Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/312

298 How doth the earth terrifie and oppress us with terrible earthquakes, which are most frequent in China, Japan, and those eastern climes, swallowing up sometimes six cities at once!–.

Of the many possible violations of sentence accent, one—common in inferior writers—is illustrated in the next section.

There are two admissible kinds of causal 'as' clauses—the pure and the mixed. The pure clause assigns as a cause some fact that is already known to the reader and is sure to occur to him in the connexion: the mixed assigns as a cause what is not necessarily known to the reader or present in his mind; it has the double function of conveying a new fact, and indicating its relation to the main sentence. Context will usually decide whether an as clause is pure or mixed; in the following examples, it is clear from the nature of the two clauses that the first is pure, the second mixed:

The second of these, it will be noticed, is unreadable, unless we slur the as to such an extent as practically to acknowledge that it ought not to be there. The reason is that, although a pure clause may stand at any point in the sentence, a mixed one must always precede the main statement. The pure clause, having only the subordinate function normally indicated by as, is subordinate in sense as well as in grammar; and the declining accentuation with which it is accordingly pronounced will not be interfered with wherever we may place it. But the mixed clause has another function, that of conveying a new fact, for which as docs not prepare us, and which entitles it to an accentuation as full and as varied as that of the main statement. To neutralize the subordinating effect of as, and secure the proper accentuation, we must place the