^"TW* >3t -^ tdSf^ '-> Tl- ^ . 3#'-y-»i^ 5>!3^^ > r. iS- 3 >>:> ■^^yg^. > >» ^r^S » >)» ^^ »►• > >» " -, ^^ ► , . i «•*• ■> -4 ■:•> - J - »5>j > J >:»» -> >^ :■ ,? > > > ^»> ••> •^^' i> :> »>»» j> ^ > » '> *> ^ ,.:x -> >. > >> '> > . » ' , > >>/>:>- -» » -'^5— » -> 3> >5>:> >, -^ -, -» > f> >t^ >■> ^..^ >5>>^ u v^ ^>J THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH: Bim) ptcs m f pcalung i\\\^ f pdling. BY HENRY ALFORD, D.D., DEAN OF CANTERBURY. LONDON : STRAHAN & Co. CAMBRIDGE : DEIGHTON, BELL, ib CO. 1864. LONDON : miADIIt RV ANLl EVANS, PRINTERS, WIIITBFRIAR.S. r INDEX. PAGE Introductory ...... 1 Omitting the "u" in words ending in " -our " . 10 "Neighbour" 11 "Control" 13 " Tenor" and " tenour" 13 Phonetic spelling . ..... 14 "Ent" and "ant" 18 " Ecstasy" and "apostasy" .... . 19 "Lay" and "lie" 20 The apostrophe of the genitive singular 20 What is the apostrophe ? . . . . 23 Plurals of compound names .... . 25 "Attorneys" and "moneys" 27 "Means" 27 "News" 28 "Mewses" ....... 28 "Diocess" or "diocese" .... 30 Division of a word between lines 30 "To" and "too" 32 "Benefitted" . 33 "Lose "and "loose" 33 " Sanitary " and " sanitory " .... 34 1 o^(u;i ^^ ^'a INDEX. "Pharaoh" Mis-sjiellinp; in newspapers "Ize" or "ise" . "Show" and "shew" , Pronunciation — misuse of the aspirate " A " or " an " before a vowel . "Such an one" .... " Only one hen in Venice " "Idear" Calling "u" "oo" . "neritor," "curator" "Manifold" "Prophecy" .... "Alm8,"&c "Cowper" .... "Cucumber" . . . . . Mispronunciation of Scripture names Examples of alwve ... "Drbane" "Junias" "Covetous" .... " The Revelation " . . . . Criticism in the "Nonconformist" . Usage and construction Idiom ...... Lliumatic mode of address . Elliptical UKages Cii]iri<'e of idiom "Methinks" Example from the Greek . P]Hpken and written En^dish "Those kind of things" . "This" and "that" Triple meaning of "that" "This much," " tliat much " "That ill" " Ever so " or " ncTcr BO " INDEX. Vll PAOE "What was," "what was not" . . . . 77 " No " and " yes " the same 77 "Oldest inmate" 78 "Lesser" 78 "Replace" 80 "Enclosure" . . . 81 "Who" and "which" 83 Use of "but" 85 "As "and "so" 86 "Had rather" 87 CoUoc^uial contractions ...... 87 Feminine substantives ...... 88 "Centre" 94 "By-and-by" 95 " Endeavour ourselves " .... 96 "To be mistaken" 97 " Good looking "or " well lookbg " . 98 "Latter," of more than two ; "last," of only two 98 "Superior," "inferior" .... 100 "Talented" . 100 "Gifted" . 101 "To leave," absolute . 101 " Could not get " . 102 " Does not belong " 103 "To progress " . 103 Nouns made into verbs ..... . 106 "To treat of," or " to treat" . 107 "The Book Genesis," "the City London" . . 107 " Reverend " and " reverent " . 109 Subjective and objective words .... . 110 " Or " and " nor " in a negative sentence . Ill Elliptical sentences . 112 General rule in such cases .... . 113 Arrangement of words in sentences . 113 Ordinary rule ....•• . 114 Emphasis .....••• . 115 Parenthesis in the case of clauses . . 118 vm INDEX. Examples from Scripture Grammar of our authorised version PAGE 121 123 .124 of Shakspearo ..... Best way of proceelural8 " Twice one are two" Cases not understood Account of these usages . Use of certain conjunctional particles Violation of this rule Use of " excejit " for " unless " . "Without". "A mutual friend" . " We will write you" "And which" " Didn't use," "hadn't used," &c. "Riding" or "driving" . "I take it" .... " The earib 8 revolving " . "Predicate" for "predict" . "If for "whether" ' ' Seldom or never "... "Like 1 do" Nouns of iiuiiiIxT .... " I know niilliin(5 l>y myself" explained " The three puysjust mentioned " . " Ucli^ioii ill the ariiirhnir" " Tlie rixht 111:111 in the right place " " His wrong hlijuwrs " AiiibiguouH dcxci'iptiona of men " WanU cutting " .... Deterioration of the language it«elf Sources of our language . PAGE 193 193 194 195 196 197 197 198 199 200 200 202 203 203 204 205 205 206 207 210 211 212 213 214 216 216 216 216 •-'17 218 219 220 220 221 000 aamatd 222 223 • INDEX. XI PAGE Process of degeneration : whence mainly arising . 225 in what consisting . 226 Dialect of our journals . 226 A " party " . 227 Technical sense of " party " . . 228 "Proceed" . 228 "Partake" . 229 "Locality" . 229 " Apartments "...... . 229 " Evince " . 229 "Commerce" . 230 "Eventuate" . 231 " Avocation " ...... . 231 " Persuasion" . 231 "To sustain" . 232 " To experience " . 232 "To accord" . 233 " To entail " . 233 "Desirability" . 233 "Reliable" . 233 "Allude" . 233 Examples of the deterioration .... . 234 Excuse of hasty writing .... . 238 Wonderful capacity of a windmill . .239 Powers of a night-watchmau .... . 239 Inflated language in prayeis .... . 240 Nicknames and expressions of endearment . 241 Talking nonsense to children .... . 243 Sir J M and the tired nux-se . 245 Concluding advice ...... . 252 Conclusion . 255 Note . 257 A PLEA FOE THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH, 1. I have called these "stray notes" "A introduc- Plea for the Queen's English." 2. I must begin by explaining what I mean by the term. It is one rather familiar and conventional, than strictly accurate. The Queen (God bless her !) is, of com'se, no more the proprietor of the English language than any one of us. Nor does she, nor do the Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled, possess one particle of right to make or un- make a word in the language. But we use the phrase, the Queen's English, in another sense ; one not without example in some similar phrases. We speak of the Queens Highway, not meaning that Her Majesty is possessed of that portion of road, but that it is a high road of the land, as distinguished frorr by-roads and private roads : open tu all of B THE QUEEyS EXGLISH. common right, and the gcncml property of our countiy. And so it is with the Qneeii's Ewjli»h. It is, so to speak, this land's great highway uf thought and speech ; and seeing that the Sovereign in this realm is the person round whom all our common interests gather, the source of our civil duties and centre of oiu* civil rights, the Querns English is not an unmeaning phrase, but one which may serve to teach us some j)rofitable lessons with regard to our language, and its use and abuse. 3. I called our common English tongue the highway of thought and speech ; and it may not be amiss to cairy on this similitude further. The Queen's highway, now so broad and smooth, was once a mere track over an unen- closed country. It was levelled, hardened, widened, by very slow degrees. Of all this trouble, the jmsser-by sees no trace now. Ho bowls along it with ease in a vehicle, which j\ few centuries ago would have been broken to pieces in a deep rut, or wotild have come to grief in a bottondess swamp. There were no Croydon baskct.s, in the day when Heiny II. and his train came to do penance from Southampton up that narrow, hollow, rough pilgrims' road, loading over liarbledown Hill to Canterbury. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 4. Now just so is it with our English lan- guage — our Queen's English. There was a day when it was as rough as the primitive inhabitants. Centuries have laboured at level- ling, hardening, widening it. For language wants all these processes, as well as roads do. In order to become a good highway for thought and speech, it must not have great prominent awkward points, over which the mind and the tongue may stumble ; its words must not be too weak to carry the weight of our thoughts, nor its limiting rules too narrow to admit of their extension. And it is by processes of this kind in the coui-se of centm-ies, that our English tongue has been ever adapted more and more to our continually increasing wants. It has never been found too rough, too unsub- stantial, too limited, for the requirements of English thought. It has become for us, in our days, a level, firm, broad highway, over which all thought and all speech can travel smoothly and safely. Along it the lawyer and the parliamcntaiy agent propel their heavy waggons, clogged with a thousand pieces of cumbrous antiquated machinery, — and no wonder, when they charge freiglitagc, not by the weight of the load, combined with the distance, but by the number of imi)cdimeuts b2 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. ■which they can manage to offer to the pro- gress of their vehicle. Along it the poet and novelist drive their airy tandems, de- pendent for their success on the dust which they raise, and thi*ough which their vai*nished equipages glitter. On the same I'oad divines, licensed and unlicensed, ply once a week or more, with omnibus or carrier's cart, pi'o- mising to carry their passengers into another land than that over which the road itself ex- tends, just as the coaches out of London used to astonish our boyish eyes by the " Uavi'e de Grace" and "Pa7-is" inscribed on them. And along this same Queen's highway plods ever the great busy crowd of foot-passengers — the talkers of the market, of society, of the family. Words, words, words ; good and bad, loud and soft, long and short ; millions in the hour, innumerable in the day, unimaginable in the year : what then in the life 1 what in the history of a nation ? wliat in that of the world 1 And not one of those is ever for- gotten. Tliere is a book where they are all set down. What a history, it has been well said, is this earth's atmosphere, seeing that all words spoken, from Adam's first till now, are still vi- brating on its sensitive uu J anresting medium ! 5. But it is not so mi;ch of the great high- THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. way itself of Queen's English that I would now speak, as of some of the laws and usages of the road ; the by -rules, so to speak, which hang up framed at the various stations, that all may read them. 6. I have called the contents of these pages "Stray notes on spelling and speaking." The thine-s of which I have to treat are for the most part insidated and unconnected ; so that I fear there will not be even the appearance of connection between the various parts of my volume. And again, it must be confessed that they are not of a veiy interesting kind. I shall have to speak of such dull things as parts of speech, and numbers, and genders ; the obscuration, or the conventional and licensed violation, of rules of grammar, and the pronunciation and spelling of words. 7. It will be necessary perhaps to state that the things of which I am going to speak are not to be looked upon as altogether of a trifling character. One of my critics, of whom I shall have more to say further on, thinks it ludicrous and absurd that a dignitary of the Church of England should meddle with such small matters. But the language of a people is no trifle. The national mind is reflected in the national speech. If the way in which men THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. express their thoughts is slipshod and mean, it will be very difficult for theu- thoughts themselves to escape being the same. If it is high-flown and bombastic, a character for national simplicity and truthfulness, we may be sure, cannot be long maintained. That nation must be (and it has ever been so in history) not far from rapid decline, and from being degraded from its former glory. Every important feature in a people's language is reflected in its character and history. 8. Look, to take one familiar example, at the process of deterioration which our Queen's English has undei'gone at the hands of the Americans. Look at those phrases which so amuse us in their speech and books; at their reckless exaggeration, and contempt for congrnity ; and then comjjare the cha- racter and history of the nation — its blunted sense of moral obligation and duty to man ; its open disregard of conventional right where aggrandizement is to be obtained ; and, I may now say, its reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the histoiy of the world. Such examples as this (and they are as many as the number of the nations and their tongues) may serve to show that language is no trifle. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 9. Then, again, carefulness about minute accuracies of inflexion and grammar may appear to some very contemptible. But it ■would be just as easy to give examples in refutation of this idea. Two strike me, of widely different kinds. Some years ago a set of poems was published at Bristol, purporting to have been written in very early times by a poet named Rowley. Literary controversy ran high about them ; many persons believed in their genuineness ; some do even now. But the imposture, which was not easy to detect at the time, has been now completely unmasked by the aid of a little word of three letters. The writer uses " its "* as the posses- sive case of the pronoun " it " of the neuter gender. Now this possessive " its " was never used in the early periods of our langviage ; nor, indeed, as late down as Elizabeth. It * We have it in one place in our present copies, viz., Levit. XXV. 5 : "That which gi-owetb of its own accord." But this has been an alteration by the printers : King James's authorized copies have "of it own accord :" just as Shakspeare wrote (see notice of the Cambridge Shakspeare in the "Times" of Sept. 29, 1863) "The innocent milk in it most innocent mouth:" and "go to it grandam, child, anditgrandam will give it a plum." The usage of "it" for "its," is still found in the provincial talk of the Midland and Northern counties. (See on this subject Dr. Latham's " History of the English Language," pp. 527-9, 589.) THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. never occurs in the English version of the Bible, made in its present anthorized fonn in the reign of James I. : " hk " or " her " being always used instead. " They came unto the iron gate that leadeth unto the city ; which opened to them of Im own accord" (Acts xii. 10). " Of beaten work made he the candlestick ; his shaft, and his branch, his bowls, his knops, and his flowers, were of the same" (Ex. xxxvii. 17). "The tree of life which yielded her fruit every montli " (Rev. xxii. 2). It is said also only to occur three times in Shakspeare, and once in "Pai'adise Lost." The reason, I suppose, being, that possession, indicated by the possessive case " its" seemed to imply a certain life or per- sonality, which things neuter could hardly be thought of as having. 10. The other example is one familiar to you, of a more solemn character. When St. Peter was stoutly, denying all knowledge of his suffering Master, they that stood by said to him, " Surely thou art one of them ; for thou art a Galilean, and thy speech agreeth thereto." So that the fact of a provincial pronunciation was made use of to bring about the repentance of an en-ing apostle, 11. This little book will be found to justify THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. the description on its title, which represents it to consist of " Stray notes on spelUng and speaking." These were written down during the intervals of more serious employment, to serve as matter for lectures to the " Church of England Young Men's Literary Associa- tion " at Canterbury. Having performed that duty, they were published in the widely circu- lated periodical entitled " Good Words ; " and now, in a considerably altered form, they are presented to the public. 