute use. The verb is still active, but the object is suppressed. Thus, if there are three persons in a room, one reading the Bible, another the newspaper, and the third a review, I say that they are all reading, without depriving the verb of its active force ; using it as an absolute predicate applicable to them all. Thus too, if of three persons one is leaving his own home to-morrow, another a friend's house, and the third an hotel, I may say that they are all leaving to-morrow. And this absolute usage is perfectly legitimate where one person only is concerned. " I shall not read this morning, but I shall write." "It is my intention to leave wdien my lease is up." How r far it may be more or less elegant under given cir- cumstances to speak thus, is another question, which can only be decided when those circum- stances are known ; but of the correctness of the usage I imagine there can be no doubt. « could not 143. Connected wdth the last are, or may seem to be, certain elliptical usages which can- not be similarly defended. Thus when the object has been to visit a friend, or to attain a certain point, we sometimes hear the excuse for failure thus expressed, " I meant to come to you," — or, " I fully intended to be there;" THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. Ill "but / couldnt get" The full expression would in *tliis case be, " I couldn't get to you;" or ; "I couldn't get there." But the verb " to get " is used in so many meanings, that it is hardly fit for this elliptical position. Besides that the sentence ends inelegantly and inharmoniously, an ambiguity is sug- gested: "couldn't get what?" a horse? or time 1 or money to pay the fare 1 or some one to show the way 1 144. Another word objectionably thus used " does not J J belong." is the verb "to belong" "Is Miss A. coming to the Amateur Concert to-night?" "No: she does not belong ;" meaning, does not belong to the Society. And then perhaps we are told that "though she does not belong this year, she means to belong next." Here again we may say that belong is a verb of so wide a signification, that it will hardly admit of beino; thus detached from its acci- dents, and used absolutely and generally. 144a. I am reminded by a valued corre- to " belong Leeds," &c. spondent, of another use of the verb " to be- long" already familiar to me, as having been long resident in the north-midland counties. " "We have," he says, " in these parts a provin- cial usage of the word " belong ;" as, " belong to Halifax," " belong to Leeds : " or, more com- 1 i 2 THE Q VEEN'S ENGLISH. monly, "belong Halifax," "belong Leeds:" meaning, live there. The late Mr. F. W., one of the largest proprietors of land in York- shire, and M.P. for the yet undivided county — and, let me add, a wise and munificent friend to the Church, — was withal so little lavish on his person, that he might easily pass for a very humble farmer. He was one day accosted on the roadside by two strangers in a gig on their way to Wighill, near York. " My man, do you belong Wighill ? " He answered, " No, Sirs, Wighill belongs to me." Irress "°~ ^^' f ^^ ie ver1 ° ^° "P ro 9 r€SS " is challenged by one of my friends as a modern Ameri- canism. This is not strictly accurate. Shak- speare uses it in King John, act v. sc. 2 : " Let me-wipe off this honourable dew, That silveiiy doth, progress on thy cheeks." * But you will observe > that the line requires the verb to be pronounced progress, not pro- * I mention, as in courtesy bound, an account of this construction which has been sent me by a correspondent anxious to vindicate Shakspeare from having used a modern vulgarism. He would understand "doth pro- gress" as "doeth progress," the latter word. being a substantive. Surely, he can hardly be in earnest, [I am surprised to see this advocated in the very sensible little English Grammar of Mr. Higginson. Aug. 1864.] THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 113 gress, so that this is perhaps hardly a case in point, except as to the word, a verb formed on the noun progress. 146. Milton also uses such a verb, in the Passage t from magnificent peroration of his " Treatise of Milton, lie formation in England." I cannot forbear citing the whole passage, as it may be a relief to my readers and to myself in the midst of these verbal enquiries : "Then amidst the Hymns and Hallelujahs of saints, some one may perhaps be heard offering at high strains in new and lofty mea- sures, to sing and celebrate thy divine mer- cies, and marvellous judgments in this land throughout all ages ; whereby this great and warlike nation, instructed and inured to the fervent and continual practice of Truth and Eighteousness, and casting far from her the rags of her old vices, may press on hard to that high and happy Emulation, to be found the soberest, wisest, and most Christian people at that day, when Thou the Eternal and shortly expected King, shalt open the clouds' to judge the several kingdoms of the world, and distributing national honours and rewards to religious and just commonwealths, shalt put an end to all earthly Tyrannies, proclaiming thy universal and mild Monarchy through i 114 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH, heaven and earth. Where they undoubtedly, that by their labours, counsels and prayers, have been earnest for the common good ol Religion and their country, shall receive above the inferior orders of the Blessed, the regal addition of Principalities, Legions, and Thrones into their glorious Titles, and, in superemi- nence of beatifick vision, progressing the date- less and irrevoluble circle of Eternity, shall clasp inseparable Hands with Joy and Bliss, in over measure for ever." 147. It may be noticed again that Milton s use of the verb is not exactly that which is become common now. He seems to make it equivalent to " moving along" or " moving throughout" in an active sense. These fa- voured ones are to progress the circle of Eter- nity, i.e., I suppose, to revolve for ever round and round it. The present usage makes the verb neuter ; to progress meaning to advance, to make progress. I can hardly say I feel much indignation against the word, thus used. We seem to want it ; and if we do, and it does not violate any known law of formation, by all means let us have it. True, it is the first of its own family; we have not yet formed aggress, regress, egress, or retrogress* * One of my Censors has found some of these words THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 115 into verbs ; but we have done in substance the same thing, by having admitted long ago the verbs suggest, digest, project, object, reject, eject ; for all these are formed from the same part of the original Latin verbs, as this "pro- gress " on which we have been speaking. 148. In treating of this verb to "progress'' Nouns made to r * \ into verbs. a correspondent notices that there prevails a tendency to turn nouns into verbs : " The ship remained to coal:" "the church is being peived :" " he was prevailed on to head the movement." I do not see that we can object to this tendency in general, seeing that it has grown with the growth of our language, and under due regulation is one of the most obvious means of enriching it. Verbs thus formed will carry themselves into use, in spite of the protests of the purists. Some years set down as English, verbs in the folio edition of Bailey's Universal Dictionary, published in 1755. But there is as wide a difference between dictionary words and English words, as between vocabulary French and spoken French. We might in a few minutes find a list of dictionary words which would introduce us to some strange acquaintances. What do we think of "abarcy," "aberuncate," " abolish able," " ahstrioge, " "abstrude," "acervate," "acetosity," "adjugate," "admetiate," " adminicle," ' ' advolation, " "adus- tible," &c, &c. Thousands of words in the Diction- aries are simply Latin, made English in form, without any authority for their use. I 2 116 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. ago, precise scholars used to exclaim againsl the verb " to experience; " and a very ugly candidate for admission into the language it was. Milton introduced its participle when he wrote, " He through the armed files Darts his experienced eye." Still, as we know in the case of " talented " and " moneyed" the participle may be tolerated long before the verb is invented : and no instance of the verb " to experience " occurs till quite recently. But all attempts to exclude it now would be quite ineffectual.* "to treat 149. To treat of) or to treat? Plainly, of." or " t.O treat?" which we please. To treat is to handle, to have under treatment, to discuss. The verb may be used with an object following it, to * A correspondent referred to me the question whether in Milton's line, " Then let the pealing organ blow," the verb "blow" is rightly used. The organ, it was urged, is blown: and it might as well be said that the fire "blows," when it is blown. But I believe Milton to be quite correct. The whole action of the organ is, to produce sound by blowing into the pipes : and this it is, rather than the filling the bellows with wind, that is meant. The action of fire is, not to blow, but to burn : when it is blown, it burns : but when the organ is blown, it, by aid of its valves, opened by the pressure on the keys, blows, and produces music. THE Q UEEXS ENGLISH. I ] 7 " treat a subject ;" or it may be used abso- lutely, to "treat concerning" or "of" a subject. It is one of those very many cases so little understood by the layers down of precise rules, where writers and speakers are left to choose, as the humour takes them, between different ways of expression. 149a. And I may once for all notice a Fallacy:— of p o • • • * wo wa y s of fallacious way of arguing, into which the expression, one must be sciolists who would legislate for our language wrong. are continually betrayed. It consists in assuming that, of two modes of expression, if one be showm to be right, the other must necessarily be wrong. Whereas very often the varying expressions are equally legitimate, and each of them full of interest, as bearing traces of the different sources from which our language has sprung. 150. There is a piece of affectation becoming " the fr° , k 1 ° Genesis," sadly common among our younger clergy, " th ? c]t y which I had already marked for notice, when I received a letter, from wmich the folio wing- is an extract : — ec I wish to call your atten- tion to the ignorance which is sometimes exhibited by clergy and others of the true meaning of the preposition in such expres- sions as ( the city of Canterbury,' ' the play of " Hamlet." ' We sometimes hear it pro- 118 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. claimed from the desk, e Here beginneth the first chapter of the book Genesis :' and we read in parochial documents of 4 the parish of St. George/ c the parish of St. Mary,' instead i of St. George's/ ' of St. Mary's,' &c." 151. I believe the excuse, if it can be called one, set up for this violation of usage is, that "the book of Genesis" and "the book of Daniel " cannot both be right, because the former was not written by Genesis, as the latter was by Daniel. But, as my corres- pondent, says, this simply betrays ignorance of the meanings of the preposition " of." It is used, in designations of this kind, in three different senses : 1. To denote authorship, as "the book of Daniel:'" 2. To denote subject- matter, as " the first booh of Kings : " 3. As a note of apposition, signifying, ic which is," or "which is called," as " the book of Genesis'' " of Exodus," &c. This last usage meets us at every turn ; and the pedant who ignores it in the reading desk, must, in consistency, drop it everywhere else. Imagine his letter describing his summer holiday : " I left the city London, and passed through the county Kent, leaving the realm England at the town Dover, and entering the empire France at the THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 119 town Calais, on my way to the Republic Switzerland." * 1-52. I may remark in passing, that here again usage comes in with its prescriptive laws, and prevents the universal application of rules. While we always say " the city of Cairo," not "the city Cairo," we never say "the river of Nile," but always "the river Nile." So too " the city of London," but " the river Thames." 153. It seems astonishing that many of our " reverend, ° J and "re- Writers should not yet be clear in their dis- vere nt." tinctive use of "revered" and "reverb." I saw lately a description of a certain person as being " unintentionally irreverend." The writer (or printer) of this forgot that "reverent" (r ever ens, -entis) is the subjective word, de- scribing the feeling within a man as its sub- ject, whereas " reverend " (reverendus) is the objective word, describing the feeling with which a man is regarded, — of which he is the object from without. Dean Swift might be " very reverend," by common courtesy ; but he was certainly not "very reverent" in his conduct or in his writings. 154:. A few words more about these subjective Subjective and objec- and objective words. It has been the fashion tive word* * See note E, at the end of the volume. 120 " or " and " nor " in a negative Bentenee. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. to laugh at and decry these terms, subjective and objective. I have generally found that those who do so are wanting in appreciation of the distinction which these words are intended to convey, and which can hardly be conveyed but by their use. Take the case where one and the same word is used in both senses. We say " a fearful heart/' and we say " a. fearful height." In the former phrase we use fearful in its subjective sense, as describing a quality inherent in the subject of the sentence ; in the latter phrase, we use fearful in its objective sense, as describing an effect produced on those who are the objects con- templated. How otherwise than by the use of these terms are we clearly and shortly to indicate this difference 1 Other instances of this double use of one and the same word may be found in "a hopeful spirit," iC a hopeful youth," — " a joyful multitude," "a joyful occasion ; " and an example of the distinction in the use of two words, in the adjectives "tall" (sub- jective, — high with reference to himself as compared with others) and " high''' (objec- tive, contemplated as .an object from with- out). 155. A good deal of confusion is pre- valent in the usages of "or" and "nor" in THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 121 a negative sentence. When I wrote, in the last paragraph but one, " he was certainly not very reverent in his conduct or in his writ- ings," was I right or wrong ? Ought I to have said, " he was not very reverent in his conduct nor in his writings ? " We may regard this sentence in two ways, which may be represented by the two following modes of punctuation : 1. "He was not very reverent in his conduct, or in his writings." 2. " He was not very reverent, in his conduct or in his writings." According to the former punc- tuation, " or " is wrong ; it should be " nor. " But observe that thus we get a somewhat awkward elliptical sentence : " He w r as not very reverent in his conduct, nor (was he very reverent) in his writings." In the second form of the sentence, "or" is right, and "nor" w T ould be wrong. This will be evident in a moment by filling up the sentence with the other alternative particle, " He was not very . reverent, either in his conduct or in his writings ; " not, " He was not very reverent, neither in his conduct, nor in his writings." 156. We may, if w^e will, strike out the negative altogether from the part of the sentence containing the verb, and attach it entirely to the alternative clauses. But in 122 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. this case it is usual to place those clauses before the predicative portion of the sentence : " neither in his conduct, nor in his writings was he very reverent." Elliptical 157. As I have "been speaking of an elliptical sentences. sentence, I may remark that it is astonishing what an amount of ellipsis the English ear will tolerate : in other words, how great an effort the mind of a hearer will make in supplying that which is suppressed. This extends sometimes even to changing the construction, and turning affirmative into negative, tacitly and unconsciously, as the sentence falls upon the eye or ear. A remark- able example of this occurs in one of the most solemn prayers in our English Communion Service : "We do not presume to come to this Thy Table, most merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness ; but (we do -presume to come, trusting) in thy manifold and great mercies." Put this admirable sentence into the hands of our ordinary rhetoricians, and it would be utterly marred. The apparently awkward ellipsis would be removed thus : " We presume to come to this Thy Table, trusting, not in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies." But at the same time, the whole character of the sentence THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 123 and of the prayer would be altered. Who does not see, that by the opening words, "We do not presume," the key-note vf the whole prayer is struck — the disclaiming of presump- tion founded on our own righteousness 1 It was worth any subsequent halting of the sentence in mere accuracy of construction, to secure this plain declaration of the spirit in which the prayer was about to be made. 158. And this leads us to a rule which we General rule in such should do well to follow in all such cases. To cases - secure the right sense being given, and the right emphasis laid, is the first thing : not to satisfy the rules of the rhetoricians. Many a sentence, which the mere rhetorician would pronounce faulty in arrangement, does its work admirably, and has done it for centuries : let him correct it and re-arrange it, and it will do that work no more. Its strong emphasis will have disappeared : its nervous homeliness will have departed, and it will sink down into vapid commonplace. 159. Let us now enter on this matter some- Ammge- what more in detail. The one rule which is words in supposed by the ordinary rhetoricians to regu- late the arrangement of words in sentences, is this: that " those jiarts of a sentence which are most closely connected in their meaning, should 124 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. Ordinary ule. Emphasis. be as closely as possible connected in position ;" or, as it is propounded by Dr. Blair, "A capital rale inthe arrangement of sentences is that the words or members most nearly related should be placed in the sentence as near to each other as possible, so as to make their mutual relation clearly appear" 160. Now doubtless this rule is, in the main, and for general guidance, a good and useful one: indeed, so plain to all, that it surely needed no inculcating. But there are more things in the English language than seem to have been dreamt of in the philoso- phy of the rhetoricians. If this rule were uni- formly applied, it would break down the force and the living interest of style in any English writer, and reduce his matter, as we just now said, to a dreary and dull monotony. For it is in exceptions to its application, that almost all vigour and character of style consist. Of this I shall give abundant illustration by-and- by. Meantime let me make some remarks on two very important matters in the con- struction of sentences: the requirements of emphasis, and the requirements of parenthesis ; neither of which are taken into account by the ordinary rule. 161. Emphasis means the stress, or force of THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 125 intonation, which the intended sense requires requires its , , . - ' . 1 t . violation, to be laid, on certain words, or changes, m a sentence. Very often (not always) we can indicate this by the form and arrangement of the sentence itself. Some languages have far greater capacities this way than onr own; bnt we are able commonly to do it sufficiently for the careful and intelligent reader. 162. Now how is this done 1 A sentence arranged according to the rule above cited, sim- ply conveys the meaning of its words in their ordinary and straightforward construction; and in English, owing to the difficulty, often felt, of departing from this arrangement, we must very generally be contented with it, at the risk of our words not conveying the full- ness of the meaning which we intended. For let me explain, that whenever we wish to indicate that a stress is to be laid on a certain word, or clause, in a sentence, we must do it by taking that word or that clause out of its natural place which it would hold by the above rule, and putting it into some more prominent one. A substantive, for example, governed by a verb, is in a subordinate position to that verb \ the mind of the reader is arrested by the verb, rather than by the substantive; sc that if for any rea- 12G THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. son we wish to make the substantive pro- minent, we must provide some other place for it than next to the verb which governs it. fn the case 163. Take, as an example, the words "he of words; ' l ' restored me to mine office :" where the words are arranged in accordance with the ordinary law, and the idea expressed is the simple one of restoration to office. But suppose a distinction is to be made between the narrator, who had been restored to office, and another man, who had been very differently treated. Of course we might still observe the rule, and say " He restored me to mine office, and he hanged him ; " but the sentence becomes thus (and it is to this that I request the reader's attention) a very tame one, not expressing the distinction in itself, nor admitting of being so read as to express it sharply and decisively. Now, let us violate the rule, and see how the sentence reads : " Me he restored unto mine office, and him lie hanged" Thus wrote our translators of Genesis (xli. 13), and they arranged the words rightly. No reader, be his intelligence ever so little, can help reading this sentence as it ought to be read. 164. And let there be no mistake about this being a violation of the rule. The words THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 127 nearest connected are "restored" and "me," which, it governs : " hanged" and " him" which it governs. When I take " me " ont of its place next " restored" and begin the sen- tence with it, letting the prononn " he " come between them, I do most distinctly violate the rnle, that those words which are most nearly connected in the sense shonld also be most nearly connected in the arrangement. I have purposely chosen this first instance of the simplest possible kind, to make the matter clear as we advance into it. Let us take another. St. Peter (Acts ii. 23) says to the Jews, speaking of our Lord, " Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain." Here we have the pronoun " Him " placed first in the sentence, and at a considerable distance from the verbs that govern it, with the clause, " being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God," inserted between. Yet, who does not see that the whole force of that which was intended to be conveyed by the sentence is thus gained, and could not otherwise be gained ? Arranged according to the common rule, the sentence would have been, " Ye have taken Him, being delivered M3 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, and by w r icked hands have crucified and slain Him;" and the whole force and point would have been lost. andparen- 1(35, And as this necessity for bringing thesis, m J ° ° c^us ase ° f m ^° P rommence affects the position of words in sentences, so does it also that of clauses. A clause is often subordinate in the construc- tion to some word or some other clause; while it is the object of the writer to bring the subordinate, not the principal, clause into prominence. And then, as we saw with regard to words just now, the clause which is inferior in constructive importance is brought out and transposed, so that the reader's attention may be arrested by it. Or perhaps the writer feels the necessity of noticing as he passes on, certain particulars which will come in flatly, and spoil the balance of the sentence, if reserved till their proper place. Such passing notices are called " parentheses" from a Greek word, meaning insertion by the way ; and every such insertion is a violation of the supposed universal rule of position. 166. Thus, for example, I am narrating a circumstance which, when it happened, ex- cited my astonishment. Undoubtedly the natural order of constructing the sentence THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. n$ would be to relate what happened first, and my surprise at it afterwards. " I was looking at a man walking on the bank of the river, when he suddenly turned about, and plunged in, to my great surprise." But who does not see the miserable way in which the last clause drags behind, and loses all force ? We there- fore take this clause out of its place, and insert it before that to which it applies, and with which it ought to be constructed : we word the sentence thus : " I was looking at a man walking on the bank of the river, when, to my great surprise, he suddenly turned round, and plunged in." I need not further illustrate so common a transposition : I will only say that it produces instances of violation of the supposed rule of arrangement in almost every extant page of good English \ and in common conversation, every day, and all day long. 167. Sometimes these insertions are such obvious interruptions to the construction, that they are marked off by brackets, and it is thus made evident that the sentence is in- tended to flow on as if they did not exist; but far more frequently they are without any such marks, and the common sense of the reader is left to separate them off for himself. 130 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. It is impossible to write lucidly or elegantly without the use of these parenthetical clauses. Care ought of course to be taken that they be not so inserted as to mislead the reader by introducing the possibility of constructing the sentence otherwise than as the writer intended. But at the same time it may be fearlessly stated, that not one of jur best writers has ever been minutely scrupulous on this point : and that there does not exist in our language one great work in prose or in poetry, in which may not be found numerous instances of possible misconstruction arising from this cause. And this has not been from carelessness, but because the writer was intent on expressing his meaning in good manly English, and was not anxious as to the' faults which carping and captious critics might find with his style. Lord Karnes gives a rule that " a circumstance ought never to be placed between two capital members of a sen- tence : or if so placed (I suppose he means, if it be so placed), the first word in the consequent member should be one that cannot connect it with what precedes" 168. Any one on the look out for misun- derstanding may convince himself by trial, that there is hardly a page in any English THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 131 book which will not furnish him with instances of violation of this rule. 169. Let my examples begin at home. One Example* of my censors quoted as faulty in this respect the following sentence, which occurred in these notes : I said that certain persons " fall, from their ignorance, into absurd mistakes." The parenthetical clause here is "from their igno- rance." My censor would amend it thus — " certain persons, in consequence of their igno- rance, fall into absurd mistakes." ISTow this is not what I wanted to say ; at least it is a blundering and roundabout way of expressing it. The purpose is, to bring the fact stated into prominence : and this is done by making the verb "fall " immediately follow its sub- ject, " certain 2 jersons ^ According to the proposed arrangement, it is the fact of what is about to be stated being a consequence of their ignorance, which is put into the place of prominence and emphasis. Very well, then : having stated that the y fall, and being about to say into what, it is convenient, in order to keep the sentence from dragging a compara- tively unimportant clause at its end, to bring in that clause, containing the reason of the fall, immediately after the verb itself. To my mind, the clause, in spite of the V)2 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. possible ambiguity, reads far better with "from" than with "in consequence of" which is too heavy and lumbering. The "possibility of a ludicrous interpretation " which my censor speaks of — the falling from ignorance as a man falls from grace, or falls from virtue, seems to me to be effectually precluded in the mind of any man who happens to remember that ignorance is neither a grace nor a virtue. Really, we do not write for idiots: and it must require, to speak in the genteel lan- guage which some of my. correspondents up- hold, a most abnormal elongation of the auricular appendages, for a reader to have suggested to his 'mind a fall from the sublime height of ignorance down into the depth of a mistake. 