Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/264

254 Christ's sake, our blessed Lord and Saviour. At the time these words were so arranged, it can hardly have been thought allowable to transfer the termination from the main word to a subordinate one : else sake would have stood at the end of the sentence. In the Morte d'Arthur, iii. 1, Arthur tells Merlin "I love Gwenever the kynges doughter Lodegrean of the land of Camelerd," that is, the daughter of Lodegrean king of the land of Camelerd. Again, in iii. 8, we find ''My name is Gavayne, the kyng Lott of Orkeney sone; and shortly after. Sir Gavayne kyng Lots sone of Orkeney. Again in iv. 7, ''I am the lordes doughter of this castel. In I. 2, — kynge Uryens, that was Sir Ewains le blaunche maynys fader — we meet with an adjective intervening between the genitive and its governing noun : such a collocation cannot be common, I should think, after the beginning of the sixteenth century, even if it be so before. In Arnold's chronicle (printed about the year 1502) we read (in p. xxxv of the reprint) the Dukis of Yorke eldest sone toke upon liym the crowne. But the practice at that time must have been very unsettled : for a few pages further on we find, the kynge of Spayns doughter; and soon after the kyngys doughter of  Spayne; and again (p. xlix) the sister of the kyngys of England., where we have a genitive with the preposition precedhig it. The usual mode however seems to have been to insert the noun on which the genitive depends between it and its attributives, as in the instances quoted above from the collects, and three of those from the Morte d'Arthur. In the same way in our version of St Matthew we are told that Herod put John in prison, for Herodias sake, his brother Philip's wife. And we meet with the same construction in Chaucer's Jack Upland: "If Christe might and could and would have made a rule perfect without default, and did not, he was not Gods sonne almighty," that is, the son of God Almighty. Again in his translation of Boethius (p. 398, ed. 1687), "Agamemnon wan agen Heleine, that was Menelaus wife, his brother:" and at the begginning of the Troilus and Creseide, " The double sorow of Troilus to telle, That was the king Priamus sonne of Troy." It would require some research to make out when the modern usage became the current one. In the Provoked Wife, A. iv. Sc. 1, we