12. As the lectures were given, and the articles were published, considerable contro- versy sprung up respecting many points which were noticed in them. Coi'respondence became very abundant, and full of amusement and interest. One gentleman did me the honour of publishing replies to the first and second essays, in which my positions were strongly controverted, and my own English charged with all the faults which I had laid to the account of others. From antagonism we came to intercourse; and one result of the controversy I cannot regi-et, that it has enabled me to receive Mr. Moon as a guest, and to regard him henceforward as my friend. Wlien two men are working on the same material, and for the same purpose, it is hard. 10 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. if they cannot, however different their views may be, work at least in amicable accord. 13, The few allusions to matters of contro- versy which have been retained in this volume, are all such as immediately concern the sub- jects under treatment. While striking out all that was merely vindicative of myself in I'efutation of an ojiponent, I have been un- willing to part with arguments which, though contributing to that end also, yet were chiefly auxiliary to the main objects which I had in view. Omitting 14. The first remark that I have to make the "u m '■'"5.'?! J" shall be on the trick now so universal across the Atlantic, and becoming in some quarters common among us in England, of leaving out the "m" in the termination "-our/" writing honor, favor, neighbor, Savior, so?" m expressions like "be he ever [never) so old, 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 chai^mer, charm he 7iever so wisely." Can we give any account of this ? AVhat 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 anotlier. 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 fol- THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 77 lows : " Be it ever so large," means, " though it attain every imaginable degree of size : " " be it never so large," means, " though there be no imaginable degree of size "vvhich it does not attain." The former is inclusively affir- mative ; the latter is exclusively negative : and these two amount to the same. 106. There are some curious phenomena " what '- was, "-wliat coming under the same head as this last. I was not." may say, "What was my astonishment," and I may say, " Wliat 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. 107. Another correspondent mentions a "no" and " yes " the curious fact about negatives and affirmatives, same. If we were to ask the question, "Had you only the children with you ? " a person south of tlie Tweed would answer " ?zo," and a per- son north of the Tweed " yes" 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." 5l8 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. " Had you none but the children with you ? " and the answer is "JVone," affirming the ques- , tion. So that the negative form naturally occurs to the mind in framing its answer, and " none " becomes *' no.'' Whereas in the other 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." "oldest 108. In some sentences unobjectionably inmate." expressed, it is impossible to be sure of the meaning. An establishment 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 ninety ? In other words, does the tenn " oldest " qualify him absolutely, or only as an inmate of that establishment 1 "lesser." 109. The mciation of degrees of compa- 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 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 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 coiu'se. The usage is sanctioned by our best writers, and that not here and there, but uniformly. " God made two great lights : the gi-eater 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,'' " 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 comparison is in the mind, though not on the tongue. It may be too, that it is not only the sound of the one word " 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 . so THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. almost T;vithout exception dissyllables. It is a confirmation of the account which we have been giving of this usage, that no one thinks of attaching the additional syllabic to " less " ■when it is combined with " more ;" more and less being already well balanced, "replace." m. Complaint is made of the growing practice of using the word " replace^' to sig- nify just the opposite of its real meaning. " Lord Derby went out of office, and tvas re- iMced by Lord Palmerston." This, as now used, conveys the meaning, '■^was succeeded hy 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 ^)?t« him in again ; he was replaced by Lord Palmerston. 112. I need not say that the usage is 1 )or- 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 placed' 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., Iiis place was filled, by Lord Palmerston ; but he THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 81 was not replaced, i.e., put hack again, by his rival. 113. The "enclosure'" of a letter, what is "enclo- sure. it ? Is it that which encloses the letter, viz., the envelope 1 or is it something enclosed in the letter, as a dried flower, or a lock of hair ? or is it something enclosed with the letter, as another letter of the same size, or a map or plan of a larger size 1 114. Strictly speaking, I suppose the noun 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 penny postage was established, incurred the payment of double postage." Then, when we pass from the abstract to the concrete use of the word, i.e., 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 the thing en- closing, or the thing enclosed 1 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- 82 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 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, within the hurdles surrounding the square ; or we may say that " the flock occupied the whole of the enclosm-e," 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." 115. Cleai'ly however, in strict pi-opriety, the word ouglit to api)ly to matter enclosed in, and not merely ivith, 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. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 83 116. A curious exteusion 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 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. 117. It will be well to attempt some expla- "who" and nation of the usages of " ivho " 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 fonns of the relative pronoun is, that " ivho " is used of persons, " tvhich" 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 G 2 84 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. cattle which I saw grazing," but " the man that met me," " the cattle that I saw," We must take care, however, to remember that which was not always accounted the neuter of who, nor is it so in grammar. Di'. Latham says : " To follow the ordinary grammarians, and to call ivhich the neuter of trho, is a blunder. It is no neuter at all, but a com- pound word." It is made up of wAo and like : and this he shows by tracing it through the various Gothic and German forms, till we come to the Scottish ivhilk and the English ivhich. 118. Both Wio and Ww'c7i ai'e in our older writers used of persons. When this is so, is there any distinction in meaning, and if so, what is it ? I think we shall find that the composition of the word ivhich, out of tvJio and like, will in some measure guide us to the answer ; and I think, without presuming to say that every case may be thus explained, that the general account of the two ways is this : " wlio " merely identifies, whereas " ivhich " classifies. Let us quote in illustra- tion one of the most important and weU- known instances. If, in the solemn address, " Oxrc Father which art in heaven," " who " had been used instead, then we shoiild have been taught to express only the fact that HE, THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 85 whom we address as our Father, dwelleth in heaven. But as the sentence now stands, as I understand it, we are taught to express the fact that the relation of Father in which He stands to us is not an earthly but a heavenly one ; that whereas there is a fatherhood which is on eai-th, 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, 119. There is a use of the word "iw^/'H^'jl principally to be found in our provincial newspapers, but now and then " leaking up- wards" 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, hut vigorous, because vigour united with age is something unex- pected ; but we have no right to say old hut 86 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. respectable, because respectability with old age is not something unexpected. Even while I VTite, my train stops at a station on the Great Western Railway, where passengers are invited to take a trip to Glasgow, "to witness the loild hut grand scenery of Scotland." Now, because scenery is wild, there is no reason why it should not be also grand ; nay, wildness in scenery is most usually an accompaniment of grandeur. Wild hut not grand would be far more reason- able, because wildness raises an expectation of grandeur, which the " hut'''' contradicts. " iis " and 120. A correspondent writes : " Many, espe- " so." 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 — ' He is not so tall as his brother ' ? " Such certainly appears to be the usage of our language, how- ever difficult it may be to account for it. We say, " one way of speaking is as good as the other ; " but when we deny this propo- sition, wc arc 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 fomi of the sentence into one less usual and still allowable, " the one way of speaking is equally good with the other," and the same adverb THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 87 will serve for both affirmative and negative : "the one is equally good with the other ; " " the one is not equally good with the other." 121. A question has been asked about the "had ra- ther.' expressions ^^ I had rather" " I had as soon" or "as lief." What is tlie "had" in these sentences 1 Is it really paii; of the verb " have " at all ? If it is, how do we explain it 1 We cannot use " to have 7'ather " in any other tense : it is no recognised phrase in our language. And therefore it has been sug- gested, that the expi'ession"7/iarf rather "has originated with erroneous filling up of the abbreviated Td rather, which is short not for / had rather, but I would rather. " I umdd rather be" is good English, because " I woidd he " is good English ; but " / had rather he " is not good English, because " / had he " is not good English. 122. One word with regard to the colloquial CoUoqui^ii ° ^ contnac- contractions which I just now mentioned. *''*""• We occasionally hear some made use of, which cannot be defended. For instance, " I ainH certain," "/ ainH going." This latter, in the past tenses, degenerates still further into the mere vulgarism, "/ warnt going." This latter is heard only as a vulgarism ; but the other two are not unfrequently used by 88 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. t 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 conti'action must siu-ely retain some trace of the resolved form from which it is abbreviated. What, then, is " ain't ? " It cannot be a contraction of ^'am not" What " arnt" 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 " / am not,'* is " Pm not : " " Pm not going ; " " Pm 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 " YoiCre not in time," not ^'you arn't: " " tliey're not coming,'' not " they am't,'' or " ain't." Feminine 123. A fow remarks may bo made on the substan- tives, use in English of feminine substantives. Certain names of occupations and offices seem to require them, and others to forbid them. We ^dij ^^ emperor" and '* empress;" but we do not in the same sense say "governor" and "governess." In this latter case the feminine form has acquired a meaning of its own, and THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 89 refuses to part with it. I remember, during the first weeks of our present Queen's reign, 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 diff'er- ence. The description "p^7^r^m," for in- stance, may include both men and women ; yet I saw the other day advertised, "The Wanderings of a jnlgriiness," &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 ^'port7'ess" announced as the person to whom we are to apply.* I expect we shall soon see " 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 * 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. 90 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. some of the European rulers may be females, when spoken of altogether, they may be coiTectly classified under the denomination ''kinffs." It has been pointed out that Lord Bacon * does this even in the case of two, "Ferdinand and Isabella, kings of Spain.'' This would hardly be said now ; and in ordi- naiy 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 incoiTCct- ness, or altered to suit modern ears. A con-espondent writes that his clergyman, in the following sentence in the prayer for the Queen, in the Communion service, " We ai*e taught that the hearts of kings are in Thy rule and governance," alters the word kings into sovereigns. 124. From pronunciation we will come to punctuation, or stopping. I remember when * A corresiwndent 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. 91 I was young in printing, once correcting the punctuation of a proof-sheet, and complaining of the hberties which had been taken with my manuscript. The pubhsher quietly answered me, that piinctuation tvas always left to the compositors. And a precious mess they make of it. The great enemies to understanding any- thing printed in our language are the commas. And these are inserted by the compositors, without the slightest compunction, on every possible occasion. Many words are by rule always hitched off with two commas ; one before and one behind ; nursed, as the Omni- bus 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 pro- cess. 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 com-se making non- sense of my unfortunate sentence. I have some satisfaction in reflecting, that, in the course of editing the Greek text, I believe I have destroyed more than a thousand commas, which prevented the text being properly understood. 125. One very provoking case is that where THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. two adjectives come together, belonging to the same nomi-substantive. Thus, in print- ing a nice young man, a comma is placed after nice, giving, you "will obsei*ve, a very different sense from that intended : bringing before us 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 black dog,'^ printed without commas, eveiy- body knows what we mean ; but this would be printed " a gi-eat, black dog." Take again the case where meaning is intensified by adjectives being repeated — as in " the wide wide ivorld,'' " the deep deep sea." Such expressions you almost invariably find printed " tJie wide, wide world '^ " the deep, deep sea,** thereby making them, if judged by any rule at all, absolute nonsense. 12G. Still, though too may commas are bad, 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 tliat year. Had the date been 1631, instead of 18, an awkwai'd interpre- tation might have been possible. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 93 127. I take the following, verbatim aud punctuatim, from a religious newspaper of 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 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 shrieJcs, as they have been called, are scattered up and down the page by the com- positors without mercy. If one has written the words " sh^j" 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 shi'iek after "iSir" 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 pm*e exclamation, as in " How beautiful is night ! " or, " that I might find him ! " H THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. centre." 