A lewd young fellow seeing an aged hermit go by him barefoot, father, says he, you are in a very miserable condition,

if there is not another world.

what is thy condition if there is.

True, son, said the hermit, but

Spectator.

By this I know whether my translator be deficient, and whether my corrector merits his money or not. Pope.

Here we find, first the dubitative, and then the indicative, after the same conjunction whether; the only difference being that one verb is to be, the other to merit.

Whether your future course is destined to be long or short, after this manner it should commence; and if it continue to be thus conducted, its conclusion, at what time soever it arrives, will not be inglorious or unhappy. Blair.

Here we find the indicative and the dubitative used at pleasure.

The abbreviatives do not require any particular syntactical remarks. What there is to be said about them has found its place in the chapters on the other parts of speech.

OF PUNCTUATION.

WHEN we speak, we frequently make more or less long pauses, which indicate the march of discourse, and allow the voice to rest and to take breath.

Punctuation notes in written discourse such of those pauses as are required by the sense.

The signs of punctuation are: the full stop, the comma, the semicolon, and the colon. To these we must add the parenthesis, the note of exclamation, the note of interrogation, and the points of suspension.

The full stop marks a complete pause at the end of a sentence.

We have seen, in the chapter on construction, that a sentence may consist of one member, or of successive members linked or not by conjunctions.

When a sentence thus divides into successive members, the comma is sufficient to note the division, if the members are short, and the comma is not already used in them; when the members are long, specially if the comma is already used in them, the division

should be marked by the semicolon. In such a case, a sentence may be viewed as made up of fractional sentences, which, however, are too intimately connected by the sense to permit the use of the full stop.

The comma is used also, and especially, in the body itself of a member, when the thread of discourse is broken, either by a succession of similar parts, or by the insertion of a digressive accessory, or by an ellipsis or an inversion.

When a succession of similar parts takes the form of an enumeration, and the parts of that enumeration are of a certain length, the semicolon is used instead of the comma, especially if the comma is employed in those parts the semicolon is then necessary to prevent confusion.

The colon is used when a sentence is divided into two parts, one of which is a summary or a counterpart of the other. It is also used before a quotation.

The parenthesis serves to isolate certain remarks which the subject gives rise to, and which, however, do not form part of the sentence. These detached remarks, which in spoken language are indicated as such by a suitable intonation, are themselves called parentheses.

The note of exclamation follows an interjection, an apostrophe, or an exclamation.

The interrogative note marks a question.

There are also the three points of suspension, which

are used when a sentence is broken off.

Examples would be here useless; the student is referred to any page of a good author.

OF CERTAIN WRONG CONSTRUCTIONS.

WHILE collecting materials for this grammar, we met with a certain number of wrong constructions, showing that standard writers have their faults and negligences. With these we have not thought fit to encumber the syntax; but we shall now hold them up by way of warning, and to prevent such errors from taking more root in the language than can be prevented.

The way to try wrong constructions and other inaccuracies is to restore logical order, fill up ellipses, and analyse the sentence.

We shall begin with the wrong use of tenses, and then pass to miscellaneous cases.

WRONG USE OF THE TENSES.

The tenses are sometimes wrongly employed in complex sentences, where one proposition is subordinate to another. Such errors arise from allowing oneself to be misled by the ear instead of bearing in