After verbs expressive of the operations of the senses the participle or the infinitive may be used, but with a slight difference in the meaning; the participle describing the act as at the moment actually proceeding; e. g., I saw the bird fly. I saw the bird flying. I have spoken of a participle as being used absolutely or independently. A word is said to be used absolutely or independently when it stands disconnected in construction from what precedes, and sometimes from what follows as well. Instead of one word the absolute construction may contain two words or more. Take as examples of this construction, He failing, who shall meet success? "Your fathers-where are they ?"-(Zech. i. 5.) "Or I only and Barnabas, have not we power ?"-(1 Cor. ix. 6.) Nay but, Oman, who art thou that repliest against God?”— (Rom. ix. 20.) "O rare we!"-Cowper. "Miserable they !"-Thomson. The construction in full involves two subjects; e. g., The sun rising, the darkness fleeth away. William being dead, Victoria succeeded. A question has been raised as to what is the absolute case in English. With the view we have taken of cases, the question has little meaning or importance. For the sake of a name you may call the construction in question the absolute construction, and when pronouns are employed in that construction you will generally find them in the nominative. Yet Milton says me miserable!" 66 The construction is elliptical, and whether the noun or pronoun) employed should be subject or object depends on the way in which the ellipsis is supplied. SYNTAX OF THE PREDICATE; THE VERB,--THE OBJECT. I must now conduct you to the predicate of a simple proposition. In order to effect my purpose, I must modify our model sentence a little, as thus: Subject. The sick man Predicate. drinks a beverage made of wine and water. The sentence thus altered brings under our notice two additional parts of speech, namely, the preposition (of) and the conjunction (and). It also directs our attention specifically to government, namely, in the relation borne by the verb drinks to the noun beverage, and in the relation borne by the preposition of to the noun wine and the noun water. If, now, we look at our predicate, we find that it may be divided into two parts, namely, the verb and the object; as, Subject. The man Verb. drinks Predicate. Object. a beverage made of wine and water. Viewed in relation to its several components, the predicate contains the verb drinks; the article a; the nouns beverage, wine, water; the past participle made; the preposition of; finally, the conjunction and. The articles have been already handled. The nouns, the verb, and the preposition range themselves under the general head of government; the past participle offers an instance of agreement; the conjunction acts merely in the way of combination. Government-The Object after a Verb. Every transitive verb has an object, expressed or understood, and the same verb may sometimes be used transitively or intransitively. If no specific object is given, the verb may be considered intransitive; e. g., Intransitive Man drinks; the horse trots. Transitive: Man drinks water; the horse trots ten miles an hour. A verb which is strictly intran sitivemay be made transitive by a prepositional or adverbial suffix. To fly is intransitive, and to flyover is transitive; e. g., The eagle flew-over the summit of the mountain. Consider drink as intransitive, and append of, then you have The sick man drinks of pure water. Drinks of is here a compound verb, and might be best written with the hyphen, thus, drinks-of. In this form, as being transitive, it has for its object pure water. But to drink, and to drink of, have not precisely the same import. We drink a glass of water, and we drink of a river. In fact, of has a partitive force, that is, it denotes a portion of; e. g., "She made all nations drink of the wine."-(Rev. xiv, 8.) However, whether simple or compound, transitive verbs govern an object, that is, the action of the verb falls on a noun, which is hence called the object of the verb. This is a case of dependence, the noun which is the object is dependent on the verb of which it is the object. The relation is one purely of thought, for the relation involves in the noun no change of form. With the personal pronoun there is a change of form, corresponding to the change of sense, so that the nominatives I, we, they, become as objects, or become in what is called the objective case, me, us, them. The verb drinks may be resolved into these terms, is drinking, as The sick man is drinking a beverage; whence we learn that present participles have the same government as the verbs to which they belong. Intransitive verbs, though in general incapable of an object, may take an object in a noun of kindred meaning; e. g., "Let me die the death of the righteous."-(Numb, xxiii. 10.) Intransitives have the force of transitives also in certain idio matic phrases; e. g., "He laughed him to scorn.' "We ought to look the subject fully in the face."-Channing. "And talked the night away."-Goldsmith. The Object. The object of a proposition may, as we have seen, appear in a variety of forms. The object also assumes several shapes. The chief variations may be presented as follows: The object of a proposition may be either 1. A noun: 2. A pronoun: 3. A noun and an infinitive: 5. A proposition: The man drinks a beverage. The man bids his son remain. If dependent on the verb, that is, if it receives the action of the verb, the noun is the object of the verb; e. g., "Preventing fame, misfortune lends him wings, Rowe's Lucan. Equally simple is the case of a pronoun viewed as the object of a verb; e. g., "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould me man?"