129. The veiy simple and intelligible word " centre'' comes in for a good deal of mal- treatment in our days. Centre is from the Greek word '^ Kentro7iy' meaning merely a point : the point of a needle, or of a sting, or of anything else : and hence used in geometry to denote that point round which a circle or any other symmetrical curve is drawn. And in accordance with this its original meaning ought its use always to be : a centre should always designate a point, never a line, or, except as pi-esently 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 obsei-ved, the other always avoided. While I should take care not to say tliat I rvalked up and doion 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. 130. And in the figm-ative use of this word, and of all words, intelligent common THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 95 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 toijic of the evening, is incorrect and unmeaning. 131. Ought we to write hy and &?/, or 6y " by ,uid by." and hye 1 hy the hy, or hy the hye ? 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 " hye " ball, at cricket, is only a ball that runs hy. In this latter case the added " e " is universal : but not so in hy-jylay, hy-end, which are sometimes spelt with it and sometimes without it. And we never add it when " hy " is used as an adverb in construction in a sentence, as in passing by. This being so, it is better, 96 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. perhaps, to 'confine this way of spelling to the only case where it seems needed, the h^e ball, and to WTite "% aiid fty," "by the byr "endeavour 132. A mistake is veiy generally made by 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 mentioned, and the sense is thus 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 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 Scriptm-es, and in such studies as THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 97 help to the knowledge of the same . . . T And the candidate replies, "I -will endea- vour myself so to do, the Lord being my helper." 133. The usage of the verb to mistake is lakcu.'- '''''" somewhat anomalous. Its etymology seems simple enough — to talce 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 he 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 language and become idiomatical. "I thought so, 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 wc n 98 THE QUEE^"S ENGLISH. hear the former of these, we begin to con- sider whether we were right or wrong ; when the latter, we at once take the measui'e 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, cu'cumstances have com- pelled him to learn his language. "good 134. A correspondent asks me, good looTcing looking " or "weu look- or well lookinq? Here is another instance of idiom vei'sus accuracy. And idiom decidedly has it. To speak of a well-loohing 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 looTc good. It is, to looh ivell ; 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 ^ j j oFoni 'two" PJ'Scisians is, the avoiding of the use of " latter'' 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 1 136. Let us inquire into the matter. The THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 9ft 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 second the latter, not the last. But if I speak of three invasions, I must call the third, in referring to it, the last, not the latter. Is there reason in this 1 Let us look at it in this light. Of two invasions, the earHer 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 1 137. 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" 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 . H 2 100 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. only t?ro, T\-as 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. Thcrc is an expression creeping, I "inferior." fear, into general use, than which nothmg can well be worse in grammar, "a superioi- man;" "a vciy 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 arc to be filled iip by inserting "to most men," or the like. But with all its conve- nience, and all the defence which can be set lip for it, this way of speaking is odious ; and if followed out as a precedent, cannot but vulgarize and deteriorate our language, "tjiicntcd" 140. Wo seem rather unfortunate in our 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 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. ,101 verb ? 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 it worse by false orthography), " mo- niedy 141. Another formation of this kind, "si'ted." "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. been called the neuter use of the verb to leave : " I shall not leave before December 1." But it is not correct to describe this as a 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 102 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 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 ovrn 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 when my lease is up." How 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 could be no doubt. "could not 143. Connected with the last are, or may get." . ' -^ 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;" "but I couldnt (jet." The full expression would in this case be, " I couldn't get to you;" or, "I couldn't get there." But the verb " to get " is iised in so many meanings, that it is hardly fit for tliis elliptical position. Jjcsides that the sentence ends inelegantly THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 103 and inharmoniously, an ambiguity is sug- gested: "couldn't get what?" a horse? or time 1 or money to pay the fare ? or some one to show the way ? 144. Another word objectionably thus used '' does not is the verb " to helongP " Is Miss A. coming to the Amateur Concert to-night?" "No: she does not helong ;" 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 being thus detached from its acci- dents, and used absolutely and generally. 145. The verb to "progress',' is challenged "topro- 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 mpe off this honourable de-n', That silverly 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 hound, 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. 104 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. gr^ss, so that this is perhaps hardly a case in point, except as to the word, a verb formed on the noun jy'i'ogress. 146. Milton also uses such a verb, in the magnificent peroration of his " Treatise of Re- formation in England." I cannot forbeai* 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 Righteousness, 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 T}Tannies, proclaiming thy universal and mild Monai-chy through THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 105 heaven and earth. Where they undoubtedly, that by their labours, counsels and prayers, have been earnest for the common good of , 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, 2^^og7'essing 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 j^rogress 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 i^rogress 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,* * My Censor has found some of these words set down 105 TUE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. into verbs ; but we have doue iu substance the same thing, by having admitted long ago • the verbs suggest, digest, x>roject, object, reject, eject ; for all these are fonned from the same part of the original Latin verbs, as this "p7'0- gress " on which wo have been speaking. StoTertf ^ 148. In treating of this verb to ''progress," a correspondent notices that there prevails a tendency to turn nouns into verbs : " The ship remained to coal : " " tlie church is being jieived ;" " 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 growtli of our language, and under due regulation is one of the most obvious means of enriching it. Yerbs thus formed will carry themselves into use, in spite of the protests of the purists. Some years as English verbs in the folio edition of Bailey's Uni- versal Dictionary, published in 1755. But there is as wide a difference between dictionary words and English words, as between vocabulary French and spoken French. A list of dictionary words might be found in a few minutes which would introduce us to some strange acquaintances. What do we think of "abarcy," "aberuncate," "abolishable," "abstringe," "abstrude," "acervate," "acetosity," " ad jugate," "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. or ''to THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 107 ago, precise scholars used to exclaim against 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 'Ho experience" occurs till quite recently. But all attempts to exclude it noiv would be quite ineffectual. 149. To treat of, or to treat 1 Plainly, "J_ 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 treat a subject : or it may be used absolutely, 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 humoiu* takes them, between different ways of expression. 150. There is a piece of affectation becoming '' tii° book ^ ° Genesis, sadly common among our younger clergy, " t^| oity which I had already marked for notice, when I received a letter, from which the following is an extract : — " I wish to call your atten- lOS THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 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 Canterbuiy,' ' the play of " Hamlet." ' We sometimes hear it pro- claimed from the desk, 'Here beginneth the first chapter of the book Genesis : ' and we read in parochial documents of *the parish of St. George,' 'the parish of . St. Mary,' instead ' of St. George's,' ' of St. Mary's,' &c." 151. I beheve 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 " o/." It is used, in designations of this kind, in three different senses: 1. To denote authorship, as ^Hhe hook of Daniel :" 2. To denote subject- matter, as " the first look of Kings : " 3. As a note of apposition, signifying, " which is," or " which is called," as " the book of Genesis;' ''of Exodus;' kc. This last usage meets us at every turn ; and the pedant who ignores it in the reading desk, must, in consistency. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 109 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 town Calais, on my way to the Republic Switzerland." 152. 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, and "re- writers should not yet be clear in their dis- verent." tinctive use of " reverence " and " revere?i^.'' I saw lately a description of a certain person as being " unintentionally irreverend." The writer (or printer) of this forgot that "reverend" (^reverens,-entis) is the subjective word, de- scribing the feeling within a man as its sub- ject, whereas '^reverend" (i-everendus) 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 110 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. he was certainly not " very reverent " in his conduct or in his writings. Subjective 154. A few words more about thesc sif6/ec<{t'i? and object- ive words, and objective words. It has been the fashion 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 ai-e 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 heiglit." 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 ? Other instances of this double use of one and the same word may be found in "a hopeful spirit," ''a hopeful youth," — " a joyful multitude," "a joyful occasion ; " and an example of the distinction in the use of two words, in the adjectives 'Hall" (sub- jective, — high with reference to himself as compared with others) and ''high'" (objec- THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. Ill tive, contemplated as an object from with- out). 155, A good deal of confusion is pre- " or " and valent in the usaojes of " or" and " nor '' in negative ^ sentence. 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 1 " We may regard this sentence in two ways, which may be repi'esented by the two following modes of punctuation : 1. "He was not very reverent in his conduct, or in his writings." 2. " He was not veiy reverent, in his conduct or in his writings." According to the former punc- tuation, "■or" is wrong; it should be " 7ior.'" But observe that thus we get a somewhat awkward elliptical sentence : " He was 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" would be wrong. This will be evident in a moment by filling up the sentence with the other alternative particle, " He was not very reA'erent, either in his conduct or in his writings ; " not, " He was not very reverent, in neither his conduct, nor in his writings." seuteuccs. 112 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 156. We may, if we 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 this case it is usual to place those clauses before the predicative portion of the sentence : " neither in his conduct, nor in his wi'itings was he very reverent." Elliptical 1^7. As I have been speaking of an elliptical 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 tm-ning affirmative into negative, tacitly and unconsciously, as the sentence falls upon the eye or ear. A remark- able example of this occm-s 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 jyresnme to come, trusthuj) in thy manifold and great mercies." Put this admirable sentence into the hands of our ordinaiy rhetoricians, and it would be utterly marred. The apparently awkward ellipsis would be removed thus : THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 113 " We presume to come to this Tliy Table, trusting, uot in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies." But at the same time, the whole character of the sentence and of the prayer would be altered. Who does not see, that by the opening words, "We do not presume," the Tcey-note of the whole prayer is struck — the disclaiming of presiimp- tion founded on our own righteousness ? It was worth any subsequent halting of the sentence in mere accuracy of constiniction, to secui-e this plain declaration of the spkit in which the prayer was about to be made. 158. And this leads us to a rule which we General rule . .- , rri ill such should do well to follow m all such cases, io 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- -VrrangB^ nient ot Avhat more in detail. The one rule which is'^^'^'^^j.'