ate sentence. The passion- Those sentences which express desire and aversion are commonly expressed by the mood called imperative; but they as often imply humble supplication or mild intreaty, as authoritative command; and in such cases are called by some precative. Thus the poet describes Adam gently calling on Eve to awake And again, when our first parents offer up in lowly adoration their morning orisons, they say Hail, universal Lord, be bounteous still To give us only good! But these emotions are widely different from others, expressed in the same form of sentence: as when King Henry says to Hotspur— Send us your prisoners by the speediest means, Or you shall hear from us in such a sort As may displease you. Or when Juliet exclaims Gallop apace, ye fi'ry-footed steeds, To Phœbus' mansion! Or when Macbeth cries to the ghost of Banquo Avaunt! and quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee! 69. Passionate sentences are generally short; but their repetition in continuous succession is often a beauty of the highest kind, especially in poetry. The mighty Master of Poetry, inimitable in this, as in all the vast variety of styles which he adopts, has given an instance of the passionate iteration of feeling, in one of his earliest productions, the "Rape of Lucrece." After a beautiful enunciation of the powerful effects of time-("Time's glory is to calm contending kings," &c. &c.)-Lucretia calls on Time to heap evils on the head of her ravisher Disturb his hours of rest with restless trances ! Let there bechance him, pitiful mischances, Stone him with harden'd hearts, harder than stones! Let him have time, to tear his curled hair! Let him have time, to see his friends his foes, And ever let his unrecalling crime Have time to wail th' abusing of his time! The passion, which would dictate this terrific variety of imagery in its maledictions, might well arm the injured woman (Roman as she was) to the act of self-sacrifice so celebrated in history. sentences. 70. The examples hitherto given are of perfect sentences; but Imperfect instances often occur in which a sentence is manifestly left imperfect, and that with great beauty, as in the well-known line of Virgil— Quos ego-sed motos præstat componere fluctus. And so Satan first addresses Beelzebub, in the opening of the Paradise Lost If thou be'st he-but oh! how chang'd, how fallen! In both these cases, the words, though not in themselves fully and clearly expressive of the thought which we may suppose to be in the speaker's mind, are yet not wholly unconnected, and, therefore, show at once that they are parts of sentences which, indeed, it would be easy for the reader to fill up in his own imagination. Words. Composition CHAPTER III. OF WORDS, AS PARTS OF SPEECH. 71. THE next step in the grammatical analysis of Speech is to resolve Sentences into their significant parts, namely Words; for most persons will readily grant that a sentence consists of words; and that every word has some separate force or meaning, as so used. The origin of our term "Word" is lost in the obscurity of ages. It comes to us from a Teutonic source, and appears in many dialects, as in Moso-Gothic, Waurd; Anglo-Saxon, Word; Dutch, Woord; Frankish and Alamannic, Wort; Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic, Ord, whence it would seem not improbably to be allied to Oro, which in old Latin was to speak. Be this as it may, in its grammatical import, as it will here be used, Word answers to the Latin Dictio, which that admirable grammarian PRISCIAN defines "the least part of a constructed (that is, orderly-composed) sentence; understanding a part to be such in relation to the meaning of the whole sentence.' 72. Words themselves may, indeed, generally be subdivided as to of words. sound into syllables, and these syllables into letters. But where a word is capable of such subdivision, the syllables or letters, though they may signify something separately in other sentences, are not separately significant with relation to the sentence in which the word is used. Thus, to take Priscian's instance, in Virgil's sentence, Fama vires acquirit eundo; the two syllables vi and res form parts of the word vires; but they are only parts of its sound; they have no separate signification with relation to the sentence here quoted. Yet, in other sentences, each of these syllables may form a word, if it be significant, in relation to the sentence in which it is used; as And elsewhere volat vi fervidus axis. Res dura et regni novitas me talia cogunt So the English term handsome is to be taken as one word in a sentence, in relation to which it has one signification, e. g., comely, beautiful, or liberal; but in another sentence, where hand signifies a portion of the human body, and some an indefinite quantity or number, it forms two words. The same may sometimes be said even of a single letter; for instance, the letter i, in most words, has no sepa rate signification; but when it stands alone, as a significant part of a sentence, it is then a word, as in the Latin smallest parts 73. "If, therefore, all speech," says Harris, "whether in prose or Words, the verse, every whole, every section, every paragraph, every sentence, of speech. imply a certain meaning, divisible into other meanings, but words imply a meaning which is not so divisible, it follows that words will be the