170. There are one or two more expres- sions of mine which have been found fault with, well worth noticing for the illustrations which they will furnish on matters connected with our present subject. There has been quoted with disapprobation a sentence of mine in paragraph 2 of these notes, which ori- ginally stood thus : " Would have been broken to pieces in a deep rut, or come to grief in a bottomless swamp." It is said that this can only be filled in thus, " Would have THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 133 been broken to pieces, or would have been come to grief in a bottomless swamp :" " for," it is added, " a part of a complex tense means nothing without the rest of the tense." That is, I suppose, the whole of the auxiliary verbs which belong to the first verb in a sentence must also belong to all other verbs which are coupled to that first verb. Now, is this so 1 I do not find that our best writers observe any such rule. In Deut. vi. 11, Israel is admonished, " When thou shalt have eaten and be full, beware lest thou forget the Lord"'' AYe all know that this means : " When thou shalt have eaten and shalt be full." But, according to my censor, it must be filled up, "When thou shalt have eaten and shalt have be full." 171. You might, by applying to any chapter ^ rom Scrf p in the Bible the same treatment of which I have just been giving examples, show it to be full of ambiguities, which no one in all these generations has ever found out. Take exam- ples from one chapter, Acts xxii. In verse 4, I read, "And I persecuted this way unto the death." This violates the supposed law of arrangement, and falls under the charge of ambiguity. The gospel might, according to these critics, be understood from it to be a 134 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. Grammar of our au- thorised version : way unto death instead of a way unto life. Take again verse 29, "Then they departed from him tvhich should have examined him." Now we all know what this means. It is a more neat way of expressing what would be the regularly arranged sentence, " Then they tvhich should have examined him departed from him" But here again the captious and childish critic may find ambiguity — ■" Then they departed — from him which should have examined him." I must not, however, forget that some of my correspondents find it convenient to depreciate the language and grammar of our authorised version of Scripture.* I would recommend * One gentleman says: "When I was at school, it was the habit of my tutor to give his class specimens of bad English for correction. You will he surprised to hear, that those specimens were chiefly texts from Scripture. They were given with all reverence, never- theless. It was because the readiest examples were to "be had from the Bible, that any were taken from that source at all. Again, Shakspeare is held up by you as a pattern to modern grammarians. With all respect, I cannot understand how any man, with the education that you must have received, could venture even to insinuate such a dogma as this. Any one, with even the insufficient light which Murray affords, may detect numberless errors in every play which Shakspeare has written." This is rich indeed. One can well conceive the sort of English which was taught at my correspon- dent's school. And very much of the degenerate Eng- THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH, 135 them to try the experiment of amending that language. They may then perhaps find that what the translators themselves once said is true. A story is told, that they had a recom- mendation from a correspondent to alter a certain word in their version, giving five suffi- cient reasons for the change. They are said to have replied that they had already con- sidered the matter, and had fifteen sufficient reasons against the change. I think if my correspondents can bring themselves to con- sider reasonably any passage in which the English grammar of our authorised version appears doubtful, they will find themselves in the same predicament as this correspondent of the translators. I have often tried the expe- riment, and this has generally been the result. Mind, our present question is not that of their having adequately translated the Greek, but whether or not they wrote their own language grammatically and clearly. 172. Still, lest I should seem to be a f ^^ m " man of one book only," I will give from spoai our greatest English writer, an instance (from among many) of what would be called llsh of our day is to be traced to such instruction. I should like to have seen some of the tutor's corrected texts. 136 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH, a similar ambiguity. In the "Two Gentle- men of Verona," act. i. scene 2, Julia says : — il hateful hands, to tear such loving words ! Injurious wasps, to feed on such sweet honey, And kill the bees that yield it with your stings." According to my correspondents, we ought to understand this as saying that the bees yield the honey by means of the wasps' stings. Best way of 173. But I conceive we have had enough of proceeding ° in regard of these so-called universal rules. All I would such rules. say on them to my younger readers is, the less you know of them, the less you turn your words right or left to observe them, the better. Write good manly English; explain what you mean, as sensible intelligent men cannot fail to understand it, and then, if the rules be good, you will be sure to have complied with them; and if they be bad, your writing will be a protest against them. See the " Edin- burgh Review," quoted in note on paragraph 189. Real am- 174. It is not difficult to distinguish the biguity. ° sentences whose arrangement I have been defending, from those in which real ambiguity arises. Take the following as examples. I found it in one of the daily papers : — "The most interesting news from Italy is that of THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 137 •the trial of the thieves who robbed the bank of Messrs. Parodi at Genoa, on May 1, 1862, in open daylight, which commenced at Genoa on the 5th." In a letter addressed to another paper, this sentence occurs : " I with my family reside in the parish of Stockton, which consists of my wife and daughters." 175. Xow both these sentences are instruc- tive to us. We may see from them how such ambiguity really arises : viz., by the occurrence, between the antecedent and its pronoun, of another word, which naturally suggests to the mind of the hearer a connection with the fol- io wing pronoun. In both these sentences this is the case. Daylight is said to commence at a certain time, as well as a trial : a parish is said to consist of certain persons, as well as a family. Hence the ambiguity: and not, as is often maintained, from the mere form of the sentence. Any one so disposed may cull sentences out of any English writer, not even excepting Lord Macaulay, and show that they may be understood in a certain number of hundred, or thousand, dif- ferent ways. But the simple answer is, that nobody ever ivill so understand them: and, as has been seen, there are often reasons ^hy the apparently ambiguous form should be 1S8 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. preferred to the strictly perspicuous one, as being more forcible, putting the emphatic word or clause in the proper place, or even as avoiding stiffness and awkwardness of sound. Let your style be idiomatic, simple, natural : aim at satisfying the common sense of those who read and hear, and then, though any one who has no better employment may pick holes in every third sentence, you will have written better English than one who suffers the tyranny of small critics to cramp the expression of his thoughts. Note after a 176. The following note has been sent me, titlie dinner. . . received after a tithe dinner m Devonshire : " Mr. T. presents his compliments to Mr. H., and I have got a hat that is not his, and if he have got a hat that is not yours, no doubt they are the expectant ones." It would defy any analysis to detect the source of confusion here. Perhaps "Ae" and "Ais" refer to some third person, not the Mr. H. who is addressed. But I fear we must look for the clue in the notice, "after a tithe dinner." Evidently, the effects of the banquet had not passed away. Clerical ad- 177. The following clerical advertisement vertise- ment. from a well-known paper has been sent by a correspondent : " A married A.B., now hold- THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. I$9 ing a sole charge, will be disengaged on 17th September. He is an extempore preacher of the doctrines of grace in all their sanctifying influence, and now seeks another." If the hearers of the advertiser fare the same as his readers, I fear the influence, however good, would not be very effectively administered. For it really costs no little ingenuity to discover that it is not another doctrine nor another influence which he wants, but another sole charge. 178. Here is another specimen, in this case Criticism of Fechter's an extract from a criticism of Mr. Fechter's "Hamlet." "Hamlet," in a daily paper: "His whole system consists in playing the character up- side down. He does not ignore tradition, but employs it so far that it enables him to do precisely the reverse. Dress, gait, action, everything, like his pronunciation, are alike unintelligible." This is indeed a delightful specimen of confusion, and obscurity, and bad English. What is 'precisely - the reverse which his employment of tradition enables him to do 1 The reverse of what 1 Is it the reverse of ignoring tradition 1 Does the critic mean, that he employs tradition so far that it enables him not to ignore it 1 Surely this is not the meaning. After feeling about in the 140 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. The same term in different cases. dark some time, we arrive at a sort of suspi- cion, that the meaning must be, that Mr. Fechter employs tradition so far, that it furnishes him with the means of flying in the face of tradition — of contradicting the whole scope and tenor of tradition — of doing, in fact, precisely the reverse of that which an actor would do who scrupulously followed tradition. Bad as this sentence is, it might be matched ten times over any day on the table of a reading-room. 178a. Can we, in an elliptic sentence, use the same term, once only expressed, as doing duty both in the nominative and accusative cases'? The late famous Oxford Declaration of the Clergy described the Canonical Scrip- tures as " not only containing but being the Word of God." The meaning was sufficiently clear : but is the phrase correct 1 I venture to think that it is not, and that it should rather have" been said " not only containing the Word of God, but themselves being the Word of God." Both precision and propriety are thus better secured. 1786. Indeed we may venture to lay it down as a rule, that in sentences where several forms of speech converge, so to speak, on one term, that term is better expressed or THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 141 indicated after each of thern, than reserved to be expressed or indicated once only at the end of all. " He not only requested an in- troduction to, but received with the utmost courtesy, placed himself by the side of, and from that day kept up friendly intercourse with, my young protege," is far better written, "He not only requested an introduction to my young protege, but received him with the utmost courtesy, placed himself by his side, and from that day kept up friendly intercourse with him." In this sentence, the change for the better is obvious : in many others, con- structed in the former manner, it may not be so plain : but that the chauge is for the better, if judiciously made, will 1 think in every case be ultimately apparent. 179. Much has been said by my various Position of adverbs : correspondents about the placing of adverbs "only-" and other qualifying terms* in respect of the verbs or nouns with which they are connected ; and the dispute has turned especially on the situation of the adverb " only" with regard to its verb. "Did you see a man and a woman V* " No ; 1 only saw a man" This is our ordi- nary colloquial English. Is it wrong? Of * See this expression justified below, paragraph 181. 142 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. course the pedant comes down on us, and says, " Yes ; it is wrong. You want your adverb 'only' to qualify, not your act of seeing, but the number of persons whom you saw. The proper opposition to i I only saw a man ' would be ' I saw and heard a man,' or * / saw and touched him. 9 " So far the pedant ; now for common sense. Common sense at once replies, " I beg the pedant's pardon ; he says I didn't want the adverb ' only ' to qualify my act of seeing. I say, I did. For what was the act of seeing ? The two things to be opposed are two acts of seeing. Seeing a man, and seeing a man and a woman. It was not the same sight. I only performed the one ; I did not go further, and perform the other. I only saw a man ; I did not see a man and a woman." Of course the other way is right also, and, strictly speaking, the more technically exact of the two ; but it by no means follows that the more exact ex- pression is also the better English. Very often we cannot have exactness and smooth- ness together. Wherever this is the case, the harsher method of constructing the sentence is, in colloquial English, abandoned, even at the risk of exactness and school rules. The adverb "only" in many sentences where THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. Ill strictly speaking it ought to follow its verb and to limit the objects of the verb, is in good English placed before the verb. 180. Let us take an example of this from the great storehouse of good English, our authorised version of the Scriptures. In Ps. lxii. 4, we read, u They only consult to cast him down from his excellency;" i.e., their consultation is on one subject only, how to cast him down. See also Matt. xiv. 36. 181. The account of the matter before us is just this : I may use my adverb "only" where two things are spoken of which are affected by the same action, to qualify the one as distinguished from the other, or I may, if I will, separate the action into two parts, the one having regard to the one thing acted on, and the other having regard to the other ; and I may make use of my adverb to qualify one part of the action as compared with the other. If I say, " / will state only one thing more" I mean, that being about to state, I will confine that action to one thing and not extend it to any more ; if I say, " I will only state one tiling more" I mean that all I will do is, to make one statement, not more. But our gentlemen with their rules never look H4 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. aoout to see whether usage is not justified ; they find a sentence not arranged as their books say it ought to be, and it is instantly set down as wrong, in spite of the common sense and practice of all England being against them, "both." 182. This last-mentioned adverb is not the only word whose position is thus questioned : "both" is another. This word, we are told, should always be placed strictly before the former of the words to which it belongs in the sentence, not before the verb or noun which applies equally to the two. Thus, if I say " They broke dovm both the door of the stable and of the cellar" I am charged with having violated the rules of good English. The pedant would have it, " They broke down the door both of the stable and of the cellar," Now, to my mind, the difference between these two sentences is, that the former is plain collo- quial English : the latter is harsh and cramped, and could not have been written by a sensible man, but only by a man who thought less about conveying the sense of what he said, than about the rules by which his expression should be regulated. But let us see how the great masters of our English tongue wrote. Let us balance Shakspeare THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 145 against Lindley Murray. In the " Tempest," act i. scene 2, Prospero tells Miranda that the usurping Duke of Milan, her uncle, " Having both the key Of officer and office, set all hearts i' th' stats To what tune pleased his ear." This is, of course, a clear violation of the rule ; according to which the words ought to have run, " having the key of loth officer and office" 183. As connected with the question of the "The three x first Gos- arrangement of words, I may mention that I P els -' have been in controversy, first and last, with several people, 45 " while I have been engaged on my edition of the Greek Testament, about the expression " the three first Gospels" My correspondents invariably maintain that this expression, which I always use, must be an oversight, and that I ought to say " the first three Gospels" I should like to argue this out ; and the present seems a good oppor- tunity for doing so. 184. There are Four Gospels, as we all know. And such is the distinctive character of the three which are placed first, as com- pared with the one which is placed last, that it often becomes necessary to speak of tha * See paragraph 318a, below. L U6 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. three, and the one, in two separate classes. It is in doing so that I say " the three first Gospels" and my correspondents want me to say " the first three Gospels." Which of the two is right ? or, if both are right, which of the two is the better 1 185. My view is this. The whole number is divided into two classes : the first class, and the last class. To the former of these belong three : to the latter belongs one. There are three that are ranged under the description " first : " and there is one that is ranged under the description " last." Just in this way are the two classes spoken of in that saying of our Lord, " There are last which shall be first, and there are first which shall be last." (Luke xiii. 30.) It is not necessary that one only should be spoken of as first, and one only as last, as this quotation shows. The whole class is first, as compared with the whole other class which is last. Of twelve persons I may make two classes, and speak of the five first, and the seven last. This is a correct and logical way of speaking. The opposition between the two classes is as strict and complete, as when I say that of twelve men there are five tall and seven short. If then I wish to divide twelve men into two THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. U" classes, I say, and I maintain I say rightly, the five first and the seven last. If I wish to divide the four Gospels into two classes, I say, and maintain I say rightly, the three first Gospels, and the last Gospel. 186. Now let us try the correctness of the other expression, " the first three Gospels" Used in common talk, it would of course convey the same idea a3 the other. But that is not our present question. Our question is, which of the two is \hQ more precise and correct 1 When I say " the first three" the idea presented to the mind is, that I am going to speak of another three, which shall be set in contrast to them. The proper oppo- sition to u a tall man" is " a short man" not a short stick. When therefore I take twelve men, and dividing them into two classes, speak of the tall five and the short seven, I may be intelligible, but I certainly am not speaking precisely nor properly. And so when I take four Gospels, and, dividing them into two classes, speak of " the first three" and " the last one,' 3 I may be complying with technical rules, liar. I maintain that I am not complying with the requirements of common sense, and therefore neither with those of good English, L 2 148 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 187. A correspondent writes : — "As to the 1 three first Gospels? your explanation is clear. But would it be right to say, 'in the three ■first tveeJcs of the quarter, the receipts were below the average 1 ' and if not, why not 1 " In my opinion, it would be perfectly right to speak thus ; and in the particular instance given, " the three first weeks " would be better than " the first three weeks," for another reason ; that " three weeks " being a not unusual designation of the portion of time extending over three weeks, the expres- sion, "the first three weeks" would fail to direct the attention to the receipts week by week, which appears to be the desire of the speaker. Confused 188. Fault has been found with me by some use of J || he l' and of my correspondents and censors, for the confused use, as they are pleased to regard it, of the personal pronouns "he" and "it." Now here is another matter on which they and I are entirely at issue. A rule is cited from Dr. Campbell, that " wherever the pro- noun ( he ' will be ambiguous, because two or more males happen to be mentioned in the same clause of a sentence, we ought always to give another turn to the expression, -or to use the noun itself and not the pronoun : for THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 149 when the repetition of a word is necessary, it is not offensive. The translators of the Bible/' continues Dr. C, "have often judi- ciously used this method : I say judiciously, oecause though the other method be on some occasions preferable, yet, by attempting the other they would have run a much greater risk of destroying " (he means, " a much greater risk, namely, that of destroying ") " that beau- tiful simplicity which is an eminent charac- teristic of Holy Writ. I shall take an instance from the speech of Judah to his brother Joseph in Egypt : ' We said to my lord, the lad can- not leave his father, for if he should leave his father, his father would die. ? The words ' his father ' are in this short verse thrice repeated, and yet are not disagreeable, as they contri- bute to perspicuity. Had. the last part of the sentence run thus : ' if he should leave his father he would die,' it would not have ap- peared from the expression whether it was the child or the parent that would die." 189. So far Dr. Campbell, "Philosophy of Pdietoric." Now it so happens, that although Dr. Campbell has been able to find an instance to illustrate his point, this is a matter about which the translators of the Bible, and indeed the best of our English writers, care very 150 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. little; of this, numerous instances might be produced out of our English Bible. I will content myself with two : the first from 2 Kings i. 9 : " Then the king sent unto him a captain of fifty with his fiftj : and he went up to him : and behold, he sat on the top of an hill." To common sense it is plain enough who is meant in each case by he and him, and I don't suppose a mistake was ever mad« about it : but the sentence is in direct viola- tion of Dr. Campbell's rule. Again, in Luke xix. 3, 4, we read of Zaccheus : "And he sought to see Jesus who he was ; and could not for the press, because he was little of stature. And he ran before, and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him : for he was to pass that way." Now here you see the pronouns "he" and "him" are used indiscri- minately, sometimes of our Lord, sometimes of Zaccheus : and yet every one knows to whom to apply each of them.- The caviller might find ambiguity over and over again ; and accordingly one of my censors says of this very example, " you surely do not defend the construction of these sentences 1 " All I can tell him is, they run thus in the original : and this, our translators very well knew, is not a matter of the grammar of our language, THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH .151 but of all languages, belonging in fact to the laws of human thought. As to the transla- tors having, as Dr. Campbell says, often judi- ciously used the other method, the expression is peculiarly unfortunate. Our translators rendered most commonly what they found in the original, and very rarely indeed would have thought of repeating the noun where the original had the pronoun. In the ex- ample from Genesis, it would ha >*e been better if they had not repeated the words "his father" the third time, but had left the sentence ambiguous, as I believe it is in the original Hebrew.* * The Edinburgh Reviewer (July, 1864), in treating with just contempt the objections of these eager dis- coverers of ambiguities, makes the following very sensible remarks : ' ' If a man writes in a way which cannot be misunderstood by a reader of common candour and intel- ligence, he has done all, as regards clearness, that can be expected of him. To attempt more is to ask of lan- guage more than language can perform : the consequences of attempting it any one may see who will spend an hour with the Statutes at large. Jack was very respectful to Tom, and always took off his hat when he met him. Jack was very rude to Tom, and always knocked off his hat when he met him. Will any one pretend that either of these sentences is ambiguous in meaning, or unidiomatic in expression ? Yet critics of the class now before us are bound to contend that Jack showed iais respect by taking off Tom's hat, or else that he showed his rudeness by knocking off his own. It is use- :W THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. I;?? 