^g ' I lU THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. supposed by the ordinary rhetoricians to regu- late the arrangement of words in sentences, is this : that " tliose parts of a sentence which are most closely connected in their meaning, should be as closely as possible connected in piosition ; " or, as it is propounded by Dr. Blair, "J capital ride in the arrangement of sentences is that the tvords or members most nearly related shoidd be lylaced in the sentence as near to each other as 2'>ossible, so as to make their mutual, relation clearly apfearP ordinary IGQ. Now doubtless this rule is, in the rule. ' main, and for general guidance, a good and useful one : indeed, so plain to all, that it surely needed no inculcating. But there arc 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 remai'ks on two very important matters in the con- struction of sentences: the requirements of THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 115 emphasis, and the requirements oi parenthesis ; neither of which are taken into account by the ordinary rule. IGl. Emphasis means the stress, or force of Emphasis intonation, which the intended sense requires violation. to be laid on certain words, or changes, in 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 our own; but 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, I 2 IIG THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. * governed by a verb, is iu a subordinate position to that verb ; the mind of the reader is arrested by the verb, rather than by the substantive; so that if for any rea- 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. inthe'case 163. Take, as an example, the words "he of words, ' _ _ -^ ' restored me to mine office ;" where the words arc arranged in accordance with the ordinaiy 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 com-se 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 your 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 sec how the sentence reads: "J/e 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, bo his intelligence THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. \\\ 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 nearest connected are "restored" and "me," which it governs : " hanged" and " him" which it governs. When I take " me " out of its place next " restored," and begin the sen- tence with it, letting the pronoun " he " come between them, I do most distinctly violate the rule, that those words which are most nearly connected in the sense should 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 foi-eknowledge of God," inserted between. Yet, who does not see that the whole force of that which was intended to be conveyed by lis THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. the sentence is thus gained, and could not otherwise be gained 1 Arranged according to the common rule, the sentence would have been, " Ye have taken Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain Him;" and the whole force and point would have been lost, andparcn- 1G5. And. as tliis nccessitv for bringing thesis, in . . the case of into prominence affects the position of words clauses. ^ '■ 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 hi/ the tvay ; and every such insertion is a violation of the supposed universal rule of position. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 119 166. Thus, for example, I am narrating a circumstance which, when it happened, ex- cited my astonishment. Undoubtedly the natural order of constructing the sentence would be to relate what happened first, and my sm-prise at it afterwards. " I was looking at a man walking on the bank of the river, when he suddenly tiurned 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 1 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 an-angement in almost every extant page of good English ; and in com- mon 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 j 120 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 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. 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 wi'iter intended. But at the same time it may be fearlessly stated, that not one of our best writers has ever been minutely scrupulous on this point : and that there does not exist in om* 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 fixults which carping and captious critics might find with his style. Lord Kames gives a rule that " a circumstance our/ht never to he jdaced between tivo capital viemhei's of a sen- tence : or if so placed (I suppose he means, if it he so 2^lciced), tlie first ivord in the consequent member slioidd he one that cannot connect it ■with what 2)recedes." THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 121 168. Any one on the look out for misun- derstanding may convince himself by trial, that there is hardly a page in any English book which will not furnish him with instances of violation of this rule. 169. Let my examples begin at home. One Examples, 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 absm-d 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." Now 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 persons.'' 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 ihej fall, and being about to say inio ivhat, it is convenient, in order to keep the sentence from dragging a compara- tively unimportant clause at its end, to bring 122 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. in that cliiuse, coutainiug the reason of the fall, immediately after the verb itself To my mind, the clause, in spite of the 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 foils from grace, or falls from vu-tuc, seems to me to be effectually precluded in the mind of any man who haj^pens 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 api^endages, for a reader to have suggested to his mind a fall from the sublime height of ignorance down into the depth of a mistalce. 170. There are one or two points more in the tract of this same Censor, well worth noticing for tlie illustrations which they will furnish on matters connected with our present subject. He qxiotesy. with disapprobation, a sentence of mine in paragi-aph 2 of these notes, which originally stood thus : " Would have been broken to pieces in a deep rut, or THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 123 come to grief in a bottomless swamp." He says this can only be filled in thus, " Would have been broken to pieces, or would have been come to giief in a bottomless swamp:" " for," he adds, "a part of a complex tense means nothing without the rest of the tense." That is, I suppose, the vdiole 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 he full, heivai'e lest thou forget the Lordy We all know that this means ; " When thoji shalt have eaten and shalt be full." But, according to my Censor, it must be filled iip, "When thou shalt have eaten and shalt have be full." 171. You might, by applying to any chapter From Scrip- 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 aU these generations has ever found out. Take exam- ples from one chapter. Acts xxii. In verse 4, I read, ^^ And I persecuted this ivay unto the death" This violates the supposed law of arrangement, and falls under the charge of 12i THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. Grammar of our au- thorised version : ambiguity. The gospel might, according to these critics, be imderstood from it to be a way unto death instead of a Avay unto life. Take again verse 29, "Then they departed from him which should have examined him" Now we all know what this means. It is a more neat way of expressing what would be the regularly an-anged sentence, " Then they ivhich shoidd have examined him departed from him." But here again the captiovis 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 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- * One gentleman saj's : "When I was at school, it was the habit of my tutor to give his class specimens of bad English fur correction. You will be surprised to heai-, that those specimens were chiefly texts from Scripture. They were given with all reverence, never- theless. It was because the readiest examples wore to be had from the Bible, that any were taken from that source at all. Again, Shakspeare is held up by you as a i)attern to modern grammarians. With all respect, I canuot understand how any man, with the education THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 125 mendation from a con-espondent to alter a certain word in their version, giving ^I'e suffi- cient reasons for the change. They are said to have replied that they had already con- sidered the matter, and had fifteen suflBcient reasons against the change. I think if my coiTespondents can bring themselves to con- sider reasonably any passage in which the English grammar of onr authorised version appears doubtful, they will find themselves in the same predicament as this correspondent of the translatore. 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 oi Shak- spcare. "man of one book only," I will give from our greatest English writer, an instance 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 tiie degenerate Eng- lish of our day is to be traced to such instruction. I should like to have seen some of the tutor's corrected texts. 12a THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. (from among many) of what would be called a similar ambiguity. In the " Two Gentle- men of Verona," act. i. scene 2, Julia says: — "0 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 coiTespondents, 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 couceive wc havc had enough of in regard of thosc so-callcd Universal rules. All I would sucli 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 bo sure to havc complied with them; and if they be bad, your writing will be a protest against them. Real am- 174. It is not difficult to distinguish the 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 trial of the thieves who robbed the bank bigiiity. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 127 of Messrs. Parodi at Genoa, on May 1, 1862, in open daylight, which commenced at Genoa on the 5th." In a letter addi-essed to another paper, this sentence occurs : " I with my family reside in the parish of Stockton, which consists of my wife and daughters." 175. Now 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 suggests to the mind of the hearer a connection with the following pronoim. 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 Jtlacaulay, 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 why the apparently ambiguous form should be preferred to the strictly perspicuous one, as 128 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. being more forcible, pvxtting the emphatic word or clause in the proper place, or even as avoiding stiffness and awkwardness of sound. Let your style be idiomatic, simple, natm'al : 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 17(], The following note has been sent me, tithe dinner. ° ' received after a tithe dinner in 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 "/te" and "/m" 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. Thc following clerical advertisement vortisc- nient. from a well-known paper has been sent by a correspondent : " A married A. B., now hold- ing a sole charge, will be disengaged on 1 7th THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 129 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 efi"ectively 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 sjDecimen, in this case criticism of ... r. -»«■ T-i 1 Fechter's an extract from a criticism of Mr. techters "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 % The reverse of what % Is it the reverse of ignoring tradition % Does the critic mean, that he employs tradition so far that it enables him not to ignore it ? Surely this is not the meaning. After feeHng about in the dark some time, we arrive at a sort of suspi- E 130 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. cion, tliat the meaning must be, that Mr. Fechter employs ti-adition 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 woiJd 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. Position of 179. Much has been said by my various "only."' correspondents about the placing of adverbs 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. " Bid you see a man and a. woman ?" " Ifo ; I only saw a man." This is our ordi- naiy colloquial English. Is it wrong ? Of course the pedant comes down on us, and says, " Yes ; it is wTong. You don't want your adverb * only ' to qualify your act of seeing, but to qualify the number of persons whom you saw. The pi-oper opposition to ' / only saw a man ' would be * I smo and heard a man^ or ' / saw and touched him.' " So far the * See this expression justified below, paragraph 181. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 131 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 quahfy my act of seeing. I say, I did. For what was the act of seeing 1 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 fm-ther, 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 constnicting the sentence is, in colloquial English, abandoned, even at the risk of exactness and school rules. The adverb "o?i^y," in many sentences where strictly speaking it ought to foUow 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. Lsii. 4, we read, " They only consult to K 2 132 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. to cast him clown from his excellency ;" i.e., their consultation is on one subject only, how to cast him down. See also Matt, xiv. 36. 181. You see the account of the matter before us is just this : I may use my adverb " only " where two things are spoken of which are aflfected by the same action, to qualify the one as distinguished from the other, or I may, if I will, separate the action into two pai'ts, 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 morel'' 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, " / ivill only state one thing more" I mean that all I will do is, to make one statement, not more. But our gentlemen with their rules never look about 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. But the adverb ''only" is not the only THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 133 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 doion 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 doxon the door both of the stable and of the cellar T Now, to my mind, the diflFerence 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 against Lindley Murray. In the " Tempest," act i. scene 2, Prospero tells Miranda that the usui'ping Duke of Milan, her uncle, " HaTing both the key Of officer and office, set all hearts i' th' state ;■ To what tune pleased his ear." This is, of course, a clear violation of the rule ; 134 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. according to which the words ought to have run, " having the hey of both officer and office." "The three 183. As connected with the question of the first Gos- pels." arrangement of words, I may mention that I have been in controversy, first and last, with several people, while I have been engaged on my edition of the Greek Testament, aboiit 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 fii-st, as com- pared with the one which is placed last, that it often becomes necessary to speak of the three, and the one, in two separate classes. It is in doing so that I say " the three first Gospels" and my con-espondents want me to say " the first three Gosjyels." AVliich of the two is right 1 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 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 135 belong thi-ee : to tlie 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 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 tiy the correctness of the other expression, "the first three Gospels." Used in common talk, it would of course convey the same idea as the other. But that 136 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. is not our present question. Oiu' question is, which of the two is the more precise and correct ? When I say " the first three" the idea presented to tlie mind is, that I am going to speak of anotlier three, which shall be set in contrast to them. The proper oppo- sition to "a tall man" is "a sliort man" not a short sticlc. "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 " tlie last one" I may be complying with technical rules, but I maintain that I am not complying with the requirements of common sense, and therefore neither with those of good English. 187. A correspondent writes : — "As to the * three first Gospels/ your explanation is clear. But would it be right to say, 'in the three first weeks 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 firat weeks " would be better than " the first three • weeks," for THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 137 another reason ; that " three weels" 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. 