Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/268

258 Thus, to refer to the most celebrated instance of such a fictitious connexion, it may be very true that Troy was destroyed, and that a portion of its inhabitants survived its fall; and it is certain that Rome must have had an origin at one time or other : the "fiction in which the legend indulges, is, that these two events were connected together. As the origin of the use of his in the place of the genitive was not the question immediately before me, I assumed rather too hastily that it was a mere blunder, with- out looking round to ascertain, as one always ought to do, whether there was no other way of accounting for it : for such a charge ought not to be brought forward except as a kind of last resource. G. C. L. is inclined to question whether " such an expression as the king his house is not perfectly correct and in accordance with the spirit of the language." Now in this, as in so many other discussions, it is next to impossible to prove a negative. Above all in language, which is subject to the perpetual operation of such manifold, unaccountable, and incalculable influences, is one bound to abstain from laying down what anything must or cannot be, and to content oneself with determining and explaining what it is. The utmost that can be done is to shew that there is no sufficient evidence in favour of the construction in question as a legitimate part of the language, that it is at variance with its prevalent analogies, and then to point out the way in which the mistake, supposing it to be one, may have first gained a footing. Now in the first place I do not believe that the use of his instead of the genitive termination prevails in any of our provincial dialects : I find no mention of it in such glossaries as have fallen in my way ; and the general tendency of the speech of our lower orders, in consequence of their retaining the Saxon English with much less admixture, and thus having a more vivid feeling of its analogies, is rather to preserve its old grammatical forms to a greater extent than they are preserved in the speech of cultivated society. Nor do the idioms referred to by G. C. L. appear to me to establish his position. At all events the use of the personal pronoun after a proper name, which is found so perpetually in our old ballads, and in the old German poems,