smallest parts of speech; inasmuch as nothing less has any meaning at all." This argument would have been more accurately stated had the accomplished author inserted, after "a meaning not so divisible," the clause above employed, viz., "with relation to the sentences in which they are used." The want of some such explanatory clause has led to much misapprehension of Mr. Harris's whole doctrine. It has been assumed that he meant by signification something positive; that a certain sound must be under all circumstances significant, or under all circumstances destitute of signification; whereas the science of Grammar is relative; the signification of a sentence, be it a simple or a complex, a long or a short one, depends on the mutual relation of all its parts; and the signification of one word in a sentence depends on its relation to another in the same sentence. In this sense, we must understand the proposition that words are the least parts of speech capable of grammatical classification; how they are to be classed remains to be considered, for some principles of classification are better than others. It is not sufficient that we comprehend all our notions on a given subject under certain heads; but we must be prepared to show why we choose those heads rather than others. 74. Take, for instance, Shakspeare's well-known lines The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds, speech. Here we know that various grammatical writers call the word the Parts of an article; man, music, concord, and sounds, substantives, or nouns substantive; no, sweet, and fit, adjectives, or nouns adjective; that, and himself, pronouns; hath and is, verbs; moved, a participle; not, an adverb; and, a conjunction; in, with, and for, prepositions. 75. The first question that occurs to us is, whether these classes themselves are all recognised in all languages, and by all grammarians? And a very little experience will show that they are not. The same thing has happened in Grammar, which has happened in all other sciences. Some authors have divided speech into two parts, some into three, four, and so on to ten or twelve. Others again have made their division depend on the supposed utility of words; others on Parts of speech. their variation; others on the external objects to which they refer, and others on the mental operations which they express. On this point, it is worth while to hear what QUINTILIAN says, in the fourth chapter of his first book—“On the number of the parts of speech, there is but little agreement. For the ancients, amongst whom were ARISTOTLE and THEODECTES, laid it down, that there were only verbs and nouns, and combinatives (convinctiones); intimating that there was in verbs the force of speech, in nouns the matter (because what we speak is one thing, and what we speak about is another), and that the union of these was effected by the combinatives, which I know most persons call conjunctions; but I think the former word answers better to the original Greek oúvdeuos. By degrees the philosophers, and particularly the Stoics, augmented the number; and first, they added to the combinative the article, then the preposition. To the noun they added the appellative, then the pronoun, and then the participle, being of a mixed nature with the verb; and finally to the verb itself, they subjoined the adverb. Our (Latin) language does not require articles, and therefore they are scattered among the other parts of speech; but we have added to the others the interjection. Some writers of good repute, however, follow the doctrine of the eight parts of speech, as ARISTARCHUS, and in our own day PALÆMON, who have ranked the vocable, or appellative under the noun, as one of its species; whilst those who divide it from the noun, make nine parts. Again there are others who divide the vocable from the appellative, calling by the former name all bodies distinguishable by sight and touch, as a bed, or a house, and by the latter what is not distinguishable by one or both these means, as the wind, heaven, virtue, God. These lastmentioned authors, too, add what they call asseverations, as (the Latin) Heu! and attractations," as (the Latin) fasceatim; but these distinctions I cannot approve. As to the question whether or not the vocable or appellative should be called poσnyopía, and ranked under the noun, as it is a matter of little moment, I leave it to the free judgment of my readers." 76. Although Quintilian, who only touches on Grammar incidentally, speaks of Aristotle as maintaining that there were three parts of speech, yet VARRO says truly that Aristotle asserted there were two parts of speech, the verb and the noun. In fact, Aristotle, in his book Tepi épμnveías, treats of these two alone; considering that of them is made a perfect sentence, as Socrates philosophises :" and therefore PRISCIAN says "the parts of speech are, according to the logicians, two, viz., the noun and the verb, because these alone, conjoined by their own force, make up a full speech, or sentence; but they called the other parts syncategorematics, or consignificants." Priscian, himself, however, maintained that there were eight parts of speech; and he seems to have been implicitly followed for many centuries; but, though it is of little consequence whether we give the name of parts to particular divisions or subdivisions, it is of great im |