188. Fault has been found with me by some Confused use of of my correspondents and censors, for the "lie "and confused use, as they ai'e 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 noim itself and not the pi'onoun : for 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, because 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- 138 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. tiful simplicity which is an eminent charac- teristic of Holy Writ. I shaU take an instance fi'om 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 disagi-eeable, 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 Ehetoric." 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 wi'itcrs, care very little; of this, numerous instances might be pi'oduced 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 fifty : 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 made THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 139 about it : biit the sentence is in direct viola- tion of Dr. Campbell's rule. Again, in Luke xix, 2, 3, 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 "7ie" 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 nm thus in the omginal : and this, our translators veiy well knew, is not a matter of the grammar of our langiiage, 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. Om' 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- 140 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. ample from Genesis, it would have been better if they had not repeated the words "his father" the thh-d time, but had left the sentence ambiguous, as I believe it is in the original Hebrew. Docs 190. What are we to think of the question, " than " govern an whether " than " does or does not govern an accusative case? accusative case ? " than I : " " than me : " which is right ? My readere will j)robably answer without hesitation, the former. But is the latter so certainly "vsTong 1 We are accustomed to hear it stigmatised as being so ; but I think, eiToneously. 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 : "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 "than." constructing a clause with a comparative and " 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 vei'b " am." " He is wiser than I," being filled out, would THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 141 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. Om" 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, lie, she, ive, and they. Still it is lu'ged that " than me " cannot be right : or can only be right when " me " is necessarily in government, as in the sentence, " He likes you better than me." I can do no more in reply, than urge 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. 142 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. "itisme. •• 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 pln-ase, " It is me." Now this is an expression which oveiy 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 eveiyone else to leave it off." 193. But, my good Censors, I cannot, I did what I could. I wi-ote 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 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 hina at the station, and I was going to write : " if you see on the platform * an old jycirty in a sJi/)vel' that will be I." But my pen refused to sanction THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 148 (to endorse, I believe I ovight to say, but I cannot) the construction. " That ivill be 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 Langtiage," p. 586, says, " We may .... call the word me a secondaiy nomina- tive : inasmuch as such phrases as it is me = it is I, are common. To call such expres- sions incorrect English, is to assu.me the point. No one says that c'est moi is bad French, and dest 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 transfen-ed the forms toe, ye, and you, from one case to another 1 Or per- haps we may say, is there any real custom at all in favour of /, except so far as the gram- marians have made one ? It is clear that the French analogy is against it. It is also clear that the personal pronoun as a predi- cate may be in a different analogy from the personal pronoun as a subject." 195. And in another place, p. 584, he 144 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. says: "What if the current objections to such expressions as it is me (which the ordi- naiy grammarians would change into it is I), be unfounded, or rather founded upon the io-norance of this difference (the difference between the use of the pronoun as subject and as predicate) 1 That the present wiiter 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 <^est moi, where, accord- ing to the English dogma, c'est je would be the right expression. Both constmctions, 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 pi-onoun 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 /, being in fact a dis- tinct and independent form of the personal THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 145 pronoun. But, it may fairly be asked, whence arises this disposition to shrink from the use of the nominative case in the predicate 1 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 iised. The Majesty of the Speaker here, and His purpose of re-assming 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 proper for the nominative, and not the accu- sative, to be used. 197. Dr. Latham goes on to say, after the "itishim," ® ■^' "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. He, 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 146 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 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 I : 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 lier, as far as present usage is concerned 1 It seems to me that, if we ai'e prepared to defend the one, we ought in consistency also to defend the other. When, in the Ingoldsby legend, the monks of Rheims saw the poor anathematised jackdaw appear, " Regardless of grammar, they cried out, ' That's him ! ' " And I fear we must show an equal regardlessness of what ordi- narily 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 occm'ring in such phrases as 'Tom didn't know it to he me," " / suspected it to he him." 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 w'cnt before . it. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. U1 It is in fact, in these sentences, equivalent to as, or as heing. " You cUdnH hiow it to he 7," would be equivalent to " you didnH recog- nise it as 7," which of course would be wrong. 200. We have said something of superfluous Use of "of." prepositions : let us remark on the use of pre- positions themselves. The preposition " o/" 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 ? " 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 ? " is very good English, if we mean ""VMiat request has he to make of these provinces 1 " Bat if we mean, as the Times writer evidently did, "What does he want with the provinces?" i.e., "What need has he of them 1 " then it is a vulgarism. 201. There is a peculiar use of prepositions Pvnposi- tions at the which is allowable in moderation, but must cud uf sentences. 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 L 2 148 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. in the command, " Let not your good be evil spoken of ; " and continually in our discourse and wiiting. 202. The account to be given of this is, that 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 ? " 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 "fo," merely because the adverb of rest " tvhere,^'' has come to be used for the adverb of motion " ivhither,^'' and therefore the " ^o " is not wanted. If a man chooses, as West-countiy men mostly do, to say " Where are you going to ? " 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 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 pi*eposi- tion as the " to " of motion towards a place. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 149 " Were you going to do it ? " simply means "Were you, in your mental intention, ap- proaching the doing of it 1 " 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 ; 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 in- stitutions 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, as, e.g., "ought to" and "ought not to," " neglect to," '^'^'-ches. 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 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 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 151 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 writes" or " Livy has writ- ten" I imply that the book containing the incident is now extant. But if I say, " Livy ivrote so and so," I should naturally be taken to be sjjeaking 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 during the past 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- 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 152 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. " 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- 20G. Au important difference in meaning; is fusion. _ ° 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 do so much as hear whether there were any Holy Ghost." On which St. Paul asked them, "Unto what then were ye baptized ? " 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 au unfortunate mistake, has rendered the narrative unintelligible. It has made St. Paul ask the converts, " Have ye received the Holy Ghost since yo believed?" So far, indeed, THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 153 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 Chui'ch, should dm-ing that time, and up to the time when St. Paul spoke, never have heard of the existence of the Holy Spirit. Render the words accu- rately, and all is clear, 207. I am now going to speak of a combina- " was being * * ^ written." tion of words which is so completely natural- ised, that it would be vain to protest against it, or even to attempt to disuse it one's self. I mean, the joining together of a present and a past participle, as we do when we say " The letter ivas being written," " The dinner is being cooked." Such combinations were, I believe, not used by our best and most careful wiiters, until a comparatively recent date. The old and correct way of expressing what is meant by these phrases, was, " The letter was in writing" or " was writing ; " " The dinner was cooking : " the verbs being used in a neuter sense. The objection to " being tvritten " for " in the process of writing" is this, — that 154 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. "toritteii" is a past participle, indicating a finished act. When I say " / have written a letter,^' I mean, I have by me, or have as my act accomplished, a letter written. So that " being written " properly means, existing in a state of completion. " Mi/ letter being writ- ten, I put it in the 2^ost." And, strictly speaking, we cannot use the combination to signify an incomplete action. Still, as I have said, the inaccuracy has crept into the lan- guage, and is now found everywhere, in speech and in writing. The only thing we can do ^^ in such a case is to avoid it, where it can be avoided without violation of idiom, or giving harshness to the sentence. «>, "shall" and 208. Theuext point which I notice shall bethe use of the auxiliaries " shall" and "will." Now here we are at once struck by a curious phe- \ nomcuon. I never knew an Englishman who misplaced " shall " and " will ;" I hardly ever have known an Irishman or a Scotchman who did not misplace them sometimes. And it is strange to observe how incurable the propen- sity is. It was but the other day that I asked a person sprung of Irish blood, whether he would be at a certain house to which I was going that evening. The answer was, " Pm afraid I wonH." Yet my friend is a sound THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 155 and accurate English scholar, and I had never before, during all the years I had known him, discovered any trace of the sister island. 209. In attempting to give an explanation of our English usage, I may premise that it is exceedingly difficult to do so. We seem to proceed rather on instinct, than by any fixed rule. Yet instinct, in rational beings, must be founded on some inherent fitness of thino-s : o y and examination ought to be able to detect that fitness. Let us tiy to do this, though it may be difficult, in the case before us. 210. The simplest example that can be given " i wiu." is "/ will." Now this can have but one mean- ing. It can only be used as expressing deter- mination : only, where the will of the person speaking is concerned. "Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife ?" Answer, " I will " (in the Latin, " volo "). We cannot use " / luill," where a mere contingent future event is concerned. We cannot use " / will " of anything uncertain, anything about which we hope or fear. " Help me, I'll fall," if strictly intei-preted, would be an entreaty to be saved from an act of wilful precipitation. "/ fear I wonH " is an impossible and un- meaning junction of terms. If it meant any- thing, it could only be, "I fear that, when the 156 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. time comes, my power of volition will be found too weak for its work." But this is obviously not what it is intended to mean. The account then of "/ will" seems very simple, •' I shall." 211. Now, what is " / shall 2 " In its ordi- naiy use, it just takes those cases of things futiu-e, where " I will " cannot be said : those cases where the things spoken of are inde- pendent of our own will. " Next Tuesday I shall be twenty-one " — an event quite out of my own power. So far, all is plain. But there is a case of " / sliall " which somewhat com- plicates the matter. We are in the habit, when announcino^ something which we posi- tively mean to do, to speak of it as if it were taken, so to say, out of the region of our own will, and placed among things absolutely cer- tain ; and in such cases we turn " will " into " shall." The traveller meets with incivility, or he cannot find his luggage, at the station. He breaks forth, in angry mood, "/ shall write to tlie ' Times^ about thi^,'' — and he means the station-master to conclude that his writing is as certain as if it were already done. The "shall" is intended to elevate the " mil " into the category of things indis- putable. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 157 212. So far then for 'Hvill" and "s/w/^'' "you wiu.-' when used in the first person. But how when used in the second 1 Let us take " You will^ " You tvill " 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 will falV 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 "youshau." said to another, when the will of the speaker compels that which is spoken of. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy Go^." " Thou shalt not steal." 214. The exceptions to both these usages Exceptions, 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 placeP This is treating the obedience of the servant as a matter of cei-tainty, sure to follow of course on his lord's command. The exception in the use of " shall " is when we say, for in- stance, " If you looTc through History, you shall find that it has always been so" and the ac- 168 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 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. '.'.TH.'