An Act to make further Amendments in the Laws for the Relief of the Poor in England and Wales.

An Act for the Amendment of the Act of Uniformity.

The other formula merely collocates the chief nounal words in juxtaposition, and that in a reversed order; as— The Representation of the People Act.

The Compulsory Church Rate Abolition Act.

The Poor Law Amendment Act.

The Act of Uniformity Amendment Act.

And so for all complex notions we have a short familiar way of naming them, as well as a stately formula of designation 1.

Our speech has acquired this faculty and range of variation by its historical combination of the two great linguistic elements of Western civilization, the Roman and the Gothic. The long style of structure is that which we have learned from the French: the short and (as it now seems) reversed style is our own native Saxon.

Between these two formulas, so widely divergent, there lies the whole region of Flexion, and the prepositions of the longer formula have come in as substitutes for case-endings.

As there is a triple variety in our syntax, so it is an hereditary and congenial usage to speak and write with that variation which the nature and growth of our speech has put within our power. And this variation has moreover its utility, as when in antithesis it removes the contrast from the ear, and leaves it only to the mind, thus purging the language of a certain sensual importunity; as may be seen by the following example, wherein the italics are happily placed for our purpose :—

1 See I Cor. iii. 9; and compare the Contents.

God grant when men are at their wits end, they may be at the beginning of their faith, valiantly to hold out in the Truth.-Thomas Fuller, Abel Redevivus; the Epistle to the Reader, 1651.

591. The substitution of the preposition instead of the case of the noun, has been extended also to the pronoun. Hence a variety of pronounal phrases, such as few of us, one of you, all of them; and cumulative phrases also, as of my own, of yours, of theirs, from thence.

of itself.

Warsaw is not of itself a strong fortress, but it closes the railway and defends the passage of the Vistula.

And the conjunctions which are formed from the pronouns soon catch this phrasal habit.

out of which to.

But those wise and good men whose object it had been all along to save what they could of the wreck, out of which to construct another ark, &c.Blunt, History of the Reformation, ch. ix.

This has been felt to be a Frenchism or a classicism, and the English humour has never thoroughly liked it. At best it is but book-English. It is one of the most salient of the features of Addison's style that he asserted the native idiom in this particular; as, 'This is the thing which I spoke to you of.' This English reluctance to welcome of which,' 'to which,' 'from which,' as conjunctions, is to be noted as the point where our instincts lead us to resist the further progress of the French element. At this point there is, however, much vacillation and uncertainty: the English ear not being quite satisfied with either construction. The following is from one of Addison's papers :

This Morning I received from him the following Letter, which, after having rectified some little Orthographical Mistakes, shall make a Present of to the Publick.-The Spectator, No. 499.

But

The contact of the symbols of to is not pleasing. notwithstanding the untowardness of these little collisions, it still holds, that when point is desired, the native fashion, the so-called Addisonian, is resorted to. In the following quotation, as usual, the typography is carefully preserved :— The next great question is, what they did this for. That it was for a miraculous story of some kind or other, is to my apprehension extremely manifest ;-William Paley, Evidences, Prop. I. ch. x.

592. One of the prepositions has acquired for itself a very remarkable function, in attendance not on a noun, but on a verb; and yet it is a noun also; it is at the point of union between noun and verb, that is to say, the Infinitive. Here the preposition to has made for itself a permanent place, just as at has in Danish, and a (Latin ad) in Wallachian.

Thus we perceive that the prepositional form of the infinitive is not peculiar to English, as against other Gothic tongues; nor yet to the Gothic, as opposed to the Romance family of languages; but that it springs up indifferently under various conditions, and therefore must be referred to some general tendency. What that tendency is I have already surmised in the chapter on the adverbs. 453.

593. We have now reached the final stage of development of speech in its effort to overtake the several meanings of the mind and invest them each with an appropriate distinctness of form. It is as if we had followed with our eye the branchings of a growing tree till we came to the tips of last year's spray. Of the year's new growth in tender wood, only a small part will permanently endure. This infinitude

of little shoots will forthwith enter into a competition, which will increase in severity with every season, and nature's pruning will lop out year by year the weakest, until at length a very few will have established for themselves a post of permanence.

The sprays of language are these phrasal forms which are produced by the combination of symbolic words. They are constantly springing up in particular classes of society, in particular localities or crafts or schools; and in the same sphere they mostly pass their existence until they are ousted by some phrase of newer device. Now and then it happens that one escapes beyond the pale of its class and becomes more generally known, but even then, in most cases it is only to enjoy a short career, and be soon forgotten. An instance of this occurred in the recent expression to make it out; which originated about thirty years ago in the aristrocratic region, got enlarged so far as to be current among the whole of the educated classes, and then passed. quietly into oblivion. A distinguished Queen's Counsel told me how he found himself one day seated at a dinner table where the company was mostly of higher rank than he had been used to, and that by way of opening conversation with the lady next him, he asked her the question of the hour, Whether she had been to the Royal Academy? She had not; she had not been able to make it out. 'Make it out'! thought my friend to himself, 'What can that mean? This is one of their aristocratic phrases that they understand among themselves.' In course of time it became more public, and was heard on all sides, and it meant the same as to make time for a thing. But it had no chance of permanence, because there was already a well-established and more necessary use of this very phrase, 'to make it out,' in the sense of clearing up a difficulty or uncertainty.

Let us take an example from the other end of the community. In Somersetshire the ordinary phrase 'to have to do a thing,' is in frequent and varied use. The negative 'not to have to do' is common as a euphemism for saying that the thing is prohibited. The parson came suddenly upon some rustic children who were swinging where they had no right to be, and as he drove them off, one boy made himself the spokesman: 'Please, sir, we did n know as we had n had to swing here!'

Concluding Remarks on Syntax.

594. There are two chief controlling influences in the formation of the sentence, namely Logic and Rhythm. Of rhythm we shall have to speak in the chapter on Prosody: logic associates itself with Syntax.

Logic as a mental faculty is not originative and creative; it is only regulative and continuative. A stock of thought is presupposed, and the part of logic is to arrange this in an intelligent order. For the purposes of philology we may define logic as an intellectual consistency in syntax, a regularity of language which guides thought smoothly and with a sense of consecutiveness.

The meaning may often be clear enough though the language may be so inconsequent as to deserve the name of nonsense. In a certain Improvement Act of the session of 1872, the interpretation clause lays it down as a rule "that the term "new building" means any building pulled or burnt down to or within ten feet from the surface of the adjoining ground.' The meaning is plain enough, that no building shall be accounted as new, of which more than ten feet was old. But it is illogical, it creates a jumble and