James Martineau, Henry Taylor, Holmes, Black, Browning, Carlyle, Hutton, and Kingsley such forms as :

Cheerfulest, immensest, beautifulest, correctest, succincter, distincter, incessanter, commoner, splendider, manliest, neatliest, distinctest, advisablest, profitablest, easilier, nakedest, firiest, chiefest, supremest, extremest, diviner, divinest, surelier, pitifulest, tiresomest, mournfuller, directer, cunninger, etc.,

we may suspect that usage is now setting towards the good old Anglo-Saxon form, if ever it had ebbed away from it.

Not long after the introduction of comparison by the use of adverbs, it became fashionable to use it to strengthen that in er and est. Shakespeare is fond of these double comparatives and superlatives. You may count twelve double comparatives, such as more richer, more corrupter, more harder, in the single play of King Lear; and superlatives like most worst, most boldest, most unkindest are found, as well as double comparatives, in his dramas. The usage died out soon after Shakespeare's time.

It may be seen from correctest, incessanter, nakedest, chiefest, supremest, divinest, extremest, and directer, quoted above, that adjectives which denote qualities not susceptible of increase or decrease are nevertheless compared. Indeed, such authors as George Eliot, Freeman, Motley, Symonds, J. R. Seely, Lowell, Warner, Alford, Holmes, and others use universal with more, as, or so before it.

We add that our irregular adjectives are an inheritance from the Anglo-Saxon.

We close this subject by saying that while there is authority, respectable in quality and quantity, for the superlative degree in the comparison of two things, and for such expressions as three first, three last, etc., we are able from a wide

reading of modern authors, undertaken in order to settle these and scores of other questions, to pronounce that usage is overwhelmingly in favor of the comparative in such cases; and of the expressions first three, last three, etc., instead of three first, three last, etc.

CHAPTER VI.

GRAMMATICAL CHANGES OF THE ANGLO-SAXON IN BECOMING ENGLISH.-THE PRONOUn.

XX. The Personal Pronouns.-—1. Their Persistence.—All of these, and these in all their cases, except its, are in the Anglo-Saxon. Indeed, many of them are Indo-European as well-the pronouns, more than any other part of speech, surviving in the several languages of the family. Their Anglo-Saxon inflections also are retained in English. It is to the pronouns that we look for the only distinctive objectives in English-me, thee, him, her, us, them, and whom ; all of which, except whom, are personal pronouns.

2. Forms Transferred.—The English case corresponding to the Anglo-Saxon accusative is the objective. But with the exception of it—our objective as well as nominative—the English objectives of the personal pronouns are the AngloSaxon datives. This wholesale transfer of case-forms is remarkable. It began even in Anglo-Saxon, and by 1350 was completed.

3. Conversion of Anglo-Saxon Demonstratives into English Personals.—Our she is the Anglo-Saxon demonstrative sēo; and our third person plurals, they, their, them, are the plurals of this same demonstrative.

4. Change in the Spelling of Some Personal Pronouns.—By 1350, ic was written i; and afterwards I to distinguish it, Lounsbury thinks, from the prefix i of the passive participle.

The Anglo-Saxon genitives min and pin had each two forms in English, as they sometimes dropped then and sometimes retained it. The double forms were subsequently utilized; mi and thi stood before consonants, and min and thin before vowels and silent h. Later still, mi and thi, now written my and thy, were placed before consonants, and min and thin, spelled mine and thine, were used in the predicate; as in, This book is mine.

5. Its. His is the Anglo-Saxon genitive of the masculine and the neuter of the third personal pronoun, he and hit, and so took the place of nouns denoting persons and of those denoting inanimate things. This in time came to be regarded as improper; and the impropriety seemed the more glaring when, by the dropping of h from hit, the relation of it to he, that of the neuter to the masculine of the same pronoun, was forgotten. The literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries betrays a growing sense of the impropriety, and abounds with substitutes for his as the genitive of it. Of it, thereof, her, it, the, and it own were all used.

It had three ribs in the mouth of it, between the teeth of it.-Dan. vii. 5. Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly, thou settlest the furrows thereof, thou blessest the springing thereof.—Ps. lxv. 10. And made thy body bare of her two branches.-Titus Andron. Il. 4, 18. That it had it head bit off by it young.-King Lear, I. 4, 204. That will be thawed from the true quality with that which melteth fools. -Jul. Cæsar, III. 1, 41.

In the folio of 1623, appearing seven years after Shakespeare's death, the editors have it fourteen times where now we should use its. Six of the fourteen have own following the it; as in, To it own protection and favor of the climate. - Winter's Tale.

The first appearance, yet noted, of the new coinage its (a

grammatical blunder, since the t of hit, or it, is a case ending, and so its contains the possessive ending s plus the nominative neuter ending t) is in 1598. Spenser, 1553-1599, and Bacon, 1561-1626, never use its. Its is not found in the Bible of 1611, except in Lev. xxv. 5, and not even there in the early editions. Shakespeare in the 1623 folio uses it's* nine times and its only once-Made former wonders its.Hen. VIII. I. 1, 18. Seven of these nine appearances are in two of his latest plays-The Tempest and Winter's Tale. Milton uses its only three times in his poetry, though more frequently in his prose; and Trench says that Macaulay, 1800-1859, declared that he avoided its when he could.

No one now thinks of shunning its. We quote a sentence from the late Professor Phelps to show how frequently its may appear in good society without giving offence.

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"I have endeavored to follow it [a prayer] from its inception in a human mind, through its utterance by human lips, and in its flight up to the ear of Him who is its hearer because he has been also its inspirer, and on its journey around the unnumbered points . . . which this feeble voice reaches, and on its return from those altitudes with its golden train of blessings."

6. Ye and You.—The Anglo-Saxon ge and eow came into English as ye and you. These were used as they were in Anglo-Saxon, the one as the nominative, and the other as the objective, plural of the second personal pronoun. They are always so used in Chaucer, and in the English Bible of 1611; though this version reflects in this, as in so many other particulars, a usage older than that of its day. Con

* In the paper conveying to his nephew the desk on which the Declaration of Independence was written, Thomas Jefferson, in 1825, uses it's twice. This paper is in the State Department at Washington.