.f"'^ 215. It remains that we consider the words shall lu the third c< ^iii „ j^^(j (c gj^^ii „ as applied in the third person. -i -i person; said of persons and things spoken about. And here, what has already been said will be a sufficient guide in ordinary cases. For aU announcements of common events foreseen in the future, " tvill " is the word to be used. " / think it ivill rain before night." " To-morroiv will he old May-day." We may sometimes use " shall,'' but it can only be in case^ where our own will, or choice, or power, exercises some influence over 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 will be my birthday : " because that is a matter over 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 birtliday" a mat- ter over which she has control. Instances of 216, There are some very delicate and THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 159 curious cases of the almost indiffereut usage almost in- ° different of the two auxiliary verbs. Take this one, usage. " If he will looh, he will find it to he so." Here we use the first '* will " in the sense of " choose to : " " If he jdease to loot" But the second has its mere futm-e use : "he will find that it is so." Here however we might use, though it would be somewhat pedantic Eng- glish, the word " shall " in both members of the sentence : " If he shall look, he shall find it to he so," and then the former " shall" would be in the sense of a mere future, and the second in that sense of absolute certainty, " I will undertake that he shall find," of which I spoke just now. This sentence might in fact be correctly said in four different ways If he 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 " 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 "ivill" or "shall." In 160 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. reporting what another said, or what one said one's self, we may say, " He 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 town" &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 foct that " ivill " and " ivould " may either convey the idea of inclination of the will, or may point to a mere futm*e event. We have two notable instances in the English version of the New Testament. Oar Lord says to the Jews (John v, 40), " Ye tvill not come to me that ye might Imve life." Is He merely an- nouncing a fact, or is He speaking of the bent and inclination of their minds ? We consult the original, and the question is at once answered. What our Lord says, is this : " Ye are not ivilling" '' ye have no mind" " to come to me that ye might have life." — ^latt. xi. 27. 219. Again (Matt. xi. 27). ^^ No man know- eth the Father save the Son, and he to u'homso- ever the Son loill reveal Him." Is this " will " 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 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 161 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. sxvi. 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 shoidd hapx>en that I shoidd die with thee." But on consulting the original we find we should be wrong in thus under- standing it. It is ^^ Even if it he 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 said He, signifying hy ivhat death he shoidd glorify God," the " should " does not repre- sent any necessity, but the mere future. 222. Which is right, ^- it would seem" or "it would seem," " it " it should seem ? asks a Scottish corre- should seem." spondent. I believe both are right, but with slightly differing meanings. Both, be it 162 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. • observed, ai'e 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. !i"u^'f'""°f 223. An amusing instance of the confusion shall and ° "will." Qf shall and tvill was repeated to me by another Scottish correspondent. A young men's " Institute for Discussion and Self- improvement " is reported in a Scottish pro- vincial paper to have met, and discussed the question, "Shall the material universe be destroyed 1 " 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 cany its resolution into effect. Dr. ha. 224. I believe Dr. Latham, in his " His- thams ' aoc^.unt of tory of the English Langiiage," was the first to observe that the confusion in such cases is more apparent than real. The Englishman and the Scotchman mean the same thing, but THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 163 express it difFerently. "We may say either, "the material universe m^^be 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 anno^^ncement, 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, we say, " "Will the material universe be destroyed ? " the Scotchman says, " Shall the materinl 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 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. 225. Five years ago I was visiting Loch -"^ casein •JO o which it Maree, in 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 OTir time was nearly up, our Highland driver appeared in the distance, shouting, M 2 IGi THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. "Will I 3'auk 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. Use of 226. We often find persons using super- superfluous ^ . particles— fluous conjuuctious or prcpositious in their that." usual talk. Two cases are more frequent than others. One is the use of hut after the verb to doubt. " I do not doubt but that he will come," is both found in print and heard in conversation. The " hut " is wholly Tin- 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 unneeded, and never used by any careful writer or speaker. Defence 228. Fcw points mentioned in these "notes" of it. '■ have provoked so much rejoinder as this repro- bation of "on to." 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 " docs not sufficiently express motion : that " the cat jumped on the chair" would imi)ly merely that the cat, being on the chair already, there jumped. To this I have but THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 165 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 this, is surely not true. "The cat jumped on the table, and began to lap the milk." Who would 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" ^nd'Mnto" is not as good English as "into?'" I answer, because " on " is ordinarily a preposition of motion as well as of rest, whereas " m " 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. 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 underUes the 166 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 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 iqwn 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 1) say, ' ii})on a tower ; ' on the same principle, I would (should?) say, * on a marsh.' There would, indeed, be no harm in saying ' on a tower ; ' but there would be an impropriety m saymg ' upon a marsh ; ' for «;>, whether we are attentive or inattentive, whether we have been a thousand times wrong or never, means somewhat high, somewhat to which we ascend. I should speak con-ectly if I said, ' Dr. Johnson Jlew 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- THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 167 cated by, the action spoken of. We perhaps cannot say " upon the bottom ; " not how- ever because tve 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 "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 tqjon him that he died." 233. The expression " to open vp," is a To '_; open very favourite one with our newspapers. It may have, as several of my correspondents insist, a certain meaning of its own, though I am even now unable to see, in any case where I have louud 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 tip a com- munication between two places not so con- nected before. Thus used, the term may be endured, but, sm-ely, should not be imitated. But in the instances from " Good Words," cited by my Censor in his pamphlet, "He opens up in the parched desert a well that 168 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. refreshes lis;" "These considerations may open up to VIS one view of the . expediency of Christ's departure;" I can only regard them as Scotticisms, which certainly would not have been written south of the Tweed. 234. The parallel which my Censor draws between open tip and rise up, grow up, is hardly a just one, seeing that in these cases the adverb, or intransitive preposition, up, gives us the tendency in which the progres- sive action indicated by the neuter verb takes place ; and even if it do not that, inten- sifies and gives precision. More apposite parallels would have been found in np up, tear up, pull up, where up defines the active verb ; a moi-e decisive one still, in the term to shut tip, where up implies the closing and finality of the act indicated ; and for this reason should hardly be used with the oppo- site word to open. If we shut up a commu- nication, we ought to open it doivn rather than up. Put the word with any analogous term, and its inappropriateness will be per- ceived. A new railway devclojis, expands, promotes, the traffic ; but we could not say it develops up, expands up, promotes up, the traffic, "atbc^t." 235. Which is right, "at best," or "at the THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 169 best?" It is plain that this question does "attiie best." not stand alone ; several other phrases are involved in it. It affects " at least," " at most," " at farthest," 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," "nest," " least," " fur- thest ; " but when we put a less usual adjective in this construction, the article seems to be required, or a possessive pro- noun in its place. " The storm was at the (or, " its ") highest at noon ; " " What is woman at her loveliest 1 " 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 sis 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 Kings ssi. 4, Luke six. 42) ; " at the most," once (1 Cor. xiv. 27) ; but " at most/' never. 170 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. thcm^'"^ 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 " 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 can "^ both of them " be said of two, because when you have taken both, there is nothing left. 237. But let us examine tiiis. 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 tliem," "some of them"? Lotus, for " 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 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 171 " 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. 238. A correspondent states as his own Adverb be- tween "to" usage, and defends, the msertion of an adverb and the infinitive. 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 a choice between two forms of expression, "scientifi- cally to illustrate," and " to illustrate scienti- fically," there seems no good reason for flying in the face of common usage. 239. In a letter bearing after its address, "Roing"aud "coming. " "N. B.," I am asked whether the expression "I am coming to pay you a visit" is correct : whether it ought not rather to be "I am 172 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. going to pay yoii 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 requu-ed 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 spme portions of our realm, "^comcto 240. When I used, in the early part of these notes, the colloquial expression would have come to grief, I was told by one of my censoi'S 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 ; 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 covie to an end, not THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. I73 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 tJie gallows is but too likely to end in coming to the galloius. 241. This use of go and come is rather other uses curious. We say of a wrecked ship, that she "come."™ went to pieces ; but of a crushed jug, that it came to pieces. Plants come up, coyne 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 oui'selves 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 consistent in speaking of the sun. He is said to go down in the evening ; but never to come up in the morning. IH TUB QUEEN'S EXOLISH. 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 '? " 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. Misuse of 243. In nothing do we find more frequent " whom." mistakes in writers commonly careful, than in using the accusative case of a i-elative pro- noun where the nominative oxight 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 jier- sons lohom I knew were in the habit of using the form ' it is I,' say instead, ' it is mc.' " Here, the mistake is very evident. " I knew" THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 175 is merely parenthetical, put iu by way of voucher for the fact — "persons who, I knew, were." The ^vTiter might have said, ^'■wliom I knew to he" or " to have been ; " but as the sentence stands, ivlio 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 ivJiomsoever 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 ivhosoever and not whovisoever. 246. But then, how about the construc- tion ? " The mouth of whosoever lifts " is an elliptical clause. Filled up, it will be " the mouth of him whosoever lifts," or, more com- 176 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. pletely, "0/ Am ivlwsoever he he that lifts." In its shortened form we have the object, " him" omitted. But we must not visit this omission on the unfortunate relative pronoun which follows, and degrade it from its place in the sentence by making it do the work of the missing member, "different 247. A correspondent stigmatises the ex- to." pression " different to" which he shows (I own I was not aware of it) has become very common of late. Of course such a combina- tion is entirely against all reason and analogy. " Compare," says this wi-itei", " any other English words compounded of tliis same Latin preposition, for example, ' distant,^ ' dis- tinct,' and it will be seen that '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 " to differ " in the places where '' different" which in fact is only its participle, is thus joined. For instance, in the sentence qi;oted from Mr. Taylor's Convent Life in Italy, " Michael Aiigelo planned a totally different facade to the existing one," make this substi- tution, and read it', " Michael Angelo planned a fagade which totally differed to tlie existing one," and the error will be immediately seen. , THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 177 248. ''In respect of,'' "in respect to;' "with J^^l'/egard) respect to : " -which of these is right 1 The °^' ^'^' question extends also to " in regard of," " in regard to," " with 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 ; a?i act of loolcing hack at. The former, respect, is a Latin word, and the expression " in re- spect of,'' is used in Lutin. At the same time, the natural construction of the verb fi'om which respect is derived would be with the preposition to {irspicere 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 oriojin, 250. Still, if we agree on this much, it remains to be seen what preposition should be 2^'t'^foced. " In respect of" is the pure Latin construction, and seems on all hands (but see below) to be admitted as pure English like- wise. And the same with " in regard of ;" ^'with respect to" and "in respect to" are N 178 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. both found : the former I think the more frequently in our best writers. But, unless I am mistaken, '^uith resided of^^ is not found. 251. When my Censor said of a sentence in these notes, that I had used " in resided of" for "ivith 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 complained of. It occurs in Philippians iv. 11, and Colos- sians ii, 16, and is certainly as much used by good modem writers as that which he wishes to substitute for it. "inversely 252. What the same Censor means when he says that " inversely as " should be " inversely to," I am at a loss to iinderstand. I can comprehend " in inverse proj)ortion to,'' or " in inverse ratio to ;" but surely by aU 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 to it. Meaning of 253. Nor Can I comprehend again what the same Censor means when he says, in reference to my having called an adverb " a term," that an adverb is not a term, but a ivord, a j)ar^ of a term. For the whole account as, THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 179 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 " tenne." 