-Milton. The construction of a noun and infinitive as the object of a verb may be slightly varied. For the noun, a pronoun may be substituted; as, The man bids me remain. Before most verbs thus related, the preposition to is placed; as, The man commands his son to remain. In this construction the to may be considered as a connective. And here I may notice a vulgarism in the custom, among the uneducated, of prefixing for to the infinitive with to; as, The landlord is coming for to receive his rent. Like many vulgarisms now in use, this form of speech was once good English, as may be seen by its appearance in our English translation of the Sacred Scriptures; e. g., "They pressed upon him for to touch him."-(Mark iii, 10.) Yet we retain the for in such phrases as For me to speak is of no avail; where the words "for me to speak" form the subject to the verb is. In the instance The man commands his son to remain, it is clear that the words "his son to remain" form a compound object, and are in the same relation to the verb as is the single noun army in the ensuing sentence : The man commands an army. In the previous sentence, son is at once the object (or part of the object) to the verb commands, and the subject to the infinitive to remain; son, therefore, may be considered as the objective case before the infinitive to remain. The object, "his son to remain," may be enlarged, thus :— The man commands his son and daughter to remain. The man commands his only son to remain. The man commands his son forthwith to go home and remain there, All these constructions, and others of a similar kind, hold to the verb the same relation that I have indicated, that is to say, they are severally the objects to the verb commands. These objects are compound, and being compound, they may be resolved into their component parts, and the relations set forth which those parts bear to each other, as well as that which they bear to their cominon head, the verb commands. Instead of the second object, a noun might be given, as The man teaches his son Greek. Here the noun Greek (that is, the Greek language) holds to teaches verb, however, which has after it two nouns as objects. In some instances where two objects appear after a verb, the construction is in reality elliptical; e. g., You will now have the less difficulty in understanding how a sentence may be the object of a verb; as, The man says (that) he is ill. The words he is ill you will at once recognise as a sentence or statement, and a little reflection will show you that the sentence bears to the verb says the relation of an object to its verb. The conjunction that is merely an explanatory word, or, indeed, an expletive. A sentence as the object of the verb may also be enlarged :- The man says he is sick and has been given over by the faculty for a Tong time. The compound object in our model sentence will now be readily understood, viz., The man drinks a beverage made of wine and water. In this compound object, which consists of the words in italics, analysis shows us a noun, beverage, depending on the verb drinks; a participle, made, agreeing with beverage, and therefore conjointly with beverage dependent on drinks; a preposition, of, connecting made with wine and water; a noun, water, dependent on the preposi tion of; a conjunction, and, connecting water with wine; and, finally, another noun, wine, connected with water and the preposition of, and consequently standing to the preposition of and to the sentence generally in the relation held by the noun water. I must subjoin a few words respecting the object. Observe, then, that wine and water do not hold to drinks exactly the same relation which the words "his son Greek" holds in the above example. If so, a verb might be said to have several objects; e. g., The man bequeathed money, wine, books, and land. It is true that the nouns form the object to the verb bequeathed, but they are a compound object made by repetition; whereas in the proposition The man taught his son Greek, the compound object is formed by addition. And in the construction which assigns to certain verbs a double object, one of those objects is a person, the other is a thing. Double objects, like single ones, may be augmented by repetition; e. g., The man taught his wife, his sons, and his daughters Greek. The man taught his son Greek, Latin, German, and French. The position of the object is after the verb. And the observance of this law is in English so imperative that by disregarding it you create ambiguity, if you do not change the object into the subject and the subject into the object; e. g., As an instance of ambiguity from the inversion of the object, take this instance : "This power has praise that virtue scarce can warm, Till fame supplies the universal charm."-Johnson. Which is the subject, and which the object? Do you mean that power has praise, or that praise has power? When, however, the perspicuity of the sentence is not abated, the object may, for the sake of emphasis, be placed before the verb; e. g., "Silver and gold have I none."-(Acts iii. 6.) Especially with pronouns; e. g., |