Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 2.djvu/231

 ii. SEPT. 17,

NOTES AND QUERIES.

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hardy sea-rovers should consign their dead on one of their marauding expeditions to the safe custody of the hardier rock, and within sight and sound of the element they loved so intensely ? The Colomban monks would as naturally inter theirs in the softer ground on which, six centuries later, the church of St. Peter still stands, a venerable reflex of the surrounding seclusion and peace. This matter, however, is never likely to be cleared up either by private research or by the learned efforts of the Royal Archaeological Institute.

J. B. S. Manchester.

INCLUSIVE SUPERLATIVE.

FOR want of a better title, the above name has been by some grammarians applied to that curious construction whereof perhaps the most familiar example in the English language is to be found in the well-known lines which occur in Milton's ' Paradise Lost,' iv. 323 :

Adam, the goodliest man of men since born, His sons : the fairest of her daughters Eve.

As if Adam could have been one of his own sons, and Eve one of her own daughters !

As a matter of course bigoted defenders of all that is to be found in the great classics of all times stoutly defend this construction, and allege in its defence that it is an old and well-established Greek construction, and that it was freely adopted or imitated by Latin writers. Nay more ; as is the manner of such zealous advocates, they profess to see a positive beauty in it, just as fanatical admirers of Messrs. George Meredith and Robert Browning profess to see special beauties in the most obscure eccentricities of these writers, or as Ruskin raves about the most indefensible oddities of Botticelli.

It may not be uninteresting to collect and present in this place some of the most con- spicuous examples of this construction which are to be found in the classics, both ancient and modern.

In the 'Iliad,' i. 505, Thetis, in pleading before Jove the cause of her son Achilles, calls that hero wKu/iopwraros a\\(av the most early doomed, or most short-lived, oi the others.

In ' Iliad,' ii. 673, of Nireus it is said :

Nipeus, os KaAAioTos avrjp vTro"I\iov r)\0ev Twv aAAwv Aavatui' /ACT' ap.vp.ova

Nireus, the handsomest man who came to Troy of the other Greeks, after, or next to the distinguished son of Peleus.

In the ' Odyssey,' i. 132, we have :

lap 8* auros KAioytdv dero TroiKi'Aov, aAAtov

where Telemachus is represented as placing
 * or himself a seat apart from the other suitors,

as if he himself had been one of them. In ' Odyssey,' xi. 469, of Ajax it is said :

os dptoros jv ctiSos ft. Aavaa" v, fec.,

re

who was noblest in appearance and form of the other Greeks.

And in the same book, 1. 550, almost the same expression occurs :

AlOV0', OS 7Tpl fifV ttSoS, TTCpl 8' pytt TCTUKTO

Twv dAAwv Aai/aoJv,  raJf Trpoyeyenj/ievwv, the most worthy of mention of all those which had preceded it.

Horace, in ' Satires,' I. i. 100, describes the freed-womau of Ummidius, who clove that worthy to the chine with an axe, as " fortis- sima Tyndaridarum "; implying only thafc she showed a spirit exceeding even that of the daughters of Tyndareus, in allusion, of course, to Clytemnestra, who slew her husband Agamemnon.

Still another poet, whose name I cannot recall, speaks of Diana as " comitum pulcher- rima" the fairest of her own attendant damsels.

Tacitus, in his 'History,' i. 50, says of Vespasian : "Solus omnium ante se principum in melius mutatus est "that is, that he was the only one of the princes who preceded him who was converted to a better course.

So much for the ancients. Among the moderns we have the lines of Milton cited above. Shakespeare, too, in 'Midsummer Night's Dream, V. i. 252, has " the greatest error of all the rest," besides, I believe, other examples of the same construction. Newton asserts that it would not be incorrect to de- scribe a man as "the most learned of all others"; while in Elrington's 'Life of Arch- bishop Ussher ' Prynne is quoted as writing to the following effect : " This Archbishop [of Canterbury] was the very worst of all his traytorous [sic] predecessors"; as if a man could be one of his own predecessors.

Thus it is apparent that there is plenty of precedent and authority, both in ancient and modern times, for this most curious con- struction. And yet, when all is said and done and no matter who began it or who