8 » ^90. What are we to think of the question, govern an whether " than " does or does not govern an accusative © case? accusative case 1 " than I : " " than me : " which is right? My readers will probably answer without hesitation, the former. But is the latter so certainly wrong? We are accustomed to hear it stigmatised as being so ) but I think, erroneously. Milton writes, " Paradise Lost," ii. 299, Which when Beelzebub perceived, than whom, Satan except, none higher sat. And thus- every one of us would speak : a than who" would be intolerable. And this seems to settle the question. Two ways of 191. The fact is, that there are two ways of less to multiply examples ; no book was ever written that could stand a hostile examination in this spirit : and one that could stand it would be totally unreadable. ,, I will add a story serving to show the usefulness, on certain occasions, of these penny-wise grammarians. The churchwardens of a parish near Bristol, having reason to make a presentation to the Bishop, met to draw it up. Churchwarden A brought the draft, be- ginning, " My Lord . . ." But Churchwarden B was a man of education, with the rules of grammar ever on his tongue. "My" was of course incorrect, where the " presenters" were two persons. The presentation, he maintained, ought to be corrected ; and it narrowly escaped going up to the Bishop addressed to him as "Our Lord. . ." THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 153 constructing a clause with a comparative and constructing " than." You may say either " than I" or " than me" If you say the former, you use what is called an elliptical expression : i.e., an expression in which something is left out ; — and that something is the verb " am" u He is wiser than I," being filled out, would be, " He is wiser than I am : " " He is wiser than me," is the direct and complete construc- tion. The difference between the -two usages seems to be this : and it is curiously confirma- tive of what has been sometimes observed, that men in ordinary converse shrink, in cer- tain cases, from the use of the bare nominative of the personal pronoun. Where solemnity is required, the construction in the nomina- tive is used. Our Lord's words will occur to us (John xiv. 28), "My Father is greater than I." But in ordinary conversation this construction is generally avoided, as sounding too weighty and formal. In colloquial talk we commonly say either "He is older than me," or perhaps more frequently, " He is older than I am." And so with the other personal pronouns, he, slie, we, and they. Still it is urged that " than me " cannot be right : or can only be right when " me " is necessarily in government, as in the sentence, 154 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. " He likes you better than me." I can do no more in reply, than nrge the necessity of saying, " than whom," to show that " than " can and does really govern an objective case by its own power, and therefore may govern "me," or "him," or "her," or "them," if we choose so to construct the sentence. " it is me. " . 192. The mention of the nominative and accusative of the personal pronoun seems not inaptly to introduce a discussion of the well- known and much controverted phrase, " It is . me." Now this is an expression which every one uses. Grammarians (of the smaller or- der) protest : schoolmasters (of the lower kind) prohibit and chastise ; but English men, women, and children go on saying it, and will go on saying it as long as the English language is spoken. Here is a phe- nomenon worth accounting for. " Not at all so," say our censors : "don't trouble yourself about it ; it is a mere vulgarism. Leave it off yourself, and try to persuade every one else to leave it off." 193. But, my good censors, I cannot. I did what I could. I wrote a letter inviting the chief of you to come to Canterbury and hear my third lecture. I wrote in some fear and trembling. All my adverbs were (what THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 155 I should call) misplaced, that I might not offend him. But at last, I was obliged to transgress, in spite of my good resolutions. I was promising to meet him at the station, and I was going to write : " if you see on the platform ' an old party in a shovel/ that will be I." But my pen refused to sanction (to endorse, I believe I ought to say, but I cannot) the construction. " That will he me " came from it. in spite, as I said, of my re- solve of the best possible behaviour.* 194. Let us see what a real grammarian Dr. La- ° tham's says on the matter : one who does not lay opinion, down rules only, but is anxious to ascer- tain on what usages are founded. Dr. La- tham, in his admirable " History of the English Language," p. 586, says, " We may „ . . . call the word me a secondary nomina- tive : inasmuch as such phrases as it is me = it is I, are common. To call such expres- * Of course it will be obvious, that in the indepen- dently constructed clause "that will be me (or I)," no difference whatever in the case of the personal pronoun can be made by its previous construction in the sentence. The mention of such an idea needs an apology : but it has been actually maintained that the accusative is right in this clause, because the personal pronoun repre- sents a noun governed by the verb "see" : "that will be me [you will see]." 156 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. sions incorrect English, is to assume the point. No one says that Jest moi is bad French, and c'est je is good. The fact is that, with us, the whole question is a question of degree. Has or has not the custom been sufficiently prevalent to have transferred the forms me, ye, and you, from one case to another 1 Or perhaps we may say, is there any real custom at all in favour of 7", except so far as the grammarians have made one ? It is clear that the French analogy is against it. It is also clear that the personal pronoun as a predicate may be in a different analogy from the personal pronoun as a subject." 19o. And in another place, p. 584, he says : "What if the current objections to Huch expressions as it is me (which the ordi- nary grammarians would change into it is 7), be unfounded, or rather founded upon the ignorance of this difference (the difference between the use of the pronoun as subject and as predicate) % That the present writer defends this (so-called) vulgarism may be seen elsewhere. It may be seen elsewhere, that he finds nothing worse in it than a Frenchman finds in tfest moi, where, accord- ing to the English dogma, c?est je would be THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. !£7 the right expression. Both constructions, the English and the French, are predicative : and when constructions are predicative, a change is what we must expect rather than be surprised at." 196. The account which Dr. Latham has here given, is doubtless the right one. There is a disposition, when the personal pronoun is used predicatively, to put it into the accusa- tive case. That this is more prevalent in the pronoun of the first person singular than in the others, may perhaps arise from the fact which Dr. Latham has elsewhere established, that me is not the proper, but only the adopted accusative of 7, being in fact a dis- tinct and independent form of the personal pronoun. But, it may fairly be asked, whence arises this disposition to shrink from the use of the nominative case in the predicate ? For it does not apply to all instances where the pronoun is predicative. " He said unto them, it is I : be not afraid." This is a capital instance : for it shows us at once why the nominative should be sometimes used. The Majesty of the Speaker here, and His purpose of re-assuring the disciples by the assertion that it was none other than Himself, at once point out to us the case in which it would be 168 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. proper for the nominative, and not the accu- sative, to be used.* "it is him," 197. Dr. Latham goes on to sav, after the "it is her." first of my two citations, p. 587, " At the same time it must be observed, that the ex- pression, it is me = it is I, will not justify the use of it is him, it is her = it is he, and it is she. Me, ye, you, are what may be called indifferent forms, i.e., nominative as much as accusative, and accusative as much as nomi- native. Him and her, on the other hand, are not indifferent. The -m and -r are re- spectively the signs of cases other than the nominative.'* 198. But is this quite consistent with the idea that the categorical use of the pronoun in the predicate may be different from that of the same pronoun as a subject ? Me may not have been the original accusative case of /; but it is unquestionably the adopted ac- cusative, in constant use as such. Where lies the difference, grammatically, between it is me, and it is him, or it is her, as far as present usage is concerned 1 It seems to me that, if we are prepared to defend the one, we ought in consistency also to defend the other. When, * The predicate in the question, "Is it I?" (Matt, xx vi. 22), is hardly perhaps a case in point. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. I>8 in the Ingoldsby legend, the monks of Eheims saw the poor anathematised jackdaw appear, " Eegardless of grammar, they cried out, 1 That's him !'" And I fear we must show an equal disregard of what ordinarily passes for grammar, if we would give a correct account of the prevalent usages of our language.* 199. There is one form of construction which is sometimes regarded as coming under the present question, but with which, in fact, it is not concerned. I mean that occurring in such phrases as "Yon didn't know it to be me," " I suspected it to be Mm." In these, the accusative cases are simply in government, and nominatives would be altogether un- grammatical. The verb substantive takes the same case after it as went before it. It is in fact, in these sentences, equivalent to as, or as being. " You didnt know it to be I," would be equivalent to " you didn't recog- nise it as I," which of course would be wrong. 199a. A correspondent asks me to notice ic a « you and , . , I," accu- usage now becoming prevalent among persons sative. who ought to know better : viz. that of ' yo i and 1/ after prepositions governing the accu- sative." He gives an instance from " Both- well," a poem by Professor Aytoun, p. 199 : * See note F, at the ena of the volume. IfO THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. " But it were vain for you and I In single fight our strength to try." On the impropriety of this there can of course be only one opinion. " Perhaps,'* my correspondent adds, " Professor Aytoun may have read ' John Gilpin,' &#*(£, innocent himself of cockney isms, may have supposed that it is good English to say * On horseback after we.' " "a* thee." 1996. When Thomson, in "Kule Britannia/' wrote " The nations not so blest as thee," was he writing correct English ? I venture to think he was. As, like than, is capable of being used in two distinct constructions, the elliptic, #*i the complete. " As thou" is the elliptic construction, requiring the verb sub- stantive for its completion, "as thou art." 61 As thee," like " than whom," is the complete construction, in which the conjunction of com- parison has a quasi-prepositional force, and governs the pronoun in the objective case. The construction cited from Sir Walter Scott by one of my critics as faulty, ' ; Yet oft in Holy Writ we see Even such weak minister as me May the oppressor bruise," THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 161 is perfectly correct : not, it is true, the usual form of expression, or the more elegant, but one to which, on purely grammatical grounds, there is no objection. The attempt which my critic makes to convict it of error by assuming it to be the elliptical form, such . . . as me (am), only shows how much some of us need reminding of the first principles of the syntax of our language. 200. We have said something of superfluous Use of "of.* prepositions : let us remark on the use of pre- positions themselves. The preposition " of" is sometimes hardly dealt with. When I read in an article in the Times, on a late annexation, " What can the Emperor possibly want of these provinces of Savoy V I saw at once that the writer must be a native of the midland counties, where your friends complain that you have not "called of them of a long time" Now in this case it is not the expression, but the sense meant to be conveyed by it, that is objectionable. "What can the Emperor want of these provinces 1 " is very good English, if we mean "What request has he to make of these provinces'?" But if we mean, as the Times writer evidently did, "What does he want with the provinces 1 " i.e., " What need has he of them 1 " then it is a vulgarism. M sentences. 152 THE QUEENS Eti^LISH. 201. There is a peculiar use of prepositions, which is allowable in moderation, but must not be too often resorted to. It is the placing them at the end of a sentence, as I have just done in the words "resorted to ;" as is done in the command, " Let not your good be evil spoken of ; " and continually in our discourse and writing. Preposi- 202. The account to be given of this is, that end of the preposition, which the verb usually takes after it, is regarded as forming a part of the word itself. To speak of, to resort to, are hardly verbs and prepositions, but form in each case almost one word. But let us go on. " Where do you come from 1 " is the only way of putting that inquiry. " Whence come you 1 " is of course pedantic, though accurate. "Where are you going to?" is exactly like the other question, but here we usually drop the "to" merely because the adverb of rest " where," has come to be used for the adverb of motion " whither" and therefore the "to" is not wanted. If a man chooses, as West-country men mostly do, to say " Where are you going to 1 " he does not violate propriety, though he does violate custom. But let us go further still. Going to has not only a local, it has also a mental THE QUEER'S ENGLISH. 163 meaning, being equivalent to intending in the mind. And this usage rests on exactly the same basis as the other. The "to" of the in- finitive mood is precisely the same preposi- tion as the " to " of motion towards a place. " Were you going to do it 1 " simply means "Were you, in your mental intention, ap- proaching the doing of it ] " And the proper conversational answer to such a question is, " I was going to," or " I was not going to," as the case may be j not " I was going," or " I was not going," inasmuch as the mere verb to go does not express any mental intention. I know, in saying this, that I am at variance with the rules taught at very respectable institutions for enabling young ladies to talk unlike their elders ; but this I cannot help ; and I fear this is an offence of which I have been, and yet may be, very often guilty. 203. This kind of colloquial abbreviation of the infinitive comprehends several more phrases in common use, and often similarly objected to, e.g., "ought to" and "ought not to" "neglect to" (fee, some of them not very elegant, but all quite unobjectionable on the score of grammar. These abbreviations are very common in the West of England, M 2 161 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. and are there carried further than any reason will allow. 20 4. In many cases of this kind we have a choice whether the preposition shall precede or follow the object of the sentence. Thus I may say, " the man to whom I had written" or " the man ivhom I had written to" In this particular instance, the former is the more elegant, and would usually be said : but this is not always so ; e.g., " You re the man I wanted to have some talk with" would always be said \ not, " Youre the man with ivhom I wanted to have some talk? which would sound stilted and pedantic. Present, 205. The next thing I shall mention, not perfect for its own sake, but as a specimen of the kind of criticism which I am often meeting with, and as instructive to those who wish to be critics of other men's language. I have said that " Dr. Donne preaches" so and so. My correspondent takes exception to this, and tells me that Dr. Donne has been dead some two hundred years, and therefore I ought to say Dr. Donne preached, and not preaches. This may seem mere trifling : but it is worth while to notice, that we speak thus, in the present tense, of writings permanently placed on record. Their authors, being dead, yet THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 165 speak to us. It would be affected and unusual to speak otherwise of things cited from books. If we use the past tense at all, it is not the indefinite, but the perfect, which also conveys the idea of a living and acting even now. I should say, " Dr. Donne has explained this text thus or thus ; " not " Dr. Donne explained this text thus or thus." This latter sentence would bear a different meaning. If I say, " Livy ivrites" or " Livy has written, so and so," I imply that the book containing the incident is now extant. But if I say, "Livy wrote so and so," I should naturally be taken to be speaking of something reported as having been written in one of the books of his history which have been lost. You may say of a sick man yet living, "He has lost much strength during the week." But the moment he is dead, you can no longer thus speak : you must say, "He lost much strength daring the week." If I say, " I have seen Wales twice," I carry the period during which my assertion is true through my whole life down to the present time. If I say, " I saw Wales twice," my words simply refer to the fact, and the period to which they refer is understood to have terminated. I mean, in my youth, or when I was in Cheshire, or the like. Some- 168 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. times the difference between the two tenses may convey an interesting moral distinction. If I say, " My father left me an injunction to do this or that," I leave the way open to say, " but now circumstances have changed, and I find another course more advisable : " if I say " My father has left me an injunction to do this or that," I imply that I am at this mo- ment obeying, and mean to obey, that injunc- tion. The perfect tense is in fact a present, relating to the effect, at the present time, of some act done in the past.* Their con- 206. An important difference in meaning is sometimes made by the wrong or careless use of one of these tenses for the other. An instance of this occurs in the English version of the Bible in the beginning of Acts xix. There we read, in the original, that St. Paul finding certain disciples at Ephesus, asked them, "Did ye receive the Holy Ghost when ye believed — ■ when ye first became believers ? " To this they answered, "We did not so much as hear whether there were any Holy Ghost." * The confusion between these tenses is sometimes curious. "I call," says an Irish correspondent, " at the office of a gentleman who is expected every minute, and am told, 'He didn't come to-day,' or, * He didn't come yet.'" THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 267 On which St. Paul asked them, "Unto what then were ye baptized 1 " They replied, " Unto the baptism of John." Then he ex- plained to them that John's baptism, being only a baptism of repentance, did not bring with it the gift of the Holy Ghost. In this account, all is clear. But the English version, by an unfortunate mistake, has rendered the narrative unintelligible. It has made St. Paul ask the converts, " Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed]" So far, indeed, all would be clear; for they certainly had not, though this does not represent what was said by the Apostle. But it is their answer which obscures the history. " We have not so much as heard," they are made to say, "whether there be any Holy Ghost." Strange indeed, that these disciples, who had probably been for years in the Church, should during that time, and up to the time when St. Paul spoke, never have heard of the existence of the Holy Spirit. Bender the words accu- rately, and all is clear. 207. I am now going to speak of a combina- " wa "y«m nHL- when used in the first person. But how when used in the second % Let us take " You ivill." " You will " is used when speaking to ano- ther person of a matter entirely out of the speaker's power and jurisdiction. " You ivill be twenty -one next Tuesday" " If you climb that ladder you ivill fall." This is the ordi- nary use. Here again there is an exception, which I cannot well treat till I have spoken of " You shall." 213. " You shall" or "You shall not" is "you shall." said to another, when the will of the speaker compels that which is spoken of. " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." " Thou shalt not steal." 172 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. Exceptions. 214. The exceptions to both these usages may be stated thus, and they are nearly related to that of which I spoke when on the first person. A master writes to his servant, " On the receipt of this you will go" or " you will please to go? " to such a place." This is treating the obedience of the servant as a matter of certainty, sure to follow of course on his lord's command. The exception in the use of " shall " is when we say, for in- stance, u If you look through History, you shall find that it has always been so" and the ac- count of it seems to be, that the speaker feels as perfect a certainty of the result, as if it were not contingent, but depended only on his absolute command. « wm "and 215. It remains that we consider the words "shall in the third u w m » anc [ « ^ii » as applied in the third person. x *■ person; said of persons and things spoken about. And here, what has already been said will be a sufficient guide in ordinary cases. For all announcements of common events foreseen in the future, " will " is the word to be used. " I think it will rain before night" " To-morroiv will be old May-day." We may sometimes use " shall," but it can only be in cases where our own will, or choice, or power, exercises some influence over THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 173 the events spoken of : as for instance, " The sun shall not set to-night before I find out this matter?' "Next Tuesday shall be the day." Notice, you would not say, " Next Tuesday shall be my birthday : " you must say, " Next Tuesday vnll be my birthday : " because that is a matter oyer which you have no control : but the Queen might say, "Next Tuesday shall be my birthday : " because she would mean, " shall be kept as my birthday" a mat- ter over which she has control. 216. There are some very delicate and instances of almost in- curious cases of the almost indifferent usage different usage. of the two auxiliary verbs. Take this one, " If he vAll look, he will find it to be so." Here we use the first " will " in the sense of " choose to : " " If he please to look" But the second has its mere future use : " he will find that it is so." Here however we might use, though it would be somewhat pedantic Eng- lish, the word " shall " in both members of the sentence : u If he shall look, he shall find it to be so" and then the former " shcdl n would be in the sense of a mere future, and the second in that sense of absolute certainty, " I will undertake that he shcdl find" of which I spoke just now. This sentence might in fact be correctly said in four different ways : 174 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. If ho will look, he will find : If he shall look, he shall find : If he will look, he shall find : If he shall look, he will find. I may mention that the almost uniform use of cc shall" as applied to future events and to persons concerned in them, is reserved for the prophetic language of the Bible, as spoken by One whose will is supreme and who has all under his control. 217. There are certain other cases in which we may say either "will" or "shall" In reporting what another said, or what one said one's self, we may say, " lie told me he should go up to town to morrow and settle it ;" or we may say, " He told me he ivould go up to toivn" &c. This arises from the possibility, already noticed, of using either word in speaking in the first person. Ambiguity. 218. Sometimes an ambiguity arises from the fact that " ivill " and " ivould " either may convey the idea of inclination of the will, or may point to a mere future event. We have two notable instances in the English version of the New Testament. Our Lord says to the Jews (John v. 40), " Ye ivill not come to me that ye might have life?'' Is He merely an- nouncing a fact, or is He speaking of the THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 175 bent and inclination of their minds 1 We consult the original, and the question is at once answered What our Lord says, is this : " Ye are not wiLUng" " ye have no mind" " to come, to me that ye might have life." 219. Again (Matt. xi. 27). "Xomanknow- eih the Father save the Son, and he to whomso- ever the Son will reveal Him" Is this " ivill" a mere auxiliary for the future meaning, or does it convey the idea of exercise of will ? Here again the original sets us right in a moment. It is, "he to whom the Son is minded to reveal Him." 220. Let us take a still more remarkable case. The Pharisees said to our Lord (Luke xiii. 31), " Get thee hence, for Herod will kill thee." This seems a mere future, and I have no doubt English readers universally regard it as such : but the original is " Herod wishes," "is minded," "to kill thee." 221. The sense of duty conveyed by " should " sometimes causes ambiguity. Thus we have (Matt. xxvi. 35), " Though I should die with thee, yet will I not deny thee." This, to the mere English reader, only conveys the sense, " Even if it should happen that I should die ivith thee" But on consulting the original we find we should be wrong in seem," "it should seem." 176 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. thus understanding it. It is " Even if it be necessary for me to die with thee" — and would have been better rendered, " Even if I must die with thee." But in another clause (John xxi. 19), " This spake Ee > signifying by what death he should glorify God" the (i should" does not represent any necessity, but the mere future, "it would 222. Which is right, (i it would seem" or " it should seem " 1 asks a Scottish corre- spondent. I believe both are right, but with slightly differing meanings. Both, be it observed, are expressions of very slight and qualified assent. The former, " it would seem" implies, "we are told that if we were to weigh all that is to be said, we should come to such or such a conclusion." The . latter, "it should seem," conveys the meaning, with perhaps a slightly ironical tinge, that we are required to believe so and so. The Germans use their "soil" in reporting the conclusions or belief of others, in nearly the same sense. Confusion of 223. Aii aniusing instance of the confusion "will." of shall and will was repeated to me by another Scottish correspondent. A young men's " Institute for Discussion and Self- improvement " is reported in a Scottish pro- THE QUEEN' 8 ENGLISH. 177 vincial paper to have met, and discussed the question, "Shall the material universe be destroyed ? " My correspondent supposes that the decision was in the negative : or that if it was in the affirmative, the society can- not have proceeded to carry its resolution into effect. 224. I believe Dr. Latham, in his " His- Dr. La- tham's tory of the English Language," was the first account of to observe that the confusion in such cases is more apparent than real. The Englishman and the Scotchman mean the same thing, but express it differently. We may say either, "the material universe will he destroyed," ex- pressing merely something which will happen some day in the future : or we may say " the material universe shall be destroyed," in which caSe we put more solemnity and emphasis into our announcement, and treat it as some- thing inevitable, pronouncing almost as if we were exercising our own will in the mat- ter. When we turn the assertion into a question, ive say, " Will the material universe be destroyed ? " the Scotchman says, " Shall the material universe be destroyed ] " He means to put, as a question, what we meant, when we used shall in the assertion. But be it observed, that in turning the proposition N J 78 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH, into a question, the shall assumes a ludicrous form, because of the deliberative aspect given to the sentence; and it looks as if the person putting the question had the option whether he would destroy the universe or not. A case in 225. Five years ago I was visiting Loch which it Jo & faiL mS to M aree ; m Ross-shire, with my family. We took a " trap " from the comfortable inn at Kinloch-Ewe, and lunched and sketched on the cliffs, about twelve miles down the lake. When our time was nearly up, our Highland driver appeared in the distance, shouting, "Will I yauk him?" which, being interpreted, meant to say, " Shall I harness the pony ? " I hardly see how even Dr. Latham's explana- tion will account for the usage here.