Page:The grammar of English grammars.djvu/560



OBS. 4.--The putting of you for thou has introduced the anomalous compound yourself, which is now very generally used in stead of thyself. In this instance, as in the less frequent adoption of ourself for myself, Fashion so tramples upon the laws of grammar, that it is scarcely possible to frame an intelligible exception in her favour. These pronouns are essentially singular, both in form and meaning; and yet they cannot be used with I or thou, with me or thee, or with any verb that is literally singular; as, "I ourself am." but, on the contrary, they must be connected only with such plural terms as are put for the singular; as, "We ourself are king."--"Undoubtedly you yourself become an innovator."--L. Murray's Gram., p. 364; Campbell's Rhet., 167.

"Try touch, or sight, or smell; try what you will,   You strangely find nought but yourself alone." --Pollok, C. of T., B. i, l. 162.

OBS. 5.--Such terms of address, as ''your Majesty, your Highness, your Lordship, your Honour'', are sometimes followed by verbs and pronouns of the second person plural, substituted for the singular; and sometimes by words literally singular, and of the third person, with no other figure than a substitution of who for which: as, "Wherein your Lordship, who shines with so much distinction in the noblest assembly in the world, peculiarly excels"--Dedication of Sale's Koran. "We have good cause to give your Highness the first place; who, by a continued series of favours have obliged us, not only while you moved in a lower orb, but since the Lord hath called your Highness to supreme authority."--Massachusetts to Cromwell, in 1654.

OBS. 6.--The general usage of the French is like that of the English, you for thou; but Spanish, Portuguese, or German politeness requires that the third person be substituted for the second. And when they would be very courteous, the Germans use also the plural for the singular, as they for thou. Thus they have a fourfold method of addressing a person: as, they, denoting the highest degree of respect; he, a less degree; you, a degree still less; and thou, none at all, or absolute reproach. Yet, even among them, the last is used as a term of endearment to children, and of veneration to God! Thou, in English, still retains its place firmly, and without dispute, in all addresses to the Supreme Being; but in respect to the first person, an observant clergyman has suggested the following dilemma: "Some men will be pained, if a minister says we in the pulpit; and others will quarrel with him, if he says I."--''Abbott's Young Christian'', p. 268.

OBS. 7.--Any extensive perversion of the common words of a language from their original and proper use, is doubtless a matter of considerable moment. These changes in the use of the pronouns, being some of them evidently a sort of complimentary fictions, some religious people have made it a matter of conscience to abstain from them, and have published their reasons for so doing. But the moral objections which may lie against such or any other applications of words, do not come within the grammarian's province. Let every one consider for himself the moral bearing of what he utters: not forgetting the text, "But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgement: for by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned."--Matt., xii, 36 and 37. What scruples this declaration ought to raise, it is not my business to define. But if such be God's law, what shall be the reckoning of those who make no conscience of uttering continually, or when they will, not idle words only, but expressions the most absurd, insignificant, false, exaggerated, vulgar, indecent, injurious, wicked, sophistical, unprincipled, ungentle, and perhaps blasphemous, or profane?

OBS. 8.--The agreement of pronouns with their antecedents, it is necessary to observe, is liable to be controlled or affected by several of the figures of rhetoric. A noun used figuratively often suggests two different senses, the one literal, and the other tropical; and the agreement of the pronoun must be sometimes with this, and sometimes with that, according to the nature of the trope. If the reader be unacquainted with tropes and figures, he should turn to the explanation of them in Part Fourth of this work; but almost every one knows something about them, and such as must here be named, will perhaps be made sufficiently intelligible by the examples. There seems to be no occasion to introduce under this head more than four; namely, personification, metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche.

OBS. 9.--When a pronoun represents the name of an inanimate object personified, it agrees with its antecedent in the figurative, and not in the literal sense; as, "There were others whose crime it was rather to neglect Reason than to disobey her."--Dr. Johnson. "Penance dreams her life away."--Rogers. "Grim Darkness furls his leaden shroud."--Id. Here if the pronoun were made neuter, the personification would be destroyed; as, "By the progress which England had already made in navigation and commerce, it was now prepared for advancing farther."--Robertson's America, Vol. ii, p. 341. If the pronoun it was here intended to represent England, the feminine she would have been much better; and, if such was not the author's meaning, the sentence has some worse fault than the agreement of a pronoun with its noun in a wrong sense.

OBS. 10.--When the antecedent is applied metaphorically, the pronoun usually agrees with it in its literal, and not in its figurative sense; as, "Pitt was the pillar which upheld the state."--"The monarch of mountains rears his snowy head."--"The stone which the builders rejected."--Matt., xxi, 42. According to this rule, which would be better than whom, in the following text: "I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them an other little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots."--Daniel, vii, 8. In Rom., ix, 33, there is something similar: "Behold, I lay in Sion a stumbling-stone and rock of offence: and whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed." Here the stone or rock is a metaphor for Christ, and the pronoun him may be referred to the sixth exception above; but the construction is not agreeable, because it is not regular: it would be more grammatical, to change on him to ''