Recent Exemplifications of False Philology

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Scribner, Armstrong & Company, 1872 - English language - 124 pages

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Page 49 - one Londoner in ten thousand can lay down the rules for the proper use of will and shall. Yet not one Londoner in a million ever misplaces his will and shall. Doctor Robertson could, undoubtedly, have written a luminous dissertation on the use of those words. Yet, even in his latest work, he sometimes misplaced them ludicrously.
Page 91 - may be listed among the upper serving-men of some great household, and be admitted to some such place as may style them the sewers or the yeomen-ushers of devotion, where the master is too resty, or too rich, to say his own prayers, or to bless his own table.
Page 5 - I believe you will very rarely find, in any great writer before the Revolution, the possessive case of an inanimate noun used, in prose, instead of the dependent case ; as, 'the watch's hand', for ' the hand of the watch'. The possessive, or Saxon genitive, was confined to persons, or, at least, to animated subjects.
Page 4 - and that by so chaste a writer as Cowper, is an instance of the strange abuses which poets have introduced into their language, till they and their readers take them as matters of course, if they do not single them out expressly as
Page 50 - Next to that tone of voice which, it would seem, is not to be acquired by any striving in adult years, and which indicates breeding rather than education, the full, free, unconscious utterance of the broad ah sound of a is the surest indication, in speech, of social culture which began at the cradle
Page 15 - Besides, of an implicit faith which they profess, the conscience also becomes implicit, and so, by voluntary servitude to man's law, forfeits her Christian liberty. Who, then, can plead for such a conscience as, being implicitly enthralled to man, instead of God, almost becomes no conscience ; as the will, not free, becomes no will
Page 67 - He seems to have been well acquainted with his own genius, and to know what it was that nature had bestowed upon him more bountifully than upon others.
Page 81 - I am apt to think that the changing of the Trojan fleet into water-nymphs, which is the most violent •machine in the whole .¿Eneid, and has given offence to several critics, may be accounted for the same way.
Page 86 - And, at this day, though I have kind invitations enough to visit America, I could not, even for a couple of months, live in a country so miserable as to possess no castles.
Page 19 - instead of taking it in its proper sense, as the act of reproducing in our minds the feelings of another, whether for hatred, indignation, love, pity, or approbation, it is made a mere synonym of the word pity.

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