* * I venture to insert the following remarks of a very- intelligent Irish correspondent : — " Your rules for the use of 'shall' and 'wilV seem to me, as far as they go, the most simple and satisfactory I have ever read. But I observe : — "I. No rule is laid down for the use of these words in interrogation. In Ireland the tendency is to make use of ' will' in every case. I have collected several examples from English writers which seem to me to suggest the following rules : — " ' Will you?' is a request. "' Shall you? 1 a simple question as to the future event. " * Will he? 9 a simple question. " 'Shall he ?* means ' do you wish that he shall.' THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 179 226. We often find persons using super- Use of superfluous fluous conjunctions or prepositions in their particles— J r r "doubt but that." " * Will IV is always incorrect. Ml Shall IV has two meanings: 1st, it asks the simple question as to the future event, v.g., l shall I be of age next month V 2nd, it asks, * do you wish that / shall V v.g., 'shall I call you friend V "II. You say nothing of the use of these words in the secondary clauses of such sentences as the following : " ' He hopes that he shall not be thought,' &c. ' ' ' He walked into a church knowing well he should find, ' &c. " Phrases of this kind occur very frequently, and, I think, almost all my countrymen would be found to use will and zuould instead of shall and should. I may add that, as it seems to me nothing to be found in your book would set them right on this point, I would propose the following principle for such cases : — If we report in our own words what another has said, or thought, or known, or felt, we must use that verb which he would have used if, speaking in the first person, he had himself related the circum stance. ' ' III. There is to be found almost every day in the Times (second column) a curious illustration of the dis- tinction between 'shall' and 'will.' When a person advertises for a lost article we sometimes read, ' If any person brings, &c, he shall be rewarded :' sometimes we find, ' a reward will be given.' Now here your rules seem to be at fault. The future event, namely, the giving of the reward, is dependent upon the will of the speaker in the latter case as well as in the former. If the rule hold good, therefore, we might say, ' A reward shall be given.' Yet this is never said." [This seems to fall under the list of exceptions men- tioned in paragraph 214 ; where the result is so spoken of as not contingent but certain, l ' A reward shall be N 2 180 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. usual talk. Two cases are more frequent than others. One is the use of but after the verb to doubt. " I do not doubt but that he will come," is both found in print and heard in conversation. The " but " is wholly un- necessary, and a vulgarism. " I do not doubt that he will come," expresses precisely the same thing, and should always be used. "onto." 227. The same may be said of the ex- pression on to. "The cat jumped on to the chair ; " the to being wholly unneecled, and never used by any careful writer or speaker. Defence 22S. Few points mentioned in these "notes" ©f it. x have provoked so much rejoinder as this repro- bation of "on toy It seems, to judge by its many defenders, -to be an especial favourite. The plea usually set up for it is, that " on " with- out " to " does not sufficiently express motion : that " the cat jumped on the chair " would imply merely that the cat, being on the chair already, there jumped. To this I have but one answer ; that no doubt . the words may mean this, to one who is disposed to invent meanings for them ; but that they do mean given, " is the subjective dictum of him who has so deter- mined : "a reward will be given," is the objective future certainty, the determination being lost sight of.] THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 181 this, is surely not true. "The cat jumped on the table, and began to lap the milk." Who vrould ever misunderstand this ? Take an in- cident of one's schoolboy long walks. "Coach- man, I'm very tired, and I shall be late in ; but I've got no money in my pocket." "All right, my lad, jump on the box." Was there ever a schoolboy who would fail to com- prehend this ? * 229. One correspondent asks why "on to" "^££ to « is not as good English as "into?" I answer, because "on" is ordinarily a preposition of motion as well as of rest, whereas "in" is almost entirely a preposition of rest. To fall on, to light on, and the like, are very com- mon • and we are thus prepared for the use of on to signify motion without an additional preposition. 229a. It will be manifest, that the iuxta- "Riding ' J on to." position of " on" and " to" in such a sentence * Since the publication of the first edition, several correspondents have again vehemently controverted the opinion here expressed : and I have been even urged to withdraw it and confess myself in the wrong. I am afraid, therefore, that my correspondents will think me very obstinate for still maintaining my view : and say- ing, that I cannot conceive what signification of motion toiuards is gained by the vulgarism •" on to" which is not already conveyed by "on," or at all events by " upon" * upon. 132 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. as this, " she continued holding on to the door of the carriage,'' is not an example within the scope of these remarks. The " on" in this case belongs to the verb : and "holding -on to" is equivalent to "clinging to." "on "and 230. How do our usages of "on" and "upon " differ 1 In the very few cases where we recognise any difference, the question may be answered by observing the composition of the latter word. It almost always, as the dictionaries observe, " implies some sub- stratum ; " something that underlies the thing spoken of. But then so does also the shorter preposition in most cases. There is hardly an instance to be found of which it could positively be said, that we may use the one preposition and may not use the other. Perhaps we may find one, when we say that a diver, describing his trip beneath the water, would hardly report that he "saw several rusty guns lying upon the bottom," but " ly- ing on the bottom." 231. A correspondent sends me what he supposes to be an account of the distinction, but I believe it to be an erroneous one. " I would (should ?) say, ' upon a tower ; ' on the same principle, I would (should?) say, 6 on a marsh.' There would, indeed, be no THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 183 harm in saying ' on a tower ; ' but there would be an impropriety in saying 'upon a marsh \ ' for ap> whether we are attentive or inattentive, whether we have been a thousand times wrong or ne\rer, means somewhat high, somewhat to which we ascend. I should speak correctly if I said, ' Dr. Johnson flew upon me : ' incorrectly, if I said, ' he fell upon me.'" 232. The error here seems to me to be in referring the height indicated by up to the motion previous to, not to the position indi- cated by, the action spoken of. We perhaps cannot say " upon the bottom ; " not how- ever because we do not rise to get there, but because the bottom, being of necessity the lowest point, has nothing beneath it with reference to which it is high. And as to my correspondent's last dictum, that a he fell upon me" would be incorrect, let him look at 1 Kings ii. 25, 34, 46, in which places it is said of Adonijah, Joab, and Shimei, respec- tively, that Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, "fell upon him that he died." 233. The expression "to open up/ 9 is a To "open up." very favourite one with our newspapers. It may have, as several of my correspondents insist, a certain meaning of its own, though 184 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. I am even now unable to see, in any case where I have found it, why the simple word "open" would not be better. The meaning which it is designed to convey, seems to be, to open for the first time, — to break up and open. A railway is said to open up a com- munication between two places not so con- nected before. Thus used, the term may be endured, but, surely, should not be imitated. As to the instances from " Good Words," which have been produced against me as if I were responsible for them, " He opens up in the parched desert a well that refreshes us ;" " These considerations may open up to us one view of the expediency of Christ's departure;" I can only regard them as Scot- ticisms, which certainly would not have been WTitten south of the Tweed. 234. The parallel which the defenders of the expression have drawn between open up and rise up, grow up, is hardly a just one, seeing that in these cases the adverb, or intransitive preposition, up, gives us the ten- dency in which the progressive action indi- cated by the neuter verb takes place ; and even if it do not that, intensifies and gives precision. More apposite parallels would have been found in rip up, tear up, pull THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 1S£ up, where up defines the active verb ; a more decisive one still, in the term to shut up, where up implies the closing and finality of the act indicated ; and for this reason should hardly be used with the opposite word to open. If we shut up & communi- cation, we ought to open it down rather than up. Pu1 the word with any analogous term, and its inappropriateness will be per- ceived. A new railway develops, expands, promotes, the traffic ; but we could not say it develops up, expands up, promotes up, the traffic. 235. Which is right, "at best \ n or "at the "atbesV ° "at the lest ? " It is plain that this question does best." not stand alone ; several other phrases are involved in it. It affects " at least," " at most," " at furthest," and even such very common expressions as "at first," and "at last." The answer, it seems to me, is, that the insertion or omission of the definite article is indifferent. Usage has generally sanctioned its omission before the very common super- latives, " first," " last," "most," "least," " fur- thest • " but when we put a less usual adjective in this construction, the article seems to be required, or a possessive pro- t£6 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. noun in its place. "The storm was at the (or, " its ") highest at noon ; " " What is woman at her loveliest ? " And we some- times fill out the phrase with the article when we want it to be more than usually solemn : " If he did not love his father, at the least he might have honoured him." "At the last" is found six times in the English Bible ; "at last," if we may trust the con- cordances, never; "at the first," twenty- eight times ; " at first," never ; " at the least," three times ; while " at least " is found twice (1 Sam. xxi. 4, Luke xix. 42) ; "at the most," once (1 Cor. xiv. 27) ; but " at most," never, "ail of 236. " All of them," " both of them." These them," «' both of expressions are often challenged. Are they right, or not? When I have a number of things, and speak of " one of them," " two of them," " the rest of them," the preposition " of" has what is called its partitive sense. It may be explained by " out of" or "from among P Thus, " one of them " is " one from among them;" "two of them" is "two from among them ; " " the rest of them " is 4 " all from among them that do not belong to those already named." But, it is urged, "all of them " cannot be " all from among them/' because there would be none left. Neither THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 187 can " both of them " be said of two, because when you have taken both, there is nothing left. 237. But let us examine this. Is it so certain that the "of" in the phrases "all of them," "both of them," has the same meaning as the " of " in the phrases " one of them," "two of them," "some of them"? Let us, for Ci all of them," put " the whole of them," and for that, " the sum total of them," or, as our newspapers would say, "the entirety of them." Now it is manifest that any one of these is good grammar, and that the "of" does not mean " from among" but implies " consisting of :" is spoken of the quality, as "sum total," or "entirety," is of quantity. " The sum total of them," is as legitimate as "a pint of beer." Why not, then, "all of them," or " both of them % " The fallacy of the objection here is, the assuming for the preposition a sense which it need not have, just because it had that sense in some phrases apparently similar. In other words, the mistake was, being misled by a false analogy. 237a. "A gallows fifty cubits high" or, "a "fifty cubits to J ° ' ' bigh,"or gallows of fifty cubits high"? The former "of fifty ° jo cubits expression is used in Esther vii. 9; the latter ni & n " ? 188 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. in Esther v. 14. Clearly, both of these are legitimate. A gallows whose height is fifty cubits, may be said to be " fifty cubits high " : it is high, and the measure of that height is fifty cubits. Thus we have "a mile wide": " ten thousand fathoms deep." Also, the same gallows may be said to be " of fifty cubits" (high, or, in height) : the " of" being used, as in the phrases " she was of the age of twelve years" (Mark v. 42), " of a great age" (Luke ii. 36), to indicate the class or standard of the object spoken of. The gallows is high, and belongs to that class of things whose height is fifty cubits. Ad\crbbe- 238. A correspondent states as his own tween "to" -i-i^-ii. • n it and the usage, and defends, the insertion 01 an adverb infinitive. ° . „,.„.. n 1 between the sign of the infinitive mood and the verb. He gives as an instance, " to scien- tifically illustrate" But surely this is a prac- tice entirely unknown to English speakers and writers. It seems to me, that we ever regard the to of the infinitive as inseparable from its verb. And when we have already a choice between two forms of expression, " scientifically to illustrate," and "to illustrate scientifically," there seems no good reason for flying in the face of common usage. "gomg' = and 239. Ina letter bearing after its address, '•coming.'' THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. '-N. B./' I am asked whether the expression U I am coming to pay you a visit" is correct : whether it ought not rather to be " I am going to pay you a visit : " and the question is extended to the reply, " I am coming," when any one calls ; which is also supposed to be incorrect, and still more so when followed by "directly." I mentioned the address of the letter to account in some measure for the inquiry ; for it seems to me to be one which we Southrons should never have thought of making. In both cases, coming is right. In the former, we might use going, but it would be in the temporal sense, not in that of motion. But in the other, we could not say going at all, if we indicated approach to the person calling. An apology is almost required for setting down things so simple and obvious; but the doing so may. serve to show what sort of usages prevail and are upheld in some portions of our realm. 240. When I used, in the early part of "comol ' •; r grief. ' : ' these notes, the colloquial expression ivould have come to grief, I was told by one of my censors that it ought to have been would have gone to grief. It is not easy, perhaps, to treat according to strict rule what is almost a slang phrase, or has but lately ceased to be one ; 190 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. still, I venture to think that to come to grief is of the two the more according to the analogy of our usage. We say to come to an end, not to go to an end ; we say of a desperate young villain, that he will come to the galloivs, not that he will go to the gallows. Indeed, if we chose, we might illustrate the difference between the two expressions, by saying what I fear is often true of the effect of our public executions, that going to the gallows is but too likely to end in coming to the gallows. other uses 241. This use of qo and come is rather of "go " and "come." curious. We say of a wrecked ship, that she went to pieces ; but of a crushed jug, that it came to pieces. Plants come up, come into leaf, come into flower ; but they go to seed, they go out of flower. It may be that in this case we regard the above-ground state as that in which we ourselves are, and the being in leaf and in flower as those in which we wish them to be, and like to think of them ; and so the passing into those states is a kind of approach to us : whereas the state of seed being one leading to decay, and beyond what is our own place and feeling as regards flowers, they seem to depart from us in passing into it. Thus the sun goes in behind a cloud, and comes out from behind it. But we are not THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 191 consistent in speaking of the sun. He is said to go down in the evening ; but never to come up in the morning. 242. And very minute shades of meaning are sometimes conveyed by the use of one or other of these verbs. You are talking about a public meeting with a friend who you know will be there. If you say to him " I shall not come to the meeting," you identify him with those who get up the meeting, and imply that he is desirous you should join him there. If you say, " I shall not go to the meeting," you tacitly ignore the fact of his being about to attend, and half imply that he would do well to stay away also. " Are you coming to church to-day 1 " implies that the questioner is / " Are you going to church to-day ? " implies nothing as to whether he is or is not. To this latter question one might rejoin, "Yes: are you?" but not so to the former. 243. In nothing do we find more frequent misuse of . n "whom." mistakes in writers commonly careful, than in using the accusative case of a relative pro- noun where the nominative ought to be used. A correspondent, for instance, describing what he thinks the disastrous effects of my advo- cacy of " it is me" says, " I have heard per- 192 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. sons whom I knew were in the habit of using the form 'it is I,' say instead, 'it is me.'" Here, the mistake is very evident. " I knew" is merely parenthetical, put in by way of voucher for the fact — "persons who, I knew, were." The writer might have said, "whom I knew to be" or " to have been ; " but as the sentence stands, who must be the nominative case to the verb were. 244. A still worse example occurred in the Times a short time since, in translating the Count de Montalembert's famous speech in favour of liberty of conscience. It would perhaps be hard to criticise a report of a speech ; but the sentence was quoted for espe- cial comment in the leading article, and no correction was made. It ran thus : " The gag forced into the mouth of whomsoever lifts up his voice with a pure heart to preach his faith, that gag I feel between my own lips, and I shudder with pain." 245. Now in this sentence, first of all it is clear that "whomsoever lifts" cannot be right. The indefinite relative pronoun ought to be the nominative case to the verb lifts, and therefore ought to be whosoever and not whomsoever. 246. But then, how about the construe- THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 193 Aon % " The mouth of whosoever lifts " is an elliptical clause. Filled up, it will be " the mouth of him whosoever lifts," or, more com- pletely, "of him whosoever he be thai lifts" In its shortened form we have the object, " him," omitted. But we must not visit this omission on the unfortunate relative pronoun w T hich follows, and degrade it from its place in the sentence by making it do the w T ork of the missing member. 247. A correspondent stigmatises the ex- " different pression " different to," which he shows (I own I was not aware of it) has become very common of late. Of courso such a combina- tion is entirely against all reason and analogy. " Compare," says this writer, "any other English words compounded of this same Latin preposition, for example, ' distant,' ' dis- tinct/ and it will be seen that Q from' is the only appropriate term to be employed in con- nection with them." The same will be seen, I venture to add, by substituting the verb u to differ" in the places where "different," which in fact is only its participle, is thus joined. For instance, in the sentence quoted from Mr. Taylor's Convent Life in Italy, " Michael Angelo planned a totally different facade to the existing one," make this suhsti- o 194 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. tution, and read it, " Michael Angelo planned a facade which totally differed to the existing one," and the error will be immediately seen. "in respect 248. " In respect of" " in respect to" "with (or, regard) 1 J ' L ' of," &c. respect to : " which of these is right 1 The question extends also to " in regard of" " in regard to" u ivith regard to" For respect and regard, though far from meaning the same when spoken of as feelings of the mind, yet in their primitive meaning, which is that now treated of, are identical. 249. I believe it will be found that of and to may be indifferently used after these words. Both words have the same signification ; an act of looking back at. The former, respect, is a Latin word, and the expression answering to " in respect of," is used in Latin. At the same time, the natural construction of the verb from which respect is derived would be with the preposition to (respicere ad). There is nothing in the meaning of the word to forbid either construction — with of or with to. The same may be said of regard, which is of French origin. 250. Still, if we agree on this much, it remains to be seen what preposition should be prefixed. " In respect of" is the pure Latin construction, and seems on all hands (but see THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 195 below) to be admitted as pure English like- wise. And the same with u in regard of;" "ivith respect to" and "in respect to" are both found : the former I think the more frequently in our best writers. But, unless I am mistaken, "with respect of" is not found. 251. When one of mj Censors said of a sentence in these notes, that I had used " in respect of" for " with respect to" he surely must have been speaking without his authorities before him. He will find in the dictionaries, that in the scanty lists there given, Spenser, Bacon, Tillotson, all use the expression com- plained of. It occurs in Philippians iv. II, and Colossians ii. 1 6, and is certainly as much used by good modern writers as that which he wishes to substitute for it. 252. What the same Censor means when "inversely as." he says that " inversely as " should be " inversely to" I am at a loss to understand. I can comprehend "m inverse proportion to" or " in inverse ratio to ;" but surely by all the usages of mathematical language, from which the phrase is borrowed, one variable thing must be said to be directly or inversely as, not to, another which is compared with it. 252a. A correspondent asks the question, "contrast " contrast to" or " contrast with ?" It may "with" o 2 196 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. be answered that both of these seem allowable. For contrast partakes of two ideas ; that of opposition, and that of comparison. Now we oppose one thing to another, and we (com- monly) compare one thing with another. Still, as the idea of opposition is, beyond question, the prevalent one, I should prefer " contrast to." Meaning of 253. Nor can I comprehend again what the "a term." r ° Censor above-mentioned means when he says, in reference to my having called an adverb " a term," that an adverb is not a term, but a word, a part of a term. For the whole account to be given of " term" its derivation and its usage, is against him. It comes to us prox- imately from the Latin terminus — directly from the French " terme." Both these, when used of language, signify, not a clause, but a word. And so our dictionaries give the meaning of the English term — "The word by which a thing is expressed." Reason for 254. I mention this, not for the sake of mentioning these self-vindication, which forms no part of my objections. design in collecting these notes, but that I may guard others against being misled by this incorrect view of the meaning of a word in common use. «i need not 255. With the same end in view, I notice THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 197 another of his objections. " I need not have have J troubled troubled myself." He would correct this to myself." " I should not have needed to trouble myself : " saying, " the verb troubled, which you have put in the past, should have been in the pre- sent : just as the verb need, which you have put in the present, should have been in the past." Now in these words appears the cause of my Censor's mistake. It is the very com- mon one of confusing a 'perfect tense with a past one. " I need not have troubled my- self " is strictly correct ; being equivalent to "I need not be in the present situation of having troubled myself." Every perfect is in fact a present. " I have troubled myself" de- scribes not a past action, but the present result of a past action. This is now so generally acknowledged even by the ordinary gram- marians, that it is strange in our days to find any one who attends to the matter making a mistake about it. 256. Seeing, however, that this has been Caution respecting done, it may be as well to put my readers on past and pertectj their guard, ever to bear in mind the dis- tenses. tinction between the indefinite past and the perfect. I have said something on this differ- ence ill a former paragraph ; it may be enough to repeat here, that while the mdefi- KB THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. nite past tense of a verb must always be constructed as a past, the perfect, consisting of the auxiliary " have " with the past parti- ciple of the verb, denotes present possession of the state or act described by that past participle, and must always be treated and constructed as a present* Use of the 257. One more point noticed by my Censor present to L J J signify fixed mav se rve for our instruction. I had begun design. J ° a sentence, " The next point which I notice, shall be . . ." This he designates as "confusing the present and the future." Here again is a mistake as to the usage of the tenses. There is a very common use of the present, which has regard, not to actual time of occurrence, but to design. " Do you go abroad this year %" "I will come unto you when I shall pass through Macedonia, for I do pass through Macedonia," 1 Cor. xv i. 5. In this sense the present was used in the sentence complained of. " The next point which I notice," means, " the next point coming under notice," "the next point which I mean to notice in my lecture," It is necessary for one who would write good grammar, and remark on the grammar of * See Dr. Latham's "History of the English Lan- guage," p. 557. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. U% others, to know the usages of the various tenses, not merely to deal with these tenses as they appear at first sight. 