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." 254. I mention this, not for the sake of Reason for mentiouing self- vindication, which forms no part of mv ^^^^°^ ' -l J 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. 255. With the same end in view, I notice " i need not ^^^^ another of his objections. " I need not have troubled myself." troubled myself.' He would correct this to " / 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 N 2 ISO THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. Caution respecting past and perfect tenses. having troubled myself." Every perfect is in fact a 2^resent. " I Iiave 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 done, it may be as well to put my readers on their gaiai'd, ever to bear in mind the dis- tinction between the indefinite 2)ast and the perfect. I have said something on this differ- ence in a former paragraph ; it may be enough to repeat here, that while the indefi- nite past tense of a verb must always be constructed as a 2)ast, the perfect, consisting of the auxiliary " have " with the past parti- ciple of the verb, denotes j)resent possession of the state or act desci-ibed by that past participle, and must always be treated and constructed as a 2yresent* 257. One more point noticed by my Censor sigiiify fixed jjiay servo for om* instruction. I had beffuu design. ^ o a sentence, " The next point which I notice, shall be . . ." This he designates as * See Dr. Latham's " History of the English Lau- guage," p. 557. Use of the present to THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 151 " 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 occuiTence, but to design. " Do you go abroad this year 1" "I -will come unto you when I shall ]Dass through Macedonia, for. I do pass through Macedonia," 1 Cor. xvi. 5. In this sense the present was used in the sentence complained of. " The next point which I notice," means, " the nest point coming under notice," " the next point which I mean to notice in my lecture." It is necessaiy for one who would write good grammar, and remark on the grammar of 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 •^ elliptic. objected to by one who fills it up thus : " it may be a difl&culty of many other people, besides being a difficidty 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 piurpose. The pronoun " Mm " is governed by the pre- position, or transitive adverb '^ besides." 182 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. " Others besides him " is a clause perfect in itself, and needs no fiUing up what- ever. Caution 259. Aud this may sei-ve as a caution to cigainst rash . ... r. r-n- and positive US agamst rashness in this matter of nlhng iissortions about con- up seuteiices, having hastily assumed them btruction — to be elliptical. One of my critics says, " We hear clergymen sometimes say . . than him, than /ter, than them! Only place the verb after such words — place the words is and are — and see what nonsense it makes — than Am is, than her is, than them are." 260. Here is an instance of that against which I would caution my readers. This WTiter first assumes that the construction of 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 tha7i 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 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 183 illogical critique would be deceived by its rash and positive character, and imagine the point in question to be proved. 261, "Wliat do you wish us to under- ^'j°^^-„ ^^^ stand by readers '■constructing^ the sentence % "construe." Writers ' construct :' readers ' construe.'' " This is said in reference to my having wi'itten 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, direct one of them to construe the sentence. He knows perfectly well what I mean. He tm-ns 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 184 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. "above.'' Adjectives used as adverbs. " construing,^' in the sentence quoted, Trould make sense, and convey a certain mean- ing not very far removed from that which. I intended : bnt it -svould not convey that meaning itself, that of supplying a construc- tion — building up the sentence with reference to its concords and governments. 262. A coiTcspoudent says, "You make use of the adverb "above'' as an adjective. Can you use the coiTclative word " helow " 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 in the ellipsis, and saying " the above-mentioned." 263. I must say something on the question 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 gi-ammar, 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 spako plain.''' " The moon shines bright." " How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank, THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 185 "Breathe soft, ye ■winds, ye waters gently flow." 264. These, we are told, ought to have been written with " plainly'' " hrightly" " siveetly'' and " softly.'" But this is a case' where the English language and the common gi-ammarians are at variance. The sentences which I have quoted are hut 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 will not. Most of those which can be so used seem to be of one syllable ; i:)lain, soft, sioeet, right, wrong, and the like. In all these cases it may be more precise and accurate to say 'plainly, softly, sweetly, rightly, xvrongly, he, 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, in no case do they thus use adjectives of more than one syllable. We may say, He spake plain : but we cannot say " He spoke simple," or " He spoke delightful." We may say, "The moon shines bright," but we cannot say, "The moon shines brilliant." What 186 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. Two uses of adverbial qualifica- tions, — subjective and ob- jective. 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 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 quahfying 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 ohjectively used, has re- spect to the result, and not to the mode, of THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 1S7 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, " do rightly," or as an adjective, " do that which is right,'^ " do justice." In this particular case, it does not appear which of the two is intended. But take another, Neh. viii. 33 — " Thou hast done riglit, but we have done wickedly." Here it seems almost certain, from the parallelism, that right is meant to be used adverbially; 268. JSTow pass on to the other cases in which the adjective is used. " He spake plain." "That which he spake was j?:)Zai7z." " He spake (that which was) 2^^«^w.'' 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 188 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. shining : it is rather objective than sub- jective. " The moon is giving hght, 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. "looking 270. The account above given will at once enable us to convict of error such expres- sions as " looking sadly,'' " smelling sweetly," ''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., neuter, and akin in construction to the verb substantive " to &e." " The rose smells siveet" is in construc- tion much the same as "oint decidedly iveak ; but writing as I did a de- cided weak point, I spoke of a iveak point of whose existence there coidd he no doidjt. 274. If we use our powers of observation, AnomaUes. 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 prac- tice. 275. Take but one example out of many ; "long" aud " short " the use of the adjectives long and short, with 592 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH, reference to adverbial constx'uction. Long is an adverb as well as an adjective. We say "How long," speaking of time. "Paiil was.* .long speaking." We have no adverb '^longly,'^ though we have " widely^'' " hi^oadly," " deeji- ly." Now observe the adjective "sJwrV^ Its ,use as an adverb is hardly legitimate. Yom' banker asks you whether you wiU tahe 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 " sliortly " 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 irreached shortly ; " but we must use it of that which is to come, " I hope shortly to see you." "just now." 27G. 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 ai:)plication 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 "Whcnr* and we reply THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 193 "Just now," we 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 coimties we have such a sentence as " I'll be with you just now," which is perfectly right in logical pre- cision, though proscribed by English usage. 278. The use of the indicative and sub- Subjunctive and indica- junctive moods, after conditional particles, as tive moods in condition- if and whether, is a wide subject, and one on ^^ sentence?. which considerable uncertainty seems to pre- vail. The general rule appears plain enough : The general rule. that when matter of fact is concerned, we should use the indicative : when matter of doubt, the subjunctive. *' Whether I he 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 clearlv ^titeii by 1 • 1 T 1 -TN T ^r. 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, 194 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 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, there is no element of doubt, and the verb should be in the indicative mood. If (as is the case) he is gone, I must 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 must follow him.* if,'nonincc of 280. When a correspondent said of the this i-ule. 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 sujiplied is the former one in Dr. Latham's rule. " If (as is the case) a man values his peace of mind." iTiis rule 281. But this rule, satisfactory as it is for a * Ilistory of the English Lanfjuage, p. 646. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 195 guide, does not seem to have been known to perhaps un- known to our older wi-iters. Oiir translators of the o>^r oWer writers. 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 missing phrase clearly must be, "as is the case" they have used the subjunctive. An instance of this is found in Col. iii. 1, "If ye then he 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," &c. " 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; 2 196 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. then let me," (fee. So fai' 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 observed the rule. " If now thou hast under- standing, hear this." — Job xxsiv. 16. 284. The same irregularity appeai-s 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 Gi'eek verb is in the indicative, as by the ordinaiy rule the English should be also : " Though (as is the fact) I am absent in the flesh." Bias former- 285. I believe it will be found, on the ly to the subjunctive, whole, that there is a decided bias on the part of oui' translators to the use of the sub- junctive mood. I do not of couree 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 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 197 be so by the auxiliary, or by the form of the verb itself. 286. But if there was a bias then in favour l^^it more to the indica- of the subjunctive, the bias is as decidedly *i'^^- now against it. Our conditional sentences in common talk are almost all expressed in the indicative. " I don't know whether I shall be at the committee ; but if I am, I will mention it." This eveiy one says. "If I 6e," 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. 198 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. Verbaftev 288. Wliile Speaking upon the indicative without an g^j^jj subiunctive moods, I may notice that auxiliary. "^ j j the use of the bare verb without " may" or ^^ might ^^ or " should" after the conjunction " that" which we not unfrequently meet with in the Enghsh version of the Bible, and in the Common Prayer-book, is not ungi-am- 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 uufeignedly thankful, and that we shew forth thy praise not only with our lips but in our lives," the verb '^ shew " is as truly in the subjunctive as the verb " he " in " that I be not ashamed," or the verb " slip " in " hold thou xip my goings in thy paths, that my footsteps slip not." That this is so, is conclusively shown by considting 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 here 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 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 199 ye axen the fadir in my name, he give to you : " and so on, wherever the auxiliary is found in the more modern version. 289. We will now pass on to another Singulars and Plurals. matter — the use of singulars and lolurals. It is a general rule, that when a verb has two or more nominative cases to which it belongs, it must be in the plural number. But let us take care what we 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 "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 s'eparately, and also when it is only true of them taken toge- ther. Now how is this in another example 1 Am -I to say " tico and tivo are four" or " two and tim 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 1 Here as clearly I may be grammatically correct in saying " two and two are four," if, that is, I understand some- 200 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 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, ivith no apples, I do not see how " are " can be right. I am saying that the sum of two numbers, which I express by tivo 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 "is" 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 childi'en made to say, " twice one are two." For this there is no justification whatever. It is a plain violation oif the first rvdes 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 not 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 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 201 nouns coupled together by " and." The diffi- culty arises from the fact that " and '' has many meanings. Sometimes it impoi'ts addi- tion: sometimes it merely denotes an appo- sition, or simultaneous predication of two characters or qualities belonging to one and 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 202 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. to be obtained," kc, 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 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 Lsxiii. 25, "My flesh and my heart faileth.'" Again, as was remarked by the critic in the " Times " of September 29th, 18G3, in censuring the modernizations in the Cambridge Shakspeare, Shakspeare wi'ote "His steeds to water at those springs on chaliced flowers that lies:'* and Prospero is made to say, "lies at my mercy all mine enemies." How are these apparent violations of gi'ammar to be accounted for 1 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. