Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/259

249 On English Preterites and Genitives, 249 argument on which it is founded, and the knowledge of hu- man nature, of history, and of language that it implies, is an admirable match for Dugald Stewart'^s celebrated notion that the Sanscrit language was an offset of the Greek, car- ried to India and planted there by Alexander's army. Stone- henge, we shall next be told, consists of stones hewn from the Tarpeian rock, and that Julius Cesar's soldiers brought them over in their pockets. The slight difficulty attend- ing such a hypothesis, from the size of the stones, when it is suggested to the hypothesizer, he will reply, may be got over in two ways, either by supposing that they have grown since then, or that the men in those days had bigger pockets than they have now : and he will remind us that Pope's Homer tells us how his ancestors used to lift much heavier stones than he could. For my own part I w^ould rather contend that this primeval temple is formed of the teeth of the great earthsprung giant whom Corineus slew But to stoop from these flights : there are sundry ques- tions connected with the use of our genitive which require more elucidation than they have hitherto received ; and among them are the three idioms to which my friend G. C. L. refers. Would it not be possible for instance to throw some sort of light on that singular peculiarity which compells us to prefix the genitive to the noun it is to be coupled with ? When did this restriction come into use ? It did not prevail in Anglosaxon : Coedmon has heafod ealra gesceafta^ head of all creatures^ thurh geweald Godes^ through the wielding of God. Who is the latest writer in whom one finds such a collocation of words ? I have not noticed it in Chaucer or Maundevile, or in the little I have read of Gower and Robert of Gloucester : but unless one is expressly on the watch, even such an idiom as this might occur repeatedly, without making any durable impression on the memory. In German prose the usual order is for the genitive to fol- low : that is to say, in most of the cases in which we should place the genitive before the noun it depends on, the Ger- mans would do the same: but in that far more numerous class of cases where we should have recourse to the prepo- sition of they subjoin the genitive. They, like us, would say Goethes Fausf^ and not, unless for the sake of some Vol. II. No. 4. Ii