258. " I mention it, because it may be Sentences ° wrongly that of many others besides him." This is supposed J elliptic. objected to by one who fills it up thus : " it may be a difficulty of many other people, besides being a difficulty of him." But surely a moment's thought will convince any of us, that such a filling up, nay, that any filling up at all, is quite wrong, and beside the purpose. The pronoun " him " is governed by the pre- position, or transitive adverb "besides* " Others besides him " is a clause perfect in itself, and needs no filling up what- ever. 259. And this may serve as a caution to Caution . «,,. against rash us against rasnness m this matter of filling and positive assertions up sentences, having hastily assumed them about con- r ] & J struction. to be elliptical. One of my critics says, " We hear clergymen sometimes say . . than him, than her, than them ! Only place the verb after such words — place the words is and are — and see what nonsense it makes — than him is, than her is, than them are." 260. Here is an instance of that against which I would caution my readers. This writer first assumes that the construction of m THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. the phrase is as he wants it to be, and then reasons on his own assumption to prove that the phrase is wrongly expressed. The fact is, that the construction in this case does not admit of any such filling up. I have shown (in paragraph 243), by the unquestioned and unavoidable use of " than whom," that than governs an accusative case directly, without any ellipsis whatever. That the other con- struction, " than he is," is an admissible one, cannot in the slightest degree affect the ques- tion whether this one is admissible or not. Yet I doubt not that many readers of this illogical critique would be deceived by its rash and positive character, and imagine the point in question to be proved. I 0011 :,, ^ 261. "What do you wish us to ufder- strnct and J "construe." s tand by readers 'constructing' the- sentence ? Writers ' construct ;' readers ' construe' " This is said in reference to my having written that we ought not " to mislead the reader by introducing the possibility of construct- ing the sentence otherwise than as the writer intended." And the objection is in- structive, as leading to the indication of the exact meaning and difference of the two words. Suppose I am examining a class of boys, and, with reference to a given sentence, THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 201 direct one of them to construe the sentence. He knows perfectly well what I mean. He turns the sentence into English, if it be in any other language. But suppose I tell him to construct the sentence. He knows, or ought to know, that I mean that he is to explain the construction of the sentence, to give an account of its concords and govern- ments. My Censor's mistake here is, that he transfers the meaning of the verb " con- struct" when applied to building up what did not before exist, to the case of a sen- tence given as already existing. The word " construing" in the sentence quoted, would make sense, and convey a certain mean- ing not very far removed from that which I intended : but it would not convey that meaning itself, that of supplying a construc- tion — building up the sentence with reference to its concords and governments. 262. A correspondent says, "You make "above, use of the adverb 'above' as an adjective. Can you use. the correlative word l beloiv' in the same sense ?" The usage complained of, "the above," meaning something which has been before spoken of, is certainly not elegant, though it is not uncommon. It may easily be avoided, by merely filling 202 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. in the ellipsis, and saying "the above-men- tioned." Adjectives 263. I must say something on the question used as adverbs. of adjectives used as adverbs : or rather of the allowable forms of qualifying verbs. The common rule, believed in and universally ap- plied by the ordinary teachers of grammar, is, that we must always qualify a verb by the adverbial form, and never by the adjec- tival. According to these teachers, such ex- pressions as the following are wrong, " The string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain." " The moon shines bright" " How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank." "Breathe soft, ye winds, ye waters gently flow." 264. These, we are told, ought to have been written with " plainly," " brightly" " sweetly" and " softly." But this is a case where the English language and the common grammarians are at variance. The sentences which I have quoted are but a few out of countless instances in our best writers, and in the most chaste and beautiful passages of our best writers, in which the usage occurs. On examining into it, we find that it is very much matter of arbitrary custom. Some adjectives will bear being thus used : others THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 203 will not. Most of those which can be so used seem to be of one syllable ; plain, soft, stveet, right, ivrong, and the like. In all these cases it may be more precise and accurate to say plainly, softly, sweetly, rightly, ivrongly, &c, but we certainly can, and our best writers certainly do, use these and other monosyllabic adjectives as adverbs. Still, as far as my memory serves me, they do not often thus use adjectives of more than one syllable. We may say, He spake plain : but we cannot so well say " He spoke simple" or " He spoke delightful" We may say, " The moon shines bright," but we can hardly say, " The moon shines brilliant." What may be the reason for this, I do not pretend to say; I only state what seems to be the fact. 265. One of my correspondents tries to make all easy, by suggesting that this adverbial use of adjectives is entirely poetical, and ought never to be allowed in prose. But, begging his pardon, this is assuming the whole ques- tion. We undoubtedly have the usage in prose, and have it abundantly ; and this being so, to lay down a rule' that it cannot be allowed in prose, is to prejudge the matter in dispute. 266. An important consideration may be ^erbiai °' 204 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. qualifica- tions, — subjective and ob- jective. introduced into this matter, which has not, I think, yet been brought to bear on it. There may be two uses of an adverb as qualifying a verb. One of these may have respect to the action indicated by the verb, describing its mode of performance ; the other may have re- spect to the result of that action, irrespective of its mode of performance. We may, if we will, designate these two uses respectively the sub- jective and the objective use. And it is to the latter of them that I would now draw the reader's attention. 267. When the adverbial term by which a verb is qualified is objectively used, has re- spect to the result, and not to the mode, of acting, there seems no reason why it should not be an adjective. Take the following : " Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right ?" Now in these last words, " do right," we may take right either as an adverb, ;i do rightly/* or as an adjective, " do that ivliich is right" " do justice" In this particular case, it does not appear which of the two is intended. But take another, Neh. ix. 33 — "Thou hast done right, but we have done wickedly." Here it seems almost certain, from the parallelism, that right is meant to be used adverbially. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 205 268. Now pass on to the other cases in which the adjective is used. " He spake plain." " That which he spake was plain." " He spake (that which was) plaint Here again it is immaterial to the logical sense whether we take adjective or adverb. "They love, him that speaketh right," Pro v. xvi. 13. And from these let us advance yet further to those cases where the adjectival sense is not so plainly applicable, but still may be in the thoughts. " The moon shines bright." Here it is plain, that the qualifying word bright refers not so much to the mode in which the moon performs her function of shining, as to the result or product of that shining : it is rather objective than sub- jective. " The moon is giving light, and that light is bright." "Breathe soft " is just as easily understood, "Breathe that which is soft," as " Breathe softly." 269. This after all seems to be the logical account of the usage : and by the rules of thought, not by the dicta of the ordinary grammarians, must all such usages be ulti- mately judged. 270. The account above given will at once "looking enable us to convict of error such expres- sions as " looking sadly," " smelling sweetly," £06 THE QUEEN' 8 ENGLISH. "feeling queerly." For in all these we do not mean to qualify the mode of acting or being, but to describe the result produced by the act or state. To "smell sweetly" is not meant to describe some sweet way of performing the act of smelling, but is meant to describe that the smell itself is sweet. And in this case the verb is of that class called neuter- substantive, i. e. y neuter, and akin in construction to the verb substantive " to be." " The rose smells sweet" is in construc- tion much the same as " the rose is sweet." " You look sad " is equivalent to " you seem to he sad." And so of the rest, "it would 271. Speaking of an expression which was oddly." the subject of remark in one of my lectures, I said, "it would read rather oddly." This was objected to as a violation of the rule above-mentioned. It was not really so. I here used the word " read " in an unusual sense, but at the same time one fully sanctioned by usage : in the sense of " affect the hearer when read." So that it is not a strict neuter- substantive, but a word anomalously used, and used in such a sense as to require the adverb rather than the adjective. Usage in 272. What has been said hitherto applies to comparative ■** and super- ^he p 0S iti V e degree of comparison only ; when THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 207 we pass beyond that to the comparative and ^^ es superlative, another consideration comes in. All adverbs do not admit of degrees of com- parison. That many do, is acknowledged. Oftener, oftenest, seldomer, seem to be good English words. But these exceptions are rare. "VYe cannot say simplier, brightlier, plainlier. And in consequence, when we want to express comparative and superlative degrees of qualifi- cation of a verb, we commonly have recourse to one of two other constructions : we either take the resolved comparative and superla- tive, more plainly, most plainly, or w 7 e take the comparative and superlative of the cor- responding adjective. Thus, for instance, we have " well" as the adverb of goud : we can- not say " weller " and " wellest : " we do not say " more well " and " most well : " but we go back to the adjective, and we say, for our comparative and superlative adverbs, better and best So, too, whereas we may, in the positive degree, say either "the moon shines bright" or "the moon shines brightly" we should say, in the comparative and superlative, not "the sun shines more brightly, and the fire shines most brightly" but, " the sun shines brighter, and the fire shines brightest" Take another example. When I wrote (see below, 208 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. paragraph 380) : "If with your inferiors, speak no coarser than usual ; if with your superiors, no finer ;" my language was characterised as being ungrammatical, because we cannot say "to speak coarse" True: but, as we have seen, what cannot be done in the positive, must be done in the other degrees of com- parison : and my sentence was strictly correct, and according to usage. In this case too, there was no choice open between the two forms, the resolved and the adjectival comparative. Had I written, " speak no more coarsely," " speak no more finely," the conjunction of " speak" with " no more" would have been awkward, as suggesting a temporal meaning which was foreign (see paragraph 301) to the construction of the sentence. And had I adopted the form of expression which my Censor recommends, " speak not more coarsely than usual," I might have escaped indeed his censure, but not the charge of having written pompous and pedantic English, a decided 273. Exception is taken to an expression weak point.' occurring in these notes, "a decided weak point." But there can be no doubt that my Censor is wrong. A " decidedly weak point" is one thing; a " decided weak point" is another. There is a difference, according as we regard THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 200 the adverb as qualifying only the adjective, or the adjective and substantive together. " There occurs in his book a remarkable pre- fatory announcement." Who would think of saying " a remarkably prefatory announce- ment %" Thus also in the phrase under consideration, had I written " a decidedly weak point, I should have spoken of a point decidedly weak; but writing as I did a de- cided weak point, I spoke of a weak point of whose existence there could be no doubt. 27 L If we use our powers of observation, Anomalies, we shall find in the usage of adjectives and adverbs, as in other usages, many things which follow no rule but that of custom, and of which it is very difficult to give any reason- able account. I mention this to show how inadequate the laws of ordinary grammar are to regulate or even to describe our practice. 275. Take but one example out of many ; "long" and "short." the use of the adjectives long and short, with reference to adverbial construction. Long is an adverb as well as an adjective. We say "How long," speaking of time. " Paul w^as long speaking." We have no adverb "longly," though we have " widely? " broadly" " deep- ly." Now observe the adjective "short" Its use as an adverb is hardly legitimate. Your p • 210 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. banker asks you whether you will take it short, when you present a cheque to be cashed ; but this use is a technical one. But what I wish to observe is, that the adverb " shortly " is by our usage limited to one department only of the meanings of the adjective, viz., that of time; and in that department, to time future. We cannot use shortly of time past ; we cannot use it of duration — " he preached shortly ; " but we must use it of that which is to come, " I hope shortly to see you." « just now." 276. This mention of adverbs of time re- minds me of an expression which usage has assigned to time past, as it has that other to time future. " Just now" in its strict mean- ing, imports, nearly at the present moment, whether before or after. Yet our general usage has limited its application *to a point slightly preceding the present, and will not allow us to apply it to that which is to come. If we are asked "When?" and we reply "Just now," w r e are understood to describe an event past, not an event future. 277. In this case we have the double use of the term preserved in provincial usage. In the midland and northern counties we have such a sentence as " Til be with you just now," which is perfectly right in logical THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 211 precision, though proscribed by English usage. 278, The use of the indicative and sub. subjunctive junctive moods, after conditional particles, as ^ moods if and whether, is a wide subject, and one on -li sentences! which considerable uncertainty seems to pre- vail. The general rule appears plain enough : The general that when matter of fact is concerned, we r e * should use the indicative : when matter of doubt, the subjunctive. " Whether I be mas- ter or you, one thing is plain." Here we have doubt : it is left in uncertainty which of the two is master. " You shall soon see whether I am master, or you." Here there is no uncertainty : your eyes shall see and be en- lightened as to a fact, of which the speaker at all events has no doubt. 279. The same rule has been thus clearly stated by Dr Latham* laid down by Dr. Latham: "The following method of determining the amount of doubt expressed in a conditional proposition is use- ful : insert, immediately after the conjunction, one of the two following phrases : (1) as is the case; (2) as may or may not be the case. By ascertaining which of these two supplements expresses the meaning of the speaker, we ascertain the mood of the verb which follows. When the first formula is the one required, r 2 232 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. there is no element of doubt, and the verb should be in the indicative mood. If (as is the case) he is gone, I mast follow him. When the second formula is the one required, there is an element of doubt, and the verb should be in the subjunctive mood. If (as may or may not be the case) he be gone, I mast follow him. * ignorance of 280. When a correspondent said of the this rule. first sentence in my second lecture, "If a man values his peace of mind, let him not write on the Queen's English/' that I ought to have written " If a man value his peace of mind," he apparently was in ignorance of this very plain rule. For that every man does value his peace of mind, is of course assumed, and the phrase to be supplied is the former one in Dr. Latham's rule. "If (as is the case) a man values his peace of mind. " This rule 281. But this rule, satisfactory as it is for perhaps un- known to a guide, does not seem to have been known our older writers. to our older writers. Our translators of the Bible notoriously do not observe it. In cases where the original (and the rule is not one belonging to English only, but to the condi- tions of thought) has the indicative, and the * History of the English Language, p. 646. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 213 missing phrase clearly must be, "as is the case? they have used the subjunctive. An instance of this is found in Col. hi. 1, "If ye then be risen with Christ . . . ; " which according to the original ought to be " If ye then are risen." The fact, that those addressed are thus risen, is proved in the previous chapter, and the Apostle proceeds to ground upon it the exhortations that follow. " If (as is the case ; as I have proved) ye are risen with Christ." Many more instances might be given to shew, that our translators almost univer- sally used the subjunctive mood after condi- tional particles, where we should now use the indicative. 282. Sometimes they seem to use the two moods indifferently. An example, is found in Job xxxi. 5 — 10. "If I have walked with vanity, or my foot hath hasted to deceit: let me," (fee. " If my step hath turned out of the way, and my heart walked after mine eyes, and if any blot hath cleaved to mine hands ; then let me," &c. So far is indicative. But Job goes on in the same strain, and our trans- lators in the next place adopt the subjunctive " If mine heart have been deceived by a woman .... then let," &c. 283. In some places, they seem to have 2U THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. observed the rule. " If now thou hast under standing, hear this." — Job xxxiv. 16. 284. The same irregularity appears to prevail in their construction of verbs after " though." Take as an example Col, ii. 5 : " Though I be absent in the flesh." Here the Apostle is asserting his absence as a fact, and the Greek verb is in the indicative, as by the ordinary rule the English should be also : u Though (as is the fact) I am absent in the flesh." Bias form r- 285. I believe it will be found, on the ly to the subjunctiv . whole, that there is a decided bias on the part of our translators to the use of the sub- junctive mood. I do not of course speak of the use of " be " as an indicative, as in 2 Kings ix. 9 : "Ye be righteous." This sometimes brings in ambiguity as to which mood is actually used in a conditional sen- tence : as in Gen. xlii. 19, "If ye be true men." But I speak of the prevalence of the use of undoubted subjunctives, determined to be so by the auxiliary, or by the form of the verb itself. but more to 286. But if there was a bias then in favour the indica- tive, of the subjunctive, the bias is as decidedly now against it. Our conditional sentences in common talk are almost all expressed in the THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 215 indicative. " I don't know whether I shall be at the committee ; but if I am, I will mention it." This everyone says. "If I be" would sound pedantic. We all say, " whether it is, or not, I cannot say : " not " whether it be." And so of other conditional sentences. 287. Here then we seem to have a pheno- phenome? non to be menon, instructive to those who are more observed. anxious to watch the actually flowing currents of verbal usage, than to build up bounds for them to run in. We have a well known logical rule, prevailing in our own and in other languages, and laid down by gram- marians as to be followed. But it would seem that it never has been followed univer- sally : that it has not regulated the language of the Book in commonest use, and yet that the language of that book speaks intelligibly to us. And more than this : for while that book violates the rule almost uniformly in one direction, we ourselves as uniformly violate it in the other. 288. While speaking upon the indicative J^ after and subjunctive moods, I may notice that without an J J auxiliary. the use of the bare verb without " may" or "might" or "should" after the conjunction " that" which we not unfrequently meet with in the English version of the Bible, and 216 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. in the Common Prayer-book, is not ungram- matical, nor is it to be corrected by inserting the apparently missing auxiliary verb, as I have heard some clergymen do in reading. The verb thus used was the old form of the subjunctive, now generally supplanted by the resolved form with the auxiliary. Thus when we pray " that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we shew forth thy praise not only with our lips but in our lives," the verb "sheio" is as truly in the subjunctive as the verb " be " in " that I be not ashamed," or the verb " slip " in " hold thou up my goings in thy paths, that my footsteps slip not." That this is so, is conclusively shown by consulting the older versions. In John xv. 2, for example, "he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit," is, in Wiclif s version, "he shall purge it that it bere the more fruyt." In ver. 16, "that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you," is "that whatever things ye axen the fadir in my name, he give to you : " and so on, wherever the auxiliary is found in the more modern version. Singulars 289. We will now pass on to another and Plurals. L matter — the use of singulars and plurals. It is a general rule, that when a verb has THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 217 two or more nominative cases to which it belongs, it must be in the plural number. But let us take care what w T e mean by this in each case. When I say " John and James are here," I mean " John is here, and James is here ; " " but when I say, " the evening and the morning were the first day" I do not mean 1 'the evening was the first day, and the morning was the first day," but I mean " the evening and the morning together made up the first day" So that here is an important difference. I may use a plural verb when it is true of both its nouns separately, and also when it is only true of them taken toge- ther. Now how is this in another example 1 Am I to say "two and two are four " or " two and two is four?" Clearly I cannot say are in the first explanation, for it cannot be true that two is four and two is four. But how on the second ? Here as clearly I may be grammatically correct in saying " two and two are four," if, that is, I understand some- thing for the two and the four to apply to : two apples and two apples make (are) four apples. But when I assert the thing merely as an arithmetical truth, with no applies, I do not see how " are " can be right. I am saying that the sum of two numbers, which I express 218 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. by two and two, is, makes up, another number, four; and in all abstract cases, where we merely speak of numbers, the verb is better singular : two and two "ts" four, not "are" "twice one 290, The last case was a somewhat doubt- are two. " ful one. But the following, arising out of it, is not so : — We sometimes hear children made to say, " twice one are two." For this there is no justification whatever. It is a plain violation of the first rules of grammar ; " twice one " not being plural at all, but strictly sin- gular. Similarly, "three times three are nine " is clearly wrong, and so are all such expressions \ what we want to say being simply this, that three taken three times makes up, is equal to nine. You may as well say, " nine are three times three," as " three times three are nine." Cases net 291. There still are cases in which those understood. who do not think about the composition of a sentence may find a difficulty as to whether a singular or a plural verb should follow two nouns coupled together by " and" The diffi- culty arises from the fact that " and ,} has many meanings. Sometimes it imports addi- tion: sometimes it merely denotes an appo- sition, or simultaneous predication of two characters or qualities belonging to one and THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 219 the same thing. And it is in this latter case that a difficulty arises, and a mistake is often made. Take, for instance, this sentence, where the writer is speaking of the cheapness of Bibles at the present day : " The only revelation of God's will to mankind, and the only record of God's dealings with men, is now to be obtained for a sum which a labouring man might save out of one day's wages.'' Now what is meant by this sentence is, "That book, which is the only revelation of God's will to men, and at the same time the only record of God's dealings with men, is now to be obtained," &c. One thing, and not two, is the subject of the sentence. Yet in a precisely similar sentence of my own the other day, the people at the printing-office, more studious for the letter of grammar, than for the spirit of thought, corrected is into are. And observe the effect on the meaning. If I say, " The only revelation of God's will to men, and the only record of God's dealings with men, are to be obtained," &c, I convey the idea that I am speaking of two books, one containing the only revelation of God's will, the other, the only record of his dealings. It is obvious that the writer might have cast the sentence into another form, and having said that the 220 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. Bible contains the only revelation of God's will, and the only record of God's dealings, might have gone on to say, "Both these are to be obtained/' &c. ; but constructed as the " sentence now is, the singular verb, and not the plural, is required to express his meaning. 292. Take another case. In Psalm xiv. 7, we read. " Destruction and unhappiness is in their ways:" in Psalm lxxiii. 25, "My flesh and my heart faileth" Again, as was remarked by the critic in the " Times " of September 29th, 1863, in censuring the modernizations in the Cambridge Shakspeare, Shakspeare wrote "His steeds to water at those springs on chalice d flowers that lies : " and Prospero is made to say, " lies at my mercy all mine enemies." How are these apparent violations of grammar to be accounted for ? Account 293. Simply, I believe, by regarding the usages. sense of the sentences. In each of them, one and the same act is predicated of a num- ber of persons or things, considered as one. In the two former sentences, these things are nearly synonymous : in the two latter, they are classed together. In either case, the act is one : and this fact seems to have ruled the verb in the singular, instead of the more usual plural. It has been mentioned before THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 221 in these notes, that in the Greek language a plural of the neuter gender takes after it a singular verb. The things composing it are considered as forming one mass rather than a plurality of individuals, and the verb is ruled accordingly. 