This is now sometimes used by highly qualified English

writers.

I have now travelled through nearly every Department in France, and I do not remember ever meeting with a dirty bed: this, I fear, cannot be said of our happily in all other respects cleaner island.-Mr. Weld, Vacation in Brittany, 1866.

Douglas, in the Nenia, p. 10, is so far as I know the first who called attention to this passage of our great poet [Hamlet, v. 1], as illustrating the very commonly to be observed presence of shards, flints, and pebbles,' in graves, into which it is difficult to think they could have got by accident.— George Rolleston, M.D., On Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon Sepulture.

557. This expansibility of the noun applies equally to the subject and to the object; that is to say, it may take place either before or after the verb, or even both. It does not often happen that the two wings of the sentence are expanded in the same manner, because the uniformity would not be pleasing. But the same order rules on the one side as on the other; and variety is sought only to avoid monotony. If we were speaking of the sense of liberty which is nourished in a people by the habit of discussing and correcting the laws which bind them, we might say,—

Deliberation implies consent.

Continuous deliberation implies continuous consent.

A continuous deliberation implies a continuous consent.

A continuous deliberation on the law implies a continuous consent to the law.

A continuous deliberation on the law by the subject, implies a continuous assent to the law on the part of the subject.

A continuous deliberation on the law by the subject through the medium of representation, implies a continuous assent to the law on the part of the subject in his own proper person.

A practically continuous deliberation . . . implies an absolutely continuous

assent, &c.

When the accumulation between the article (or pronoun)

and the substantive becomes overcharged, the sentence recovers its equilibrium by turning the qualifying phrase over to the other side. Instead of 'a practically continuous deliberation' we may say 'a deliberation which is practically continuous'; and if we alter a tolerably strictly carried out arrangement' to 'an arrangement which is tolerably strictly carried out' we relieve the phrase of some part of its tur.gidity.

558. And indeed we seem to trace a recurrent inversion in the ordering of words in the Sentence.

The movement is so gradual, that to the national apprehension, and for all purposes of grammar, the collocative habit is fixed. It is only if we look across great tracts of time that we perceive the inversion. If we translate the Latin verb IBO in the order of its elementary parts, it is, go will I but now all the great western languages say it in this order, I will go.

The general habit of the old Indo-European languages was to place the symbolic words after their presentives, and it was out of this habit that terminal flexion grew so widely prevalent. The modern languages put the pronouns and prepositions before their verbs and nouns, and thus act as a counterpoise to the ancient terminations.

The Mosogothic remains are not generally available as independent evidence of ancient collocation, because they so largely obey the order of the Greek original. For this reason I do not quote runa némun (94) and many such, which else would be to the point. But there is at least one case of independent Mosogothic structure. When a single Greek word is resolved in translation into two or three words, we then see the native order of arrangement so far as these two or three words are concerned, because it cannot be guided by the Greek. In Matt. xi. 5, κaðapíčovrai is rendered

'hrainyai wairthand,' i.e. 'clean become': and in verse 19, edikaion is thus given-'uswaurhta gadomida warth,' i. e. 'righteous judged is.' These are the exact reverse of the modern order, 'become clean,' and 'is judged righteous.'

559. A like conclusion may be drawn from Particle-composition. We find particles which once were prefixes now used as separable suffixes; thus Gower, in the Fifth Book of the Confessio Amantis, says that the king ordered a table to be set up and spread before his bed, only instead of 'set up,' as we should now speak, he has it 'upset':

Ther scholde be to-fore his bed,

A bord upset and faire spred.

In Acts xxvii. 16, 'We had much work to come by the boat,' the verb to come by means to compass or get possession of; and it is only an inverse reconstruction of the old verb to become (by come), if we remember its first sense of come about and so arrive at.

The adverb by is identical in origin with the prefix be-, and both at first meant about, around. But this signification being lost sight of, we find that round comes naturally in as its reinforcer, and is ranged on the other side of the principal as a counter-satellite to the particle be :—

Ham. Being thus be-netted round with villanies.

William Shakspeare, Hamlet, v. 2. 29.

560. One of the most telling examples is the English Negative. Its place is now after the verb, as I was not, I will not. In early times it was before the verb; thus-ic ne was, ic ne wille; and hence the coalesced forms nas and nill.

And this case of the Negative is only a particular instance of a rule which applies on a large scale to the station of adverbs in attendance on verbs. In the whole tribe of verbal

prefixes we see the relics of a time when the adverb stood before the verb. In the living English language the adverb has taken the opposite stand.

We retain comparatively few of the elder sort from our old mother tongue, but we have borrowed them abundantly from Latin and French; and we may array the foreign borrowings against the genuine English:

561. The three languages are variously affected towards this movement. The French have the Left structure altogether, and this is the chief source of that curiously bookish savour which French conversation has upon an English palate that has for a long time been deprived of the pleasure of it. The Germans use either Left or Right according to some obscure and rigidly grammatical rules, which bring more trouble to the learner than profit to the diction. The English retain both in free option with the happiest effect as to copiousness and the increased power of suiting speech to time, place, person, and occasion; to be homely or dignified, playful or stately, as may be required.

Perhaps enough has been said to indicate traces of a law which the student may further explore for himself1. Of the

The Japanese language offers an admirable illustration. The native grammarians distinguish their nouns, verbs, adjectives, numerals and pronouns very carefully from their particles, which they call Teniwoha. This grammatical term is composed of four of the commonest of those particles, namely, te, ni, wo, and ha. Under this class come the article and the

operative cause of this alternation, we shall have something to say in the last chapter. For the present we will only add that this double movement seems to deserve a name, such as Heteroblastēsis or Yon-strif1.

562. The movement is slow, and each age enjoys its own habits of collocation, with all the security of an immutable thing. Without this condition, an inversion of order could not be the great resource that it now is for conveying variety of signification. If the order of pronoun and verb in 'you are' were not firm, the mere change of order to ' are you' would not convey all the transition from assertion to interrogation. On this single variation there hinges in our family a series of syntactic consequences. Close to interrogation is contingency and hypothesis; and consequently we make a Conditional Mood by this mere inversion of order. Thus 'Were the whole realm of nature mine,' is equivalent to 'if it were mine.' More rarely in prose, as: 'And what will you do should you find them out?'-Mrs. Trimmer, The History of the Robins, ch. iv. In English prose we commonly use conjunctions for this purpose, and we keep the inversion for poetry: that is to say, our prose is after the French 'Si tout le monde était à moi,' while our poetry retains the Gothic faculty of collocative structure. In German

preposition, besides verbal and adjectival terminations. It is a standing rule of syntax, in this as in all the languages of the Altaic family, that every defining word precedes the word defined. Thus the adjective precedes the noun, the adverb the verb, the genitive the word which governs it, the objective case the verb, and the word governed by a preposition the preposition.' On the other hand, the Teniwoha which are the signs of Mood and Tense, and sometimes of Person, Number and Case, are suffixed to the words they modify; presenting us with a dual system of Collocation analogous to the instances cited above.-A Grammar of the Japanese Written Language; with a Short Chrestomathy. By G. W. Aston, M.A.

1 In the west country the liveliest expression for growth, whether of man or beast or plant, is the verb strive, which in this use provokes comparison with the German treiben.