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 203 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 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 J^j®°on. conjunctional and prepositional particles. The jjarticTes^^ first of these which I shall notice is " except.'''' Except means toith the exception of: 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 ioiation of " this rule. sentence taken from a newspaper : " Few 204 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. ladies, except Her Majesty, could have made themselves heard," &c. For how is the word " except " here to be understood ? From what list is Her Majesty excepted, or taken out ? Clearly not from among the few ladies spoken of. Had the sentence stood "All 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- 29G. Thex-e is a use of except, which was cept for '^ ' " unless." QjiQg Ycrj 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." Tliis is found constantly throughout the English version of . the Bible, both in the Old Testament and in the New. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 205 297. Without is another word used in some- " without." 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 yom-selves in breath with exercise, and in heart with joyfulness." In this, " without you Tceep " is in fact a con- struction compounded of "tvithout 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 " inutual ? " Much the same as " reciprocal" It describes that which 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 imderstood is clear : for they deliberately altered the previous versions to this form. Wiclif had "bi faith that is bothe yom-e and myn to gidre:" Tyndall, " through the common faith which bothe ye and I have : " so also Cranmer and the Geneva Bible. 299. And muttial ought never to be used, 206 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. unless the reciprocity exists. "The mutual love of husband and wife " is coiTect 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 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 used in correspondence, principally by mer- cantile men : "we will W7'ite you" instead of " we will write to you : " " write me at your earliest convenience," instead of ". unite to «ie." Is this an allowable ellipsis 1 It is universally acknowledged that the " to " of the so-called dative case may be dropped in certain con- structions : " He did me a fiivour ; " " He sent me a birthday present ; " " He wrote me a kind letter : '' " The Lord raised them up deliverers." In all these cases, the object or act which the verb directly governs is expresssed. 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 ellii^tically expressed. Thus : " He sent me " would mean, not " He sent to me," but he sent, as his messenger, me. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 207 "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 plirase, " He wrote me q, letter,'' or " he wrote me word,'' and merely say "he wrote me" we cannot properly understand the sentence m any other way, than that " me " is governed by the verb "wrote.'" That this is nonsense, is not to the pm-pose. The con- struction of such a phrase necessarily halts, and is defective, not only elliptical. We should say in all cases, " wi'ite to me,'' or " write me tvord,^' or the like ; never barely " write me.'' 302. Very 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, occui-ring as it did so very shortly after its 208 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. opening, and to whose untiring energy the Institution mainly owes its existence, might seriously affect its futm*e prospects and position." 303. Now in both these instances the con- junction " and '' is wholly imneeded, is indeed 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 time." 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 vciy day, Nov. 11, 18G3, I find the following sentence, occur- ring in the translation of ]M. Casimir Pen'iei*'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, hut which I have been imable to do.'' "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 " o?ie," used in the sense of the French " o??,'' or the German, "man," and meaning people in general. THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 209 " 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 far, " 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 Enghsh the saying of the French gour- mand, which, by the way, I am glad an Enghshman did not originally utter : " Avec cette sauce on pouiTait manger son propre pere ; '' — how am I to express myself ? 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, " With this sauce one could eat his own father.'' Is this an English usage (I don't mean the meal, but the grammar) ? 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 con-espondents says, " "When writing on language, grammar, and composi- tion, one ought to be more than usually particular in his endeavours to be lumself correct." These sentences do not seem to me to be p 210 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. right. Having used "one," we must also use " one's " cares, and " one's " self. We must say, at the risk of sacrificing elegance of sound, " lu 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 " ive " and " our," in all stnges of happy confusion, "didn't 30G. Thei'e is another word in our common use," " hadn't English veiT difficult to keep right. It is used," djc. » -^ _ _ 1 & the verb " tise," signifying to be accustomed. " I icsed 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 " ivasn't used." This latter would be legitimate enough, if the vei'b were " used to," meaning " accustomed hy use to." We may say, " / tvasn't used to the practice." But it will be plain that it is a different meaning of which I am now speak- THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 211 ing. 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 phi-ase, " 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. " / used " is negatived by " / used not." But unfortunately, this ex- pression does not do the work in common talk. " I used not to see hmi at my uncle's" 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 expi'ess, not something which it was your practice not to do, but something which it was not your practice to do. " / never used" is better, but it may be too strong. I am afraid there is no refuge but in the inelegant woi'd " usednH" to which I suppose most of us have many times been driven. 308. Riding or driving ? This question has "ridinjr" or been asked by several correspondents, in con- ^^^ sequence of my story, told further on, of a benevolent old gentleman " aiding in his carriage." I am asked whether this ought p 2 212 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. not to have been " driving" seeing that riding cannot properly be predicated except of pei-sons on hoi-seback. But there is not necessarily any such limitation of the mean- ing of the ^vord 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 chai'iots and on horses : " and such, as may be seen in the dictionaries, is the usage of all English writex-s. " I take it." 309. It is a cm-ious symptom of oiu- having forgotten the usages of the best age of English, that sevei-al correspondents shoidd have objected to my having written " / tahe 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 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 213 part, to take a man for his hrother, 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 "/ taJce it,^^ were to be superseded by " / a2:>prehend ; " or, as we should be sure to have it pronounced, "/ 7iappri/end." 310. Another correspondent inquu-es re-"the^ 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 eartJi's revolving on its axis.'' He believes that he has 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. But let us examine a little further. It is somewhat curious that, in this last sentence, we may leave out the possessive pronoun, Avithout obscuring the sense. "Our earth enjoys day and night as a consequence of 214 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. revolving on its axis." To which a rejoinder may be made, "of %vhat revolving on its axis?" and the answer is "the earth," not " ^Ae earth's.'^ We may, if we wish, regard the earth revolving on its aocis as a descrijjtiou 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., of the earth revolving on her axis. 312. I believe, then, that both fonns 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 he cites 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 coiTe- spondcnt objects. It may be that my ears are accustomed to the Greek and Latin con- struction, which is according to this form and not to the other, "preriicatc" 313. A coiTcspondcnt finds that the news- for "pre- dict." papers are in the habit of using "'predicate" THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 215 where they mean ^'iyredkt." I have not ob- served this ; but it may be well to say, that to 2^f^lace 1 How can the right man ever be in the wrong place ? or the wrong man in the right place ? We 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 togetJier that was wrong, not the man, nor the hole. " his wrong 324. This puts me in mind of the servant shppers." ■"• at school once coming into the schookoom, iu consequence of some interchange of slippers, and calling out, " Has any gentleman got his wrong slippers ? " Now, 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." THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 221 326. Some odd descriptions of 7nen have Ambiguous descriptions been forwarded me, arising from the ambign- of men. ous junction of compound words. In two or three places in London, we see " Old and New BooJcselhr'' — 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 com'se, 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 : " E. C. begs to apologise for not acknowledging P. 0. order at the time (but was from home), and thus got delayed, misplaced, and forgotten." 328. "^y doing a thing,''' for "if he will do it" is noticed by a friend as a common error in Scotch papers. " Found on board the steamer ' Vulcan,' a gold locket. The owner may have it by giving the date, when lost, and paying expenses." "Found, in Stockwell Street, on Friday 222 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. " wants cutting." Deteriora- tion of the laii;.'iiagu itself. early, a gold or gold-plated Geneva watch. The owner may have the same on proving his property, bi/ applying to Mr. R. B., 1G6, Hospital Street." 329. Is it right, a coiTespondent asks, to say " his hair wants cutting," " the lawn wants mowing ? " I should say, undoubtedly. His hair wants a certain act performed on it. AVhat 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 zvants his hair cut- ting^' cannot be similarly defended, nor indeed at all ; it ought to be, " he wants his hair ait." 330. But I now come, from tlic by-rules and details of the use of the language, to 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 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 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 223 forms the subject of our essay, is, '^^ clipjnng the Kings English." So that it is not im- probable that the analogy between debasing language and debasing coin first led to it. 331. Now in this case the charge is two- Sources of our lan- fold ; that of clipping, and that of beating guage. 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 Nonnan invadei's. 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 Avent 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, or more often through the French. We all remember that Gurth and "VVamba complain, in " Ivanhoe," that the farm-animals, as long as they had the toil of tending them, were THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 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 2^07'L This is characteristic enough ; but it lets us, in a few words, into an important truth. Even so the language grew up ; 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 comj)ounded 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 insepai-able ; welded together, and overlapping each other, in almost every sentence which we use. But short of exclusive use of one or tlie other, there is a very great difference in respect of the amount of use between writers and speakers. He is ever the most effective writer and speak ei-, who knows how to build THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 225 the great body of his discourse out of his ncCtive Saxon ; avaihng 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 Process of '' " degeuera- the lower kind of writers of modern English ^io" '■ ^ wnenco is the other way. The lano^uao-e, as known J^^iniy J o o J arising. 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 ofi'enders in this point are the country journals, and, as might be expected, just in proportion to their want 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 regular London press — its articles being for the most part written by men of education and talent in the various political circles. 22G THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. The main offence of the newspapers, the head and front of their offending, is, the insisting on calHng common things by uncommon names ; changing onr ordinary short Saxon nouns and verbs for long words derived from In what the Latin. And when it is remembered that couiib iiig. ^j^.^ .^ ^^^^^ 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 veiy iiseful 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. Dialect of 334. Our journals seem indeed detcnnined oiirjuunials. 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 woman is a "female ;" or if unmarried, a ^^ young j^jo-son," which expression, in the newspapers, is always of the feminine gender ; THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 227 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 " fartyl' one of which expresses a man's un%t]i, and the other, in its common uutechnical use, belongs to man associated. And why should a woman 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 1 Why not call a man a " 7nale,'" if a woman is to be a "female ? " 335. The word 2Mrty for a man is especially *^ " P""*"*^'" 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) : Stephano : Ho-w now sLall this be compassed ? Canst thou bring me to the party ? Caliban : Tea, yea, my lord : I'll yield him thee asleep, where thou may'st knock a nail into his head. q2 228 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. I once lieard 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 bearing of " a short party going over the bridge." Curious also that raised by an advei-tisement sent me; "Wanted, a party to teach a young man dancing ^:)rway mail's person." 345. ''Persuasion" is another word very ^'. P^^rsua- commonly and very curiously used by them. We all know that j^ersuasion means the fact of being persuaded, by arg-ument or by example. 5ut in the newspapers, it means a sect or way of belief. And strangely enough, it is most generally used of that veiy sect and way of . belief, whose characteristic is this, that they 232 THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. refuse to be persuaded. We constantly read of the " Hehreio persuasion,'' or the ^^ Jewish persimsion.'" I expect soon to see the term widened still more, and a man of colour described as " an individual of the negro per- suasion.'" '^t^sus- 346. Not only oui' rights of conscience, but 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 Uls and accidents possible. Men never break their legs, but they always ^'sustain a fracture'' of them ; a phrase which suggests to one the idea of the poor man with both hands holding up the broken limb to keep it straight. ricncc!"'^"" ^'^'^- Akin to 5? uc ^-"X^fe^t SOUTHERN REGIONAL ^Bf^RY FACm AA 000 352 416 2 •;>;.:3ie*:.>' «"*;. w ■^'■<- *^^mr^ *i . '- 2c,-.. :S^^jc:^ vnv <•-<: '' •«-. .«»r.4«:<. c ISC'. << C^-^??:! ■Sfc<-r* |-V1^V' -f' ^BEl4^^^ "' '' < T" ^i >rT 1 ^-.;;? ^ ^ it- .^r-^-.c