294. Care is required in the use of several Y s . ooi ceT ' 1 tain con- conjunctional and prepositional particles. The ^rticS^ first of these which I shall notice is u except." Except means with the exception oj : and exempts from some previous list, or some previous predication, the substantive or sub- stantives, or clause or clauses, before which it is placed. "All were pleased, except Juno :" i.e., "with the exception of Juno" or, "Juno being excepted" And on this account, we must take care that the person or thing excepted be one which would have been included in the previous category, if the exception had not been made. 295. This rule is violated in the following violation of this rule. ' sentence taken from a newspaper : " Few ladies, except Her Majesty, could have made themselves heard," &c. For how is the word " except r here to be understood 1 From what list is Her Majesty excepted, or taken out 1 Clearly not from among the few ladies spoken of. Had the sentence stood "All 222 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. ladies, except Her Majesty, would have proved unequal to/' &c., it would have been con- structed rightly, though clumsily ; what it meant to express was that " Few ladies besides Her Majesty, could have" done what was spoken of : and "besides"' should have been the word used. Besides (by the side of) does not subtract, as except does, but adds; and thus we should have the sense required : viz., that very few ladies added to Her Majesty, — besides her, — could have done the thing spoken of. Use of "ex- 296. There is a use of except, which was cept for L " unless." once very common, but is now hardly ever found : that, I mean, by which it stands for " unless? " I will not let thee go, except thou bless me." This usage is quite legiti- mate : amounting in fact to saying, " In no case will I let thee go, excepted only that in which thou shalt bless me." This is found constantly throughout the English version of the Bible, both in the Old Testament and in the New. "without." 297. Without is another word used in some- what, the same meaning. As in the other cases, its prepositional use has led to its con- junctional. Take the following sentence from Sir Philip Sidney : " You will never live to my age, without you keep yourselves in breath THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 223 with exercise, and in heart with joyfulness." In this, " ivithout you keep " is in fact a con- struction compounded of "ivithout keeping" and " unless " or " except you keep." 298. What are we to think of the expres- "a mutual friend." sion, " a mutual friend ? " What is " mutual ? " Much the same as " reciprocal" It describes that w r hich passes from each to each of two persons. Thus for example, when St. Paul says to the Romans (i. 12), "That I may be comforted together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me," the meaning is, in English, "by my confidence in you and your confidence in me." And that our translators meant this to be understood is clear : for they deliberately altered the previous versions to this form. Wiclif had "bi faith that is bothe youre and myn to gidre:" Tyndall, " through the common faith which bothe ye and I have : " so also Cranmer and the Geneva Bible. 299. And mutual ought never to be used, unless the reciprocity exists. "The mutual love of husband and w 7 ife " is correct enough : but " a mutual friend of both husband and wife" is sheer nonsense. A common friend is meant ; a friend that is common to both. The word mutual has no place or assignable 224 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. meaning in such a phrase, and yet we occa- sionally find it used even by those who pride themselves on correct speaking. •*we will 300. There is an expression frequently write you." used in correspondence, principally by mer- cantile men : " we will write you" instead of " we will write to you:" "write me at your earliest convenience," instead of " writs to me" Is this an allowable ellipsis ? It is universally acknowledged that the " to " of the so-called dative case may be dropped in certain con- structions : " Pie did me a favour ; " 6i He sent me a birthday present ; " " He wrote me a kind letter : p " The Lord raised them up deliverers.'' In all these cases, the object or act which the verb directly governs is expressed. But if it be omitted, the verb at once is taken as governing the personal pronoun or substantive, of which the dative case is thus elliptically expressed. Thus : " He sent me " would mean, not " He sent to me," but he sent, as his messenger,' me. "The Lord raised them up," would imply, not that He raised up some person or thing for them, but that He lifted them up them- selves. 301. And so, when we drop the substantive directly governed by the verb in the phrase THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 225 "He wrote me a letter," or "he wrote me word," and merely say "he wrote me" we cannot properly understand the sentence in any other way, than that " me" is governed by the verb " wrote. " That this is nonsense, is not to the purpose. The con- struction of such a phrase necessarily halts, and is defective, not only elliptical. We should say in all cases, "tvrite to me" or "write me word" or the like \ never barely " write me." 302. Yerv curious blunders in construction " and which. " are made by the careless use of " and " with the relative pronoun, coupling it to a sentence which will not bear such coupling. I take these two instances from one and the same page of a charitable report : " The Board offer their grateful acknowledgments for the liberal support hitherto so freely extended, and which has so greatly contributed to this satisfactory result." " It was feared that the untimely death of the surgeon to the hospital, occurring as it did so very shortly after its opening, and to whose untiring energy the Institution mainly owes its existence, might seriously affect its future prospects and position." 303. Now in both these instances the con- junction " and " is wholly unneeded, is indeed Q 226 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. quite in the way of the construction. Two clauses connected by " and " must be similarly constructed. You cannot say, " Then I went home and which is quite true." Yet this is the construction of both the sentences quoted: and the fault is one of the very commonest in the writing of careless or half- educated persons. 304. In the Times of this very day, Nov. 11, 1863, I fmd the following sentence, occur- ring in the translation of M. Casimir Perrier's letter to the President of the Legislative body : " I hoped to procure the original placard which was posted on the walls of Grenoble on that occasion, but which I have been unable to do." The following " Form of Order" is distri- buted widely by a London publisher : — - " Please send me a copy of the Shakespeare Memorial, and for which / enclose Eighteen Postage Stamps" I was surprised to find, that Murray's Handbooks for Italy abound with this vulgarism, "one" 305. There is an unfortunate word in our joined to "his." language, which few can use without very soon going wrong in grammar, or, which is worse, in common sense. It is the word " one" used in the sense of the French " on/' or the THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 227 Gerrrm, " man" and meaning people in geneial 11 What one has done, when one was young, One ne'er will do again ; In former days one went by coach, But now one goes by train." So for, "one" is pretty sure to be right. It is only when this is carried on further, that the danger arises. Suppose I wanted to put into English the saying of the French gour- mand, which, by the way, I am glad an Englishman did not originally utter : " Avec cette sauce on pourrait manger son propre pere ; " — how am I to express myself 1 In other words, how am I to take up the "one " with the possessive pronoun, or with any possessive, in English 1 The French, we see, say, u With this sauce one could eat his own father." Is this an English usage (I don't mean the meal, but the grammar) 3 I believe not, though it is becoming widely spread in current literature. " In such a scene one might forget his cares, And dream himself, in poet's mood, away." And one of my correspondents says, " When writing on language, grammar, and composi- tion, one ought to be more than usually Q2 228 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. particular in his endeavours to be himselj correct." These sentences do not seem to me to be right. Having used " one" we must also use " one's " cares, and " ones " self. We must say, at the risk of sacrificing elegance of sound, " In such a scene one might forget one's cares, And dream one's self, in poet's mood, away." The fact is, that this "one" is a very awkward word to get into a long sentence. I have sometimes seen it in our newspapers, followed not only by "he" and " his" but by "they" and "their" and " we " and "our" in all stages of happy confusion, "didn't 306. There is another word in our common "hadn't English very difficult to keep right. It is used," &c. the verb " use" signifying to be accustomed. " I used to meet him at my uncle's." When the verb is affirmatively put in this manner, there is no difficulty, and no chance of going wrong. These arise when we want to put it in the negative ; to speak of something which we were not accustomed to do. And then we find rather curious combinations. I "didn't use," I "hadn't used," I "wasn't used." This latter would be legitimate THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 229 enough, if the verb were "used to" mean- ing " accustomed by use to." We may say, u I wasn't used to the practice" But it will be plain that ' it is a different meaning of which I am now speaking. A friend tells me that in his' part of the world the people say, " didn't use to was : " and a midland correspondent, that he has heard in his town, even in good society, the phrase, " used to could" 307. If you ask me what we are to say in this case, I must reply that I can answer very well on paper, but not so well for the pur- poses of common talk. " I used " is negatived by " I used not." But unfortunately, this ex- pression does not do the work in common talk. " I used not to see him at my uncles" does not convey the idea that it was not your habit to meet him there. It rather means, that he was there, but that for some unex- plained reason you did not see him. You meant to express, not something which it was your practice not to do, but something which it was not your practice to do. " I never used" is better, but it may be too strong. I am afraid there is no refuge but in the inelegant word " usedn't" to which I suppose most of us have many times been driven. 230 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. ^idins"or 308. Riding or driving ? This question has been asked by several correspondents, in con- sequence of my story, told further on, of a benevolent old gentleman "riding in his carriage" I am asked whether "this ought not to have been " driving" seeing that riding cannot properly be predicated except of persons on horseback. But there is not necessarily any such limitation of the mean- ing of the word to ride. It comes cer- tainly from a time when the employment of wheels was almost unknown : but from centuries ago has been applied to any kind of locomotion in which a person or thing- is borne, whether on an animal, or in a carriage, or as when used of a ship on the water. A road is a broad path on which people may ride on horses and in vehicles : a road, or rade, for ships, is a part of the sea where they may ride, or be borne at anchor. We have in Jer. xvii. 25, " Riding in chariots and on horses : " and such, as may be seen in the dictionaries, is the usage of all English writers. ** I take it. 309. It is a curious symptom of our having forgotten the usages of the best age of English, that several correspondents should have objected to my having written "I take THE QUEEN'S EXGLISH. 231 it" signifying, "such is my opinion." For it is constantly found, from. Shakspeare onwards, in this sense : and the sense is amply justified by other cognate usages of the verb to take : such as, to take it well or ill, to take it in good part, to take a man for his brother, and the like. The fact of such an objection having been made, shows the necessity for upholding our plain nervous colloquial English against the inroads of modern fine language. It would be a loss instead of a gain if "I take it^ were to be superseded by iC I apprehend;" or, as we should be sure to have it pronounced, " I happryend." 310. Another correspondent inquires re- "the earth's specting the construction of such sentences as revolving." the following : — ' ; Day and night are a conse- quence of the earth revolving on its axis." He maintains, that here, revolving is a verbal noun equivalent to revolution, and that we ought to say, " A consequence of the earth's revolving on its axis/ He believes that he lias proved this by the test of substituting the pronoun for the earth, thus : '*' Day and night on our earth are a consequence of its revolving on its axis." where he rightly says no one would think of saying it revolving. 311. At first sight this appears decisive. 232 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. But let us examine a little further. It is somewhat curious that, in this last sentence, we may leave out the possessive pronoun, without obscuring the sense. " Our earth enjoys day and night as a consequence of revolving on its axis." To. which a rejoinder may be made, "of ivliat revolving on its axis?" and the answer is "the earth" not "the earth's." We may, if we wish, regard the earth revolving on its axis as a description of an idea set before the mind. The fact indicated by that idea, viz., that the earth does so revolve, produces as a consequence day and night. Day and night, in other words, are a consequence of that fact so indi- cated : i.e. j of the earth revolving on her axis. 312. I believe, then, that both forms are correct in point of construction : and a writer will use one or the other, according as euphony admits or requires. In an instance which my correspondent cited from my first paper, where I say that " the profusion of commas- prevented the text being understood,' ' it is plain that " the text's being understood " would have been harsh and ill-sounding. I believe that, as a general matter of choice, I rather prefer the form of the sentence to which my correspondent objects, It may be THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 233 that nay ears are accustomed to the Greek and Latin construction, which is according to this form and not to the other. 313. A correspondent finds that the news- " predicate" for "pre- papers are in the habit of using "predicate" diet" where they mean "predict." I have not ob- served this ; but it may be well to say, that to predicate is simply to affirm this or that of anything, whereas to predict is to foretell a future event, 314. There are certain cases where either word might be used without a fault. And such is the very instance cited by my corre- spondent :— " It is impossible to predicate what the result will be." The writer very likely meant, to predict ; but he might have intended to say, that no one can predicate this or that probable result. If so, he ex- pressed himself clumsily, but did not fall into the error complained of. 315. "If 13 for " whether" is another mis- "if" for "whether/ take which I am asked to point out. But this usage, though it may not be according to our modern habit, is found in our best writers ; and I cannot see that there is anything to complain of in it. Under the word " if," in Johnson, we have, cited from Dryden : " Uncertain if by augury or chance." never. 231 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. And from Prior, " doubting if slie doubts or no." We also read (Gen. viii. 8) that Noah " sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the gronnd." seldom or 316. Another of my correspondents is offended with "seldom or never" and prefers " seldom, if ever" It seems to me that the two express the same idea in slightly differing ways, but that both are perfectly legitimate. The one is analogous to " very little, or not at all" the other to "very little, if at all" "like i do." 317. "Like" used as an adverb, is also brought under my notice, and the complaint in this case is not without reason. u Like I do now" " like lie was" " like we are," are quite indefensible, and are avoided by all careful speakers and writers. The mistake has been occasioned by the legitimate use of "like" as an adjective at the beginning of a sentence, where it means "like to." You may say, "Like David, I am the youngest of my family : " but you may not say, "Like David was, I am the youngest of my family." 318. Nouns of number are also proposed as a subject for treatment. I am supposed to have written incorrectly " When the band of Nouns of number. THE QUEES'S ENGLISH. 235 French Guides were in this country ; " and the opinion is supported by reminding me that we say " There was a large congregation," not " there were a large congregation." Most true : and from the consideration of this example we may derive something like a rule in such cases. In saying " there vms a large congregation" I am speaking of the assembly as a whole. If I were saying anything which suggested the idea of the individuals com- posing it, I should use, not the singular verb, but the plural. I should hardly say, " the congregation was not all of the same opinion" but " the congregation ivere not all of the same opinion." The slightest bias either way will influence a writer, when using such words, towards a singular or a plural verb. I should say, that in the case complained of, perhaps it was the fact of " Guides" in the plural, being the word immediately preceding the verb, that induced me to put it in the plural ; or perhaps the knowledge that I was about to speak of the band throughout the following sentences, as " they" " the French- men" &c. 318a. "People" and "persons." A corre- " People" spondent wishes me to observe, that the former sons." of these terms signifies an aggregate of persons, 236 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. and that we ought never to say several people, but always several persons. I own I cannot find that this distinction is entirely borne out. Bacon, as adduced by Johnson, says, " If a man temper his actions so as to content every combination of people, the musick will be the fuller :" in which sentence, " people " seems to be used for " persons?' Still, it is a distinction which it is worth while to remember : for doubtless it is so far just, that it represents the general import of the two words, "i know 319. Another correspondent is puzzled by nothing by myself," ex- m y having said that " a man who talks of plained. J ° Aristobulus in the lesson, is as likely as not to preach from St. Paul's, c I know nothing by myself] to show us that the apostle wanted divine teaching, and not to be aware that he meant he ivas not conscious of any fault" My correspondent cannot conceive how the words can have any other meaning, than that the apostle had no knowledge of his own. His diffi- culty (and I mention it because it may be that of many others besides him) is that he has missed the peculiar sense of the preposition " by" as here used. It bears the sense of " of" in the words " I know no harm of him" This is still in the midland counties, " I know no harm by him." We have a somewhat THE QUEEX'S EXGLISFT, 2*7 similar usage in the Prayer-book version of Ps. xy. 4, " He that setteth not by himself *," i. e., is not self-conceited, setteth not store by him- self, as we even now say. I have heard a parish clerk pronounce these last words, " he that sitteth not by himself" in allusion, I sup- pose, to the Squire's pew. To return to u I know nothing by myself:" The meaning is decided for us by the original Greek, which is simply, " I am conscious of no fault :" and if is plain that the words of the English version were so understood when they were first written ; for Dr. Donne, in King James the First's time, preaches on them, and quotes them over and over again, in this sense. 320. A correspondent who gives me his "the three ^ 'poys'Just name vouches for the following anecdote. I mentioned, own I had fancied it was an old story : but so many things related in Joe Miller have hap- pened again within my own experience, that I must not too readily admit a doubt of my correspondent's accuracy. " My friend," he says, " happened to be present one Sabbath in a parish church some miles north of Aberdeen, the clergyman of which (a true Gael) read to his hearers a portion of the book of Daniel, containing the names ' Shadrach, Meshach, and Abedneo-o.' The reverend gentleman 238 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. finding some difficulty in delivering himself of these vocables, resolved not to attempt the task a second time, but simply referred tc ' the three " poys " just mentioned? " I have received another and fuller account of this kind of abbreviation, certified with the name of the hearer, which is a guarantee for its accuracy. In this case the officiating cler- gyman said, " same three gentlemen" and in- stead of repeating the details of instruments, " sackbut, psaltery," &c, read, " music as before" "religion m 321. In illustration, not of the habit of the arm- chair." mispronouncing, but, what is worse, of mis- understanding, another correspondent assures me that he heard a man, pretending to be a teacher of the Gospel, preach on what he called "Religion in the arm-chair," his text being (1 Tim. v. 4), Q Let them learn first to shoiv piety at home, : ' where the word "piety" as the margin of the English Bible would have informed him, means merely " kindness to their relations,' and has nothing to do with religion in the stricter sense. 322. A correspondent sends me the follow- ing. "A placard is to be seen in a certain farmyard in this county : — " ' There is a place for everything, and THE QUEEX'S ENGLISH. 230 everything for a place. Any person offending against these rules will forfeit 2cl. J " 323. By-the-by, what are we to think of "the right man in the the phrase which came in during the Crimean right place." war, "The right man in the right place" I How can the right man ever be in the wrong place ? or the wrong man in the right place ? Wb used to illustrate the unfitness of things by saying that the round man had got into the square hole, and the square man into the round hole ; that was correct enough ; but it was the putting incongruous things together that was wrong, not the man, nor the hole. 324. This puts me in mind of the servant " his wrong slippers." at school once coming into the schoolroom, in consequence of some interchange of slippers, and calling out, " Has any gentleman got lm vrrong slippers ? " Xow, if they were his, they were not wrong ; and if they were wrong, they were not his. 325. In the same note, my friend sends me the following : A Mr. Crispin of Oxford announced that he sold "boots and shoes made by celebrated Hoby, London." Mr. Hoby, irate, put into the Oxford paper : " The boots and shoes Mr. Crispin says he sells of my make is a lie." 326. Some odd descriptions of men have An 240 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. descriptions been forwarded me, arising from the anibigii- of Aen. ° ons junction of compound words. In two or three places in London, we see " Old and New Bookseller" — an impossible combination in one and the same man ; but of course meaning a seller of old and new books. Another trades- man describes himself as " Gas-holder and Boiler-maker" meaning that he makes gas- holders and boilers, but giving the idea that he undertakes to contain gas himself. We had in Canterbury a worthy neighbour, who advertised himself as " Indigenous Kentish Herbalist ; " meaning, of course, not that he was born amongst us, but that he made herbs indigenous in Kent his study. 327. I have lying on my table a note just ' received, in the following words : " R. C. begs to apologise for not acknowledging P. 0. order at the time (but was from home), and thus got delayed, misplaced, and forgotten." A correspondent sends me the following note : " Mrs. A.'s compliments to Mrs. B., and begs to say that C. lived with her for a year and found her respectable, steady, and honest." "by apply- 328. " By doing a thing" for "if he will do ing'. " it," is noticed by a friend as a common error in Scotch papers. " Found on board the steamer ' Vulcan/ a THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 241 gold locket. The owner may have it by giving the date, when lost, and paying expenses." "Found, in Stockwell Street, on Friday early, a gold or gold-plated Geneva watch. The owner may have the same on proving his property, by applying to Mr. E. B., 166, Hospital Street." 329. Is it right, a correspondent asks, to"^s H say " his hair wants cutting," " the lawn wants mowing V I should say, undoubtedly. His hair wants a certain act performed on it. What is that process called 1 ? Cutting. The word is, of course, a present participle, but it is used almost as a substantive. Thus we say, " the first and second mowings of the lawn were difficult, the third was easier." Thus, too, we speak of a " flogging ;" of "readings" of Shakspeare, &c. " He wards his hair cutting " cannot be similarly defended, nor indeed at all ; it ought . to be, " he wants his hair cut." 330. But I now come, from the by-rules Deteriora- t t i r» i n t l kion °f tk Q and details ot the use of the language, to language itself. speak of an abuse far more serious than those hitherto spoken of ; even the tampering with and deteriorating the language itself. I be- lieve it to have been in connexion with an abuse of this kind, that the term "the King's 242 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. English " was first devised. We know that it is a crime to clip the King's coin ; and the phrase in which we first find the term which forms the subject of our essay, is, "clipping the Kings English''' So that it is not im- probable that the analogy between debasing language and debasing coin first led to it. Sources of 331. Now in this case the charge is two- our Ian- ° guage. fold . ^hat of clipping, and that of beating out and thinning down the Queen's English. And it is wonderful how far these, especially the latter, have proceeded in our days. . It is well to bear in mind, that our English comes mainly from two sources ; rather, per- haps, that its parent stock, the British, has been cut down, and grafted with the two scions which form the present tree : — the Saxon, through our Saxon invaders ; and the Latin, through our Norman invaders. Of these two, the Saxon was, of course, the earlier, and it forms the staple of the language. Almost all its older and simpler ideas, both for things and acts, are expressed by Saxon words. But as time went on, new wants arose, new arts were introduced, new ideas needed words to • express them ; and these were taken from the stores of the classic languages, either direct, tfu more often through the French. We all THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 243 remember that Gurth and Wamba complain, in u Ivanhoe," that the farm-animals, as long as they had the toil of tending them, were called by the Saxon and British names, ox, ■ sheep, calf, pig ; but when they were cooked and brought to table, their invaders and lords enjoyed them under the Norman and Latin names of beef, mutton, veal, and pork. This is characteristic enough \ but it lets us, in a few words, into an important truth. Even so the language grew ; its nerve, and vigour, and honesty, and manliness, and toil, mainly brought down to us in native Saxon terms, while all its vehicles of abstract thought and science, and all its combinations of new re- quirements as the world went on, were clothed in a Latin garb. To this latter class belong all those larger words in -ation and -atious, the words compounded with ex and in and super, and the like. 332. It would be mere folly in a man to attempt to confine himself to one or other of these two main branches of the language in his writing or his talk. They are inseparable ; welded together, and overlapping each other, in almost every sentence which we use. But short of exclusive use of one or the other, there is a very great difference in respect e 2 Ui THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. Process of degenera- tion: whence mainly arising. of the amount of use between writers and speakers. He is ever the most effective writer and speaker, who knows how to build the great body of his discourse out of his native Saxon • availing himself indeed of those other terms without stint, as he needs them, but not letting them give the character and complexion to the whole. 