relations which marks of punctuation indicate, but that the application of a principle varies according to circumstances. This will appear more satisfactorily by the fuller consideration of a single case the appositive.

(1) Weeping again the king my father's wreck.-Shakespeare. (2) How pleasant it is to reflect that the greatest lovers of books have themselves become books!- Hunt.

(3) My father Shandy solaced himself with Bruscambille.—Hazlitt.

(4) The diffusion of these silent teachers, books, through the whole community, is to work greater effects than artillery, machinery, and legislation.-Channing.

(5) Do not fear that I shall read you a homily on that hackneyed theme

contentment.-Carlyle.

(6) I sit down to it as I should to a strange dish,— turn and pick out a bit here and there.-Hazlitt.

(7) I take mine ease at mine inn,' beside the blazing hearth, and shake hands with Signor Orlando Friscobaldo [a character in one of Dekkar's plays], as the oldest acquaintance I have.--Ibid.

(8) There are Robinson Crusoes in the moral as well as physical world, and even a universalist may be one of them; --men cast on desert islands of thought and speculation.—Hunt.

(9) Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a true book! ... Yearly comes its new produce of leaves (commentaries, deductions, journalistic essays), every one of which is talismanic.--Carlyle. In (1), (2), and (3), the appositive coalesces readily with the rest of the sentence. In (4), though but a single word, it is interruptive. In (5) it is preceded by a dash, as more formal and emphatic. In (6) its greater length seems to justify the addition of a comma. In (7) it consists of words not the writer's, and therefore is enclosed by brackets. In (8), in view of its remoteness from 'Crusoes' and the comma after 'world,' the semicolon and the dash were, perhaps, deemed preferable for distinctness. In (9) the specifications must be set off by