333. Unfortunately, all the tendency of the lower kind of writers of modern English is the other way. The language, as known and read by thousands of Englishmen and Englishwomen, is undergoing a sad and rapid process of deterioration. Its fine manly Saxon is getting diluted into long Latin words not carrying half the meaning. This is .mainly owing to the vitiated and pretentious style which passes current in our newspapers. The writers in our journals seem to think that a fact must never be related in print in the same terms in which it would be told by word of mouth. The greatest offenders in this point are the country journals, and, as might be expected, just in proportion to their w T ant of real ability. Next to them comes the London penny press ; indeed, it is hardly a whit better • and highest in the scale, but still by no means free from this fault, the THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 245 regular London press — its articles being for the most part written by men of education and talent in the various political circles. The main offence of the newspapers, the head and front of their offending, is, the insisting on calling common things by uncommon names ; changing our ordinary short Saxon nouns and verbs for long words derived from the Latin. And when it is remembered that i n w hat this is very generally done by men for the most part ignorant of the derivation and strict meaning of the words they use, we may ima- gine what delightful confusion is thus intro- duced into our language. A Latin word which really has a meaning of its own, and might be a very useful one if confined to that meaning, does duty for some word, whose significance extends far wider than its own meaning ; and thereby to common English hearers loses its own proper force, besides utterly confusing their notions about the thing which its new use intended to re- present. 334. Our journals seem indeed determined Dialect of to banish our common Saxon words alto- gether. You never read in them of a man, or a woman, or a child. A man is an " indi- vidual" or a "person" or a "party;" a 246 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. woman is a "female ;" or if unmarried, a " young person','' which expression, in the newspapers, is always of the feminine gender ; a child is a "juvenile" and children en masse are expressed by that most odious term, " the rising generation."" As to the former words, it is certainly curious enough that the same debasing of our language should choose, in order to avoid the good honest Saxon man, two words, "individual'" and "party" one of which expresses a man's unity, and the other, in its common untechnical use, belongs to man associated. And why should a tvoman be degraded from her position as a rational being, and be expressed by a word which might belong to any animal tribe, and which, in our version of the Bible, is never used except of animals, or of the abstract, the sex in general ? Why not call a man a "male" if a woman is to be a "female " ? w party." 33-5. The word party for a man is especially offensive. Strange to say, the use is not altogether modern. It occurs in the English version of the apocryphal book of Tobit vi. 7, " If an evil spirit trouble any, one must make a smoke thereof before the man or the woman, and the party shall be no more vexed." And in Shakspeare (" Tempest," act iii. sc. 2) : THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 247 Stepkano : How now shall this be compassed ? Canst thou bring rne to the party ? Caliban : Yea, yea, my lord : I'll yield him thee asleep, where thou may'st knock a nail into his head. And a correspondent quotes from Archbishop Ussher that, relating how he had been obliged to rebuke one of his clergy, he writes, "I sent for the party, and upon conference had with him, I put him in mind/' &c. I once heard a venerable dignitary pointed out by a railway porter as " an old party in a shovel." Curious is the idea raised in one's mind by hearing of " a short party going over the bridge" Curious also that raised by an advertisement sent me ; " Wanted, a party to teach a young man dancing privately. Apply, &c." 336. I have said that party, in its common Technical untechnical use, signifies man associated. But " party " we must remember that it has a technical use also. " I don't think," says a correspon- dent, " that party must mean ' man associated ,' but that it means one or more persons as re- garded in relation to one or more others : and that by following out this, the passages in ' Tobit ' and the ' Tempest ' may be cleared, without giving any countenance to bagman's English. The parties (partes) in a lawsuit may be each a single person : and a clergy- man who gives out a notice about ' these 248 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. parties being joined together,' although he is wrong in departing from the Prayer- book, does not seem to me incorrect in lan- guage." " proceed." 337. The newspaper writers never allow us to go anywhere, we always proceed. A man going home, is set down as "an individual proceeding to his residence" 11 partake." 338. We never eat, but always partake, even though we happen to eat up the whole of the thing mentioned. In court, counsel asks a witness, " Did you have anything to eat there?" "Yes." "What was it 1" "A bun." Now go to the report in the paper, and you'll be sure to find that "witness con- fessed to having partaken of a bun," as if some one else shared it with him. "locality." 339. We never hear of a place; it is always a locality. Nothing is ever placed, but always located. " Most of the people of the place " would be a terrible vulgarism to these gentlemen \ it must be " the majority of the residents in the locality." " apart- 340. Then no one lives in rooms, but always merits." in "apartments." "Good lodgings" would be far too meagre ; so we have " eligible apart- mentsP "evince." 341. No man ever shows any feeling, but THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 249 always "evinces" it. This " evince" by the way, is one of the most odious words in all this catalogue of vulgarities, for such they really are. Everybody "evinces" everything. No one asks, but " evinces a desire" No one is hurt, but " evinces a sense of suffering" No one thanks another, but " evinces gratitude." I remember, when the French band of the " Guides'* were in this country, to have read • in the Illustrated News, that as they pro- ceeded, of course, along the streets of the metropolis (we never read of London in polite journals), they were vehemently (everybody does everything vehemently) cheered by the assembled populace (that is the genteel name for the people). And what do you suppose the Frenchmen did in return 1 Of course, something very different from what English- men would have done under similar circum- stances. But did they toss up their caps, and cry, Vive V Angleterre ? The Illustrated Neivs did not condescend to enter into such details; all it told us was, that they " evinced a reciprocity " ! 342. Again, we never begin anything in the "com- newspapers now, but always commence. I read lately in a Taunton paper, that a horse " com- menced kicking." And the printers seem to 250 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. " eventu- ate." " avoca- tion. " think it quite wrong to violate this rule. Repeatedly, in drawing up handbills for cha- rity sermons, I have written, as I always do, u Divine service will begin at so and so ;" but almost always it has been altered to " com- mence ;" and once T remember the bill being sent back after proof, with a " query, com- mence ?" written against the word. But even commence is not so bad as " take the initiative,'' 9 which is the newspaper phrase for the other more active meaning of the verb to begin. 343. Another horrible word, which is fast getting into our language through the pro- vincial press, is to " eventuate." If they want to say that a man spent his money till he was ruined, they tell us that his unprecedented extravagance eventuated in the total dispersion of his property. 344. "Avocation" is another monster patro- nised by these writers. Now avocation, which of itself is an innocent word enough, means the being called away from something. We might say, " He could not do it, having avocations elsewhere." But in our newspapers, avocation means a man's calling in life. If a shoemaker at his work is struck by lightning, we read, that " while pursuing his avocation, the electric fluid penetrated the unhappy mans person" THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 251 345. "Persuasion" is another word very " persua- J sion." commonly and very curiously used by them. We all know that persuasion means the fact of being persuaded ', by argument or by example. But in the newspapers, it means a sect or way of belief. And strangely enough, it is most generally used of that very sect and way of belief, whose characteristic is this, that they refuse to be persuaded. We constantly read of the " Hebrew persuasion? or the "Jewish persuasion." I expect soon to see the term widened still more, and a man of colour described as " an individual of the negro per- suasion" 346. Not' only our rights of conscience, but "K*i us * even our sorrows are invaded by this terrible diluted English. In the papers, a man does not now lose his mother : he " sustains (this I • saw in a country paper) bereavement of his maternal relative." By the way, this verb to sustain is doing just now a great deal of work not its own. It means, you know, to endure, to bear up under ; to sustain a bereavement, does not properly mean merely to undergo or suffer a loss, but to behave bravely under it. In the newspapers, however, " sustain " comes in for the happening to men of all the ills and accidents possible. Men never break their 252 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. "to expe rience." legs, but they always "sustain a fracture" of them j a phrase which suggests to one the idea of the poor man with both hands holding up the broken limb to keep it straight. 347. Akin to sustain is the verb to experience now so constantly found in our newspapers. No one feels, but experiences a sensation. Now, in the best English, experience is a substan- tive, not a verb at all. But even if it is to be held (see above, paragraph 148), that the modern dialect has naturalized it, let us have it at least confined to its proper meaning, which is not simply to feel, but to have per- sonal knowledge of by trial* "toaccord." 348. Another such verb is to "accord" which is used for " award" or " adjudge." " The prize vjos accorded" we read, " to so and so" If a lec- turer is applauded at the end of his task, we are told that "a complete ovation was accorded him." 349. Entail is another poor injured verb. Nothing ever leads to anything as a conse- quence, or brings it about, but it always entails it. This smells strong of the lawyer's clerk ; as does another word which we some- times find in our newspapers, in its entirety instead of all or the whole. " to entail. ' * I read the other' day in the Times, that the weather had experienced a change ! THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 253 3-30. Desirability is a terrible word. I "desira- found.it the other day, I think, in a leading ^gj le ; article in the Times. And a correspondent sent me a quotation from the Standard, in which displenishing occurs. 351. Reliable is hardly legitimate. We do "reliable." not rely a man, we rely upon a man; so that reliable does duty for rely-upon-able. " Trust- worthy" conveys all the meaning required. 352. Allude to is used in a new sense by " allude." the journals, and not only by them, but also • by the Government offices. If I have to com- plain to- the Post- Office that a letter legibly directed to me at Canterbury has been mis- sent to Caermarthen, I get a regular red-tape reply, beginning " The letter alluded to by you." Now I did not allude to the letter at all ; I mentioned it as plainly as I could. 353. I send a sentence to a paper to the Examples of the deteiio- following effect : — "When I came to the spot, ration. I met a man running towards me with his hands held up." Next day I read, "When the very rev. gentleman arrived in close prox- imity to the scene of action, he encountered an individual proceeding at a rapid pace in the opposite direction, having both his hands elevated in an excited manner." 354. This is fiction; but the following are 254 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. truth. In a Somersetshire paper I saw that a man had had his legs burned by sitting for warmth, and falling asleep, on the top of a lime-kiln. The lime was called the " seething mass" (to " seethe " means to boil, — and " sad" or " sodden" is its passive participle) ; and it was said he would soon have been a calcined corpse, which, I take it, would have been an unheard-of chemical phenomenon. 355. In the same paper I read the follow- ing elegant sentence : — " Our prognostications as regards the spirit of the young men here to join the Stogursey rifle-corps proves correct. " The same paper, in commenting on the Hop- ley case, speaks through a whole leading article of corporeal punishment. I may men- tion that, in this case, the accused person figures throughout, as so often in provincial papers, as a "demon incarnate" and "a fiend in human shape." 356. In travelling up from Somersetshire I find the directors of the Great Western Railway thus posting up the want of a school- master at their board : " £5 reward. Whereas the windows of the carriages, &c. Whoever will give information as shall lead to conviction, shall receive the above reward ; " as being used for which : " the man as told me" THE QUEEX'S EXGLISH. 255 357. The South-Eastern directors seem to want the schoolmaster also. On the back of the tickets for the fast trains, we read the following precious piece of English grammar : — " This ticket is not transferable, only avail- able for the station named thereon." This implying, of course, that using it for the station named on it, is part of the process of transferring it to some other person. 358. On a certain railway the following intelligible notice appears : — " Hereafter, when trains moving in an opposite direction are approaching each other on separate lines, conductors and engineers will be required to bring then respective trains to a dead halt before the point of meeting, and be very careful not to proceed till each train has passed the other." 359. In the Jforning Chronicle's account of Lord Macaulay's funeral occurred the fol- lowing sentence : — " When placed upon the ropes over the grave, and while being gra- dually lowered into the earth, the organ again pealed forth." Here, of course, on any possi- ble grammatical understanding of the words, it was the organ which was placed over the grave, and was being lowered into the earth. Akin to this was the following notice, sent to 256 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. A monster balloon. " so fully proved, than . ." my house the other day by a jeweller : — " The brooches would have been sent before, but have been unwell." 360. After one of Mr. Glaisher's balloon ascents, we read that, " After partaking of a hearty breakfast, the balloon was brought into the town amidst the cheers and congratula- tions of the major part of the inhabitants." They may well have applauded a balloon which had performed so unheard-of a feat. 361. In a leading article of the Times, not long since, was this beautiful piece of slipshod English : — " The atrocities of the middle passage, which called into action the Wilberforces and Clarksons of the last generation, were not so fully proved, and were certainly not more harrowing in their circumstances, than are the iniquities perpetrated upon the wretched Chinese." 362. Here you will observe we are by the form of the sentence committed to the combi- nation of "were not so fully proved . . . than." This is a fault into which careless writers con- stantly fall : the joining together two clauses with a third, whose construction suits the latter of them, but not the former. " He was more popular, but not so much respected as his THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH, 25^ father." Nothing can be easier than to avoid the fault. Transpose your third clause, letting it follow jour first, and constructing it with- out reference to your second. " He was more popular than his father, but not so much respected." The mind of the hearer easily fills up the ellipsis after " respected," and the sentence sounds well. Thus the Times' writer might have said, " were not so fully proved as are the iniquities perpetrated upon the wretched Chinese, and were cer- tainly not more harrowing in their circum- stances." 363. There is another way, making the sentence correct indeed, but exceedingly clumsy. We may say, " tie was more popular than, but not so much respected as, his father." But to my mind, this is almost worse than the incorrect sentence. It exhibits punctiliousness in all its stolidity, without any application of the sound, or effect, of the sentence. 364. And just let me, as I pass, notice one Excuse of defence which has been deliberately set up for ing. English of this kind. It has been said that one who sits in his study, writing, at leisure, may very well find time to look about him and weigh the structure of his sentences ; but s 258 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. that the contributors of articles to the < press are obliged to write always in a hu and have no such opportunities of consider- ation. 365. Now this plea either fails in its object of excusing the practice complained of, or it proves too much. It fails, if it does not assign sufficient cause for the phenomenon : if, as I believe, it is not mere haste which causes a man to write such English as this, but deficiency in his power of putting thoughts into words : it proves too much, if it really does sufficiently excuse the writers • for if such writing is the inevitable result of the hasty publication of these critiques, why is not more time given for their production, and why are not more pains bestowed on them 1 For surely it is an evil, for a people to be daily accustomed to read English expressed thus obscurely and ungrammatically : it tends to confuse thought, and to deprive language of its proper force, and by this means to degrade us as a nation in the rank of thinkers and speakers. Wonderful %QQ t i am indebted for the following: to capacity of a ° windmill. a correspondent: — "To Millees. — To be let, a windmill, containing three pair of stones, a bakehouse, corn shop, and about THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 259 five acres of land, dwelling house, and garden." 366a. In the Times, a few days since, an Ghosts sum- t moned by aavertisement thus ended : " If dead, his advertise- ment. wife or children may apply." 367. The following sentence, occurring in Powers of a night-watch- a hotel advertisement, may serve to illustrate man. a very common mistake : " Its night-watch- man enables gentlemen to be called at any time, and, hourly patrolling the building, adds greatly to the comfort and security of all." Now we are sensible of an absurdity here. But what is the mistake ? It is not, you see, that some word, which to any ordinary reader has but one application, may be so combined as to bear other applications : but the incon- gruity is inevitable. A man who hourly patrols the building enables gentlemen to be called at any time : i.e., by some arrange- ment which he makes, puts it in their power to be called, by somebody. Whereas the inten- tion plainly was to notify that, owing to the fact of a night-watchman being employed, gentlemen can be called at any time by the night-watchman. The mistake is one easy to understand, though called by rather a hard name. It is the confounding of the abstract with the concrete. The fact of the night- 8 2 260 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. watchman being employed is in its nature abstract : is a consideration apart from persons and things which pnt it forth in action. This fact is independent of the particular man employed as night-watchman, and is the source of the advantages arising from it, who- ever may happen to be so employed. inflated lan- 368. I have received more than one letter guage in prayers. from a gentleman who is much troubled by the inflated language of a book of prayers used in a school of small and ignorant boys. It would not become me to bring forward, as subjects for mirth, sentences and phrases whose meaning is so solemn : I can only deal with the complaint in a general way. And in doing so, I may say that there can hardly be a graver offence in the compilers of books of devotion, than this of using hard words and inflated sentences. If there is one essential requisite in a written prayer, it is, that it provide as much as possible for every w T ord being understood and felt by those that are to use it. My correspondent tells me that the w T riter of w 7 hom he complains invariably uses felicity for happiness, avocations for employments, and the like. If I might pre- sume to counsel the teachers of schools and heads of families, I would say, cast aside THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 261 every book of prayers which, offends in this way. The simple and well-known collects of the Prayer-book, or even your own sense of the wants of your school or household, will 'furnish you with better, because more easy and real language of devotion than these high- flown manuals. And in default of either of these resources, I may venture to say that a school or a family rising from the reverent utterance of the Lord's prayer only, will have really 'prayed more, than one which has been wearied with ten minutes of a form such as that of which my correspondent complains. 369. Another criticism whioh I cannot help Nicknames L and expres- making, is on the practice of using, in general ^ ions °* e J n * r c '- ° deannent. society, unmeaning and ridiculous familiar nicknames or terms of endearment. A more offensive habit cannot be imagined, or one which more effectually tends to the disparage- ment of those who indulge in it. I find myself, after the departure of the ladies from the dining-room, sitting next to an agreeable and sensible man. I get into interesting conver- sation with him. We seek a corner in the drawing-room afterwards, and continue it. His age and experience make him a treasure- house of information and practical wisdom. Yet, as talk trieth the man, infirmities begin 262 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. to appear here and there, and my respect for my friend suffers diminution. By-and-by, a decided weak point is detected : and further on, it becomes evident that in the building up of his mental and personal fabric there is" somewhere a loose stratum which will not hold under pressure. At last the servants begin to make those visits to the room, usually occurring about ten o'clock, which begin with gazing about, and result in a rush at some recognised object, with a summons from the coachman below. I am just doubt- ing whether I have not about come to the end of my companion, when a shrill voice from the other side of the room calls out, " Sammy, love ! " All is out. He has a wife who does not know better, and he has never taught her better. This is the secret. The skeleton in their cupboard is a child's rattle. A man may as well suck his thumb all his life, as talk, or allow to be talked to him, such drivelling nonsense. It must detract from manliness of character, and from proper self-respect : and is totally inconsistent with the good taste, and consideration, even in the least things, for the feelings of others, which are always present in persons of good breeding and Christian courtesy. Never let the world THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 2C3 look through these chinks into the boudoir. Even thence, if there be- real good sense present, all that is childish and ridiculous will be banished ; but at all events keep it from the world. It is easy for husband and wife, it is easy for brothers and sisters, to talk to one another as none else could talk, without a word of this minced-up English. One soft tone, from lips on which dwells wisdom, is worth all the " loveys " and u deareys " which become the unmeaning expletives of the vulgar. 370. And as we have ventured to intrude Talking nonsense into the boudoir, let us go one step further to children up, and peep into the nursery also. And here again I would say, never talk, never allow to be talked, to children, the contemptible non- sense which is so often the staple of nursery conversation. Never allow foolish and un- meaning nicknames to come into use in your family. We all feel, as we read of poor James I., with his "Steenie " for the Duke of Buckingham, and " Baby Charles " for his unfortunate son, that he cannot have been worthy to rule in England. We often find foolish names like these rooted in the practice of a family, and rendering grown-up men and women ridiculous in the eyes of strangers, 264 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. And mind, in saying this 3 I have no wish to proscribe all abridgments, or familiar forms of names for onr children, but only those which are unmeaning or absurd. I hold " Charley" to be perfectly legitimate : "Harry" is bound up with the glories of English history: Ned, and Dick, and Tom, and Jack, and Jem, and Bill, though none of them half so nice as the names which they have superseded, are too firmly fixed in English practice and English play, ever to be banished. Kate has almost become a name of itself ; few maidens can carry the weight of Eleanor, whereas there never was a lass whom Nelly did not become. The same might be said of Miliy and Amelia, and of many others. But the case of every one of such recognised nicknames differs widely from that, where some infantine lisping of a child's own name is adopted as the desig- nation for life : or where a great rifleman with a bushy beard is called to hold his mamma's skein of wool by the astounding title of "Baby." Sir j— m— 371. All perhaps do not know the story of and the tired L L J nurse. the kind old gentleman and his carriage. He was riding at his ease one very hot day, when he saw a tired nursemaid toiling along the footpath, carrying a great heavy boy. His THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 265 heart softened : he stopped his carriage, and offered her a seat : adding, however, this : " Mind," said he, " the moment yon begin to talk any nonsense to that boy, yon leave my carriage." All went well for some minntes. The good woman was watchful, and bit her lips. But alas ! we are all caught tripping sometimes. After a few hundred yards, and a little jogging of the boy on her knee, burst forth, " Georgy porgy ! ride in coachy poachy !" It was fatal. The check-string was pulled, the steps let down, and the nurse and boy consigned to the dusty foot- path as before. 372. This story is true. The person mainly concerned in it was a well-known philanthropic baronet of the last generation, and my informant was personally acquainted with him. A similar story, a correspondent reminds me, is told of Dr. Johnson. 373. As I am sending these sheet's to the Extract press, I receive a copy of the Leeds Mercury Leeds Mer- cv/ry. for Nov. 12, 1863, containing a leading article under the title of " English for the English," which touches on an abuse of our language unnoticed in these pages, but thoroughly de- serving of reprobation. It is so appropriate to my present subject that I shall venture 266 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. to cite a large portion of it almost as it stands. 374. " While the Dean," the writer says, " took so much trouble to expose one danger with which our mother tongue is threatened, he took no notice whatever of another peril which to us seems much more serious. He dealt only w x ith the insubordinate little ad- verbs and pronouns of native growth, which sometimes intrude into forbidden places, and ignored altogether the formidable inva- sion of foreign nouns, adjectives, and verbs which promises ere long to transform the manly English language into a sort of mongrel international slang. A class of writers has sprung up who appear to think it their special business to ( enrich ' the language by dragging into it, without any attempt at assimilation, contributions from all the tongues of the earth. The result is a wretched piece of patchwork, which may have charms in the eyes of some people, but which is certainly an abomina- tion in the eyes of the genuine student of language." 375. " We need only glance into one of the periodical representatives of fashionable lite- rature, or into a novel of the day, to see how THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 2G7 serious this assault upon the purity of the English language has become. The chances are more than equal that we shall fall in with a writer who considers it a point of honour to choose all his most emphatic words from a French vocabulary, and who would think it a lamentable falling off in his style, did he write half a dozen sentences without employing at least half that number of foreign words. His heroes are always marked by an air distingue; his vile men are sure to be biases; his lady friends never merely dance or dress well, they dance or dress a merveille ; and he himself when lolling on the sofa under the spirit of laziness does not simply enjoy his rest, he luxuriates in the dolce far nienie, and wonders when he will manage to begin his magnum opus. And so he carries us through his story, running off into hackneyed French, Italian, or Latin expressions, when- ever he has anything to say which he thinks should be graphi Dally or emphatically said. It really seems as if he thought the English language too meagre, or too commonplace a dress, in which to clothe his thoughts. The tongue which gave a noble utterance to the thoughts of Shakespere and Milton is alto- gether insufficient to express the more cos- 268 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. mopolitan ideas of Smith, or Tomkins, or Jenkins ! " 376. "We have before us an article from the pen of a very clever writer, and, as it appears in a magazine which specially pro- fesses to represent the ' best society,' it may be taken as a good specimen of the style. It describes a dancing party, and we discover for the first time how much learning is necessary to describe a l hop ' properly. The reader is informed that all the people at the dance belong to the beau monde, as may be seen at a coup oVoeil ; the demi-monde is scrupulously excluded, and in fact everything about it bespeaks the haut ton of the whole affair. A lady who has been happy in her hair-dresser is said to be coiffee a ravir. Then there is the bold man to describe. Having acquired the savoir /aire, he is never afraid of making a faux pas, but no matter what kind of con- versation is started plunges at once in medias res. Following him is the fair debu- tante, who is already on the look-out for un bon parti, but whose nez retrousse is a decided obstacle to her success. She is of course accompanied by mamma en grande toilette, who, entre nous, looks rather ridee even in the gaslight. Then, lest the writer should seem THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 269 frivolous, he suddenly abandons the descrip- tion of the dances, vis-a-vis and dos-a-clos, to tell us that Homer becomes tiresome when he sings of Boco^? ttotvicl c/ llpr] twice in a page. The supper calls forth a corresponding amount of learning, and the writer concludes his article after having aired his Greek, his Latin, his French, and, in a subordinate way, his English." 377. "Of course, this style has admirers and imitators. It is showy and pretentious, and everything that is showy and pretentious has admirers. The admixture of foreign phrases with our plain English produces a kind of Brummagem sparkle which people whose appreciation is limited to the superficial imagine to be brilliance. Those who are deficient in taste and art education not un- frequently prefer a dashing picture by young Daub to a glorious cartoon by Raphael. The bright colouring of the one far more than counterbalances the lovely but unobtrusive grace of the other. In a similar way, young students are attracted by the false glitter of the French-paste school of composition, and instead of forming their sentences upon the beautiful models of the great English masters, they twist them into all sorts of unnatural 270 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. shapes for no other end than that they may introduce a few inappropriate French or Latin words, the use of which they have learned to think looks smart. Of course, the penny-a- liners are amongst the most enthusiastic followers of the masters of this style. They not only think it brilliant, but they know it to be profitable, inasmuch as it adds consider- ably to their ability to say a great deal about nothing. The public sees a great deal in the newspapers about ' recherche dinners' and ' sumptuous dejeuners ' (sometimes eaten at night), and about the eclat with which a meeting attended by the ' elite of the county ' invariably passes oft; but they get but a trifling specimen of the masses of similar rubbish which daily fall upon the unhappy editors. The consequence of all this is that the public is habituated to a vicious kind of slang utterly unworthy to be called a lan- guage. Even the best educated people find it difficult to resist the contagion of fashion in such a thing as conversation, and if some kind of stand is not made against this inva- sion, pure English will soon only exist in the works of our dead authors."* * A correspondent says, " In your next edition pray THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 271 378. " But it is not only on literary grounds that we think the bespanglement of our lan- guage with French and other foreign phrases is to be deprecated. Morality has something to say in the matter. It is a fact that things are said under the flimsy veil of foreign diction which could not very well be said in plain English. To talk in the presence of ladies about disreputable women by the plain English names which belong to them is not considered to display a very delicate mind, but anybody may talk about the demi-monde without fearing either a blush or a frown. Yet the idea conveyed is precisely the same in the one case as in the other; and inasmuch as words can only be indelicate when they convey an indelicate idea, we should think that the French words ought to be under the same disabilities as the English ones. In like manner, things sacred are often made strangely familiar by the intervention of a French die- dispose of those Gallicisms which are "becoming too preva- lent : ' The king assisted at the ceremony :' ' My brother has come to pass a few days with me :' instead of the English was present and to spend." For the former of these there is, I believe, no excuse. But the latter usage, " passing time," is surely found in all periods of our lite- rature : and the good English substantive "pastime" ia a voucher for it. 272 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. tionary. * Persons whose reverence for the Deity is properly shown in their English con- versation by a becoming unwillingness to make a light use of His holy Name, have no hesitation in exclaiming Mori Dieu ! in frivo- lous conversation. The English name for the Father of evil is not considered to be a very reputable noun, but its French synonym is to be heard in ' the best society.' Far more telling illustrations than these could easily be found, but we have no inclination to seek them. Ideas which no decent person would ever think of expressing before a mixed com- pany are certainly often spoken and written in French, and in our opinion they do not lose a particle of their coarseness by being dressed up in foreign clothes. We think, therefore, that the interests of morality as well as of pure taste concur in calling upon those who have influence with the public to set their faces against this vicious style." 379. I need not say that with every word of this I heartily concur. It is really quite refreshing to read in a newspaper, and a pro- vincial one too, so able and honest an exposure of one of the worst faults of our daily and weekly press. Use of ex- 379a. I am tempted to add, in this second pletives. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 273 edition, some remarks on the use, in speaking and writing, of terms which either seem to be, or really are, unneeded by the sense. 3795. To prohibit the use of expletives altogether, would perhaps seem hard. In conversation, they seem to help the timid, to give time to the unready, to keep up a plea- sant semblance of familiarity, and, in a word, to grease the wheels of talk ; in writing, we often want them to redress the balance of a halting sentence, when any other way of doing so would mar the sense ; or to give weight to a term otherwise feeble, or to fill out a termination which, without them, would be insignificant in sound. For these reasons, the occasional use of expletives must be tolerated ; and that style of speaking or writing which should abandon them altogether would appear to us harsh and rugged. 379c. I said, the occasional use. Modera- tion ought to be observed : and where it is not, there is just ground for complaint. The man is properly found fault with who inter- lards his talk at every turn with " You see," and "You know." Both these terms have their use, and if that use be disregarded in an indiscriminate profusion of them, thqy will become vapid and meaningless. They serve, T 274 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. when used as quasi-expletives, just to keep the hearer up to the mark of the knowledge you are imparting to him, and should be used only as applying to facts or ideas of which he is, or should be, already in possession. "wh 1 '" 37 9d There are other expletives which serve merely to indicate the sequence of the course of talk, or the frame of mind in which it is continued. A simple question is asked ; and your friend's answer begins with " Well." Little as the* word means, it just does this service : it puts the respondent en rapport with the questioner : he intends by it to say that he does not absolutely repudiate the inquiry : that, so far, is well, and that we have common ground up to this point. Or the first word of the answer is " Why, — " a par- ticle, of which the meaning is not quite so easy to assign ; but I suppose it gives a kind of du- bitative aspect to what follows : introduces a deliberative and not quite certain reply ; or perhaps slightly rallies the querist on some obvious element in the reply which his ques- tion shows him to have overlooked. " What would you do first, if you were to fall down ?" " Why get up again, of course." So that the use of such prefatory particles is, I con- ceive, by no means to be proscribed. It THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 275 should however in the main be confined to oral communication or dramatic dialogue, and not be admitted in the style of a writer. 37 9e. Yet even in written composition « at all." there are certain expressions more or less . nearly approaching to expletives, the use of which cannot well be prohibited. I am challenged by one of my correspondents, who gives a list of sentences in which I have used the expression " at all," to say what difference in the meaning of any of them there would be if the words were struck out. My answer must be, in accordance with the foregoing remarks, that the difference in meaning would perhaps not be great, but it would be quite enough to justify the use of the words, as any intelligent reader may at once perceive. " Thou hast not delivered thy people at all" (Exod. v. 23), is surely very distinct, at all events in the feeling of utter desolation ex- pressed, from "Thou hast not delivered thy people." " If thou do at all forget the Lord" (Deut. viii. 19), makes the hypothesis much more complete than it would be without the qualifying words. Or, to take another notable example, where the difference would seem to be less than in the others, " God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all" (1 John i. 5), t 2 276 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. who does not see that by the words "at all" every possibility of even the least shade o A darkness existing in Him is altogether ex- cluded % So that, when my correspondent designates these words as a feeble expletive, which adds nothing to the meaning of the sentence to which it is attached, I cannot agree with his opinion, nor do I think that the majority of my readers will. 379/. If the origin of the phrase is to be sought for, I know not any other than may be found in the requirements of speech itself. What the Apostle, in the original Greek of 1 John i. 5, expressed by the strong double negation, (TKoria kv avrS ovk ecrriv ovSefxia, we could not in English render by " there is not in Him no darkness," because in our language the doubling of a negation destroys instead of strengthening it : we had recourse to another way of expressing total exclusion, "there is in Him no darkness at all;'' ll at all," i. e., taking the assertion even up to the measure of all, — " altogether" — providing for, and taking into consideration, every sup- posable exception, every qualifying circum- stance. The preposition " at" in this phrase, has the same sense as in " at least," " at best," and the like. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 271 379?. "And the like." This is also desig- "and the y ° like." nated by my correspondent as a feeble expletive, and indeed as an " Irishism" ISTo donbt it may be so used as to become an expletive ; but I am not conscious of having so used it : at least, in every one of the sen- tences which he quotes, it does full service, as shortly comprehending other examples of the same kind as those already cited. 37 9h. Let me say a word on expletives of Unmeanint J x exclama- another kind : exclamations of surprise, or of tions - any other feeling, which taken by themselves cany no meaning. It is perhaps impossible to avoid them altogether : speech will break out when emotion is excited : and " You dorCt say so," or "Indeed !", or "Bear me f" is sometimes heard even from persons best able to give an account of what they say. Yet it may not be amiss to remember, that idle words are seldom quite harmless; and to impress on ourselves, that the fewer we use of such expletives the better. This was strikingly brought before me during intercourse with Italians last winter in Rome. I had observed that my Italian friends often in their talk uttered some sounds very like our "dear, dear !" and at first I thought that rny ear must have deceived me. But I soon found £78 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. that it was so : and that sometimes the excla- mation even took the form of " dear me !" The explanation of course is obvious. The Italians were exclaming " Dio, Dio !" and the fuller form was " Dio mio !" And the re- flection arising from it was as obvious: viz., that it thus seems probable that our unmean- ing words, "dear, dear!" and " dear me!" are, in fact, nothing but a form of taking the sacred Name in vain, borrowed from the use of a people with whom we were once in much closer intercourse than we now are. Thus it would seem that the idle word is not quite free from blame. Concluding 380. But it is time that this little volume idvice, drew to an end. And if I must conclude it with some advice to my readers, it shall be that which may be inferred from these exam- ples, and from the way in which I have been dealing with them. Be simple, be unaffected, be honest in your speaking and writing. Never use a long word where a short one will do. Call a spade a spade, not a well-known oblong instrument of manual industry ; let home be home, not a residence; a place a place, not a locality ; and so of the rest. Where a short word will do, you always lose by using a long one. You lose in clearness ; THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 279 you lose in honest expression of your meaning ; and, in the estimation of all men who are qualified to judge, you lose in reputation for ability. The only true way to shine, even in this false world, is to be modest and unas- suming. Falsehood may be a very thick crust, but in the course of time, truth will find a place to break through. Elegance of language may not be in the power of all of us ; but simplicity and straightforwardness are. "Write much as you would speak ; speak as you think. If with your inferiors, speak no coarser than usual ; if with your superiors, no finer. Be what you say ; and, within the rules of prudence, say what you are. 381. Avoid all oddity of expression. No one ever was a gainer by singularity in words, or in pronunciation. The truly wise man will so speak, that no one may observe how he speaks. A man may show great knowledge of chemistry by carrying about bladders of strange gases to breathe ; but he will enjoy better health, and find more time for busi- ness, who lives on the common air. When I hear a person use a queer expression, or pro- nounce a name in reading differently from his neighbours, the habit always goes down, in my estimate of him, with a minus sign 280 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. before it ; stands on the side of deficit, not of credit. 382. Avoid likewise all dang words. There is no greater nuisance in society than a talker of dang. It is only fit (when innocent, which it seldom is) for raw schoolboys, and one-term freshmen, to astonish their sisters with. Talk as sensible men talk : use the easiest words in their commonest meaning. Let the sense conveyed, not the vehicle in which it is con- veyed, be your object of attention. 383. Once more, avoid in conversation all singularity of accuracy. One of the bores of society is the talker who is always setting you right ; w r ho, when you report from the paper that 10,000 men fell in some battle, tells you it was 9,970 ; who, when you describe your walk as two miles out and back, assures you it wanted half a furlong of it. Truth does not consist in minute accuracy of detail, but in conveying a right impression ; and there are vague ways of speaking, that are truer than strict fact would be. When the Psalmist said, " Eivers of waters run down mine eyes, because men keep not thy law," he did not state the fact, but he stated a truth deeper than fact, and truer. 384. Talk to please, not yourself, but your THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 281 neighbour to his edification. What a rea A pleasure it is to sit by a cheerful, unas- suming, sensible talker ; one who gives vol an even share in the conversation and in his attention ; one who leaves on your memory his facts a^d his opinions, not himself who uttered them, not the words in which they were uttered. 38-5. All are not gentlemen by birth ; but all may be gentlemen in openness, in modesty of language, in attracting nd man's attention by singularities, and giving no man offence by forwardness ; for it is this, in matter of speech . and style, which is the sure mark of good taste and good breeding. 386. These stray notes on spelling and Conclusion, speaking have been written more as contri- butions to discussion, than as attempts to decide in doubtful cases. The decision of matters such as those which I have treated is not made by any one man or set of men ; cannot be brought about by strong writing, or vehement assertion : but depends on influ- ences wider than any one man's view, and taking longer to operate than the life of any one generation. It depends on the direction and deviations of the currents of a nation's thoughts, and the influence exercised on 282 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. words by events beyond man's control. Gram- marians and rhetoricians may set bounds to language : but usage will break over in spite of them. And I have ventured to think that he may do some service who, instead of standing and protesting where this has been the case, observes, and points out to others, the existing phenomena, and the probable account to be given of them. NOTES. NOTE A. Mr. Serjeant Manning has published a very interesting and learned pamphlet on "the Character and Origin of the Possessive Augment in English and its Cognate Dia- lects." Without pronouncing any opinion as to the theory which the learned Serjeant adopts, I may say that the reader will find in his pamphlet a very full and instructive discussion of all points relating to the ques- tion, coupled with an extraordinary amount of informa- tion and erudition. He describes himself as i ' annum agens octogesimum tertium ;" a circumstance which does not render the book less remarkable. NOTE B. These paragraphs have provoked a somewhat vehement rejoinder in a late number of a nonconformist news- paper, in which they are characterised as " a sufficiently ill-intentioned, if not very powerful, assault" on that journal. Two remarks may be pertinent in reply. The first, that no assault on any paper, as such, was ever contemplated by me, but as strong a protest as I could make against the most objectionable principle laid down in the critique, and an endeavour, by exposure of the blunder, to show how much the opinion was worth. The blunder is now rather amusingly defended thus : "We accidentally substituted for the less known 284 NOTES. Epsenetus what is to the classical scholar the more familiar and analogously formed name SophjBnetus.'" Now as regards the classical scholar, — Epametus, the writer on cookery, is about as often mentioned in Athen^us, as Sophsenetus in Xenophon : and the matter in question being St. Paul's lists of salutations, I do not see why the critic should have gone to Xenophon for his example, unless he had believed that the name occurred in St. Paul also. The second remark shall be an extract from a letter written by one of the first nonconformist biblical scholars of the day : — " I felt rather vexed, that so respectable a newspaper should have inserted the in- excusably stupid and grossly ignorant remarks of one of its correspondents, in reference to your articles on the Queen's English." NOTE C. There is an especial reason for stating that this sen- tence is printed verbatim as delivered in St. George's Hall, at Canterbury. NOTE D. I have been favoured with some notices from a distin- guished correspondent, which have caused me to alter what was in the first edition the tone of these para- graphs as regarded the phrases in question. There seems every reason to believe that hind and sort have been regarded by our best writers as nouns of number, and as such joined with the pronoun in the plural. Thus we have in Shakespeare, "King Lear," Act IL, Scene 2 : "These kind of knaves I know." NOTES. 28i 4 Twelfth Night," Act I., Scene 5 : " That crow so at these kind of fools." " Othello/' Act III., Scene 3 : " There are a kind of men so loose in soul." In Pope : "The next objection is, that these sort of authors are poor." Examples are also stated to occur in Lord Bacon, Swift, and Addison. NOTE E. It has been suggested that the "o/" in "the city of Canterbury," may be territorial : that as it is rendered in Latin by " de," this "de" may be the same that we find in " H envious de Estria." But I cannot quite agree with this view : because though it might seem to be justified in the case of a town, it clearly would not be in that of a book, or in any other in which the territorial connexion is out of the question. NOTE F. I venture to reprint here, as of great interest, Mr. Ellis's letter to the Reader, of May 7, 1864 : "'IT'S ME. "To the Editor of The Reader. "Colney Hatch- Park, 30 April, 1864, "Sir, — In reference to your remarks on it's me in your notice of Dean Alford's 'Plea for the Queen's English,' I consider that the phrase it is I is a modernism, or rather a grammaticism— that is, it was never in po- 386 NOTES. pular use, but was introduced solely on some grammati- cal hypothesis as to having the sam ) case before and after the verb is. It does not appear to have been con- sonant with the feelings of Teutonic tribes to use tbtj nominative of the personal pronouns as a predicate. To them — and therefore to English people — it is I is just as strange as est ego, ttrrt lya, would be to Latin or Greek. These last languages require ego sum, \yw sipu (Matt. xiv. 27 ; Mark vi. 50 ; John vi. 20). The predicate was here simply omitted. In Gothic we have precisely the same construction, ih im (John vi. 20). The Eng- lish Wycliffite translations both give / am. But the Anglo-Saxon version, like the modern German, is not content with leaving the predicate unexpressed, and we find ic hit eom ; High German, ich bin es ; literally, / am it; namely, that which you see. The Heliand para- phrase is very explicit (Schmeller's ed., p. 90, line 2), i Ih Mum that barn Godes* ('I am the Son of God'). The Welsh and Gaelic try to be emphatic, the first saying myfi ydyw (q. d. myself am), and the second, is mise a ta ann (q. d. it's myself that's living). But of course we do not look to these languages as a guide to English. The Danish is very peculiar and important on account of its intimate relation with English. As in English, the dative and accusative cases of the personal pronouns now coincide in Danish, J eg, mig (I, me) ; Du, dig (thou, thee) ; Han, ham (he, him). We find the fol- lowing rule laid down in Tobiesen's Ddnische Sprach- lehre (Sternhagen's ed., 1828, p. 215):— 'After the impersonal verbs, det er and det bliver (it is), the per- sonal pronouns jeg, du, han are not used in the nomi- native, but in the dative, as der er mig der har gjort det (it's me that did it) ; det er dig, som har vceret mester derfor (it's thee who was its master) ; det bliver ham, som vi mile tale med (it's him that we wish to speak with) ; [where also the construction of the relative and preposition is English] ; audi similarly in the plural : det er os } jer, dem (it's us, yoti, them).' This is per* NOTES. 287 'ectly explicit, and shows the same construction as the English ; but, in the Testament, the wish to he uncol- loquial has apparently forced the translator to depart from the usual custom when the words are given to Jesus, but he returns to it when they are echoed by Peter (Matt. xiv. 27, 28). 'Jesus — sagde : — det erjeg, — men Peder — sagde : Herre, dersom det er dig, ba byd mig,' &c. ('Jesus said, It is I ; but Peter said, Lord, if it is thee, bid me,' &c.) The conclusion seems to-be that it's me is good English, and it's I is a mistaken purism. We have now, I think, come to regard the objective form of the personal pronoun as a predicative form, and this will justify thatfs him, although the Danes still say * denne er han ('that's he'). We are therefore in the same condition as the French with their 'Jest moi,' though we have not quite reached their ' lui n'osait pas ' (' him didn't dare'). "Alexander J. Ellis." It will be curious if, after all, it should be proved that our much -abused colloquial phrase is the really good English, and its rival ' ' a mistaken purism." ADDITIONAL NOTE. A friend has directed my attention to the fact that ia "The New Whig Guide," printed in 1824, the word "talented" is noticed as an Irish expression, equivalent to the English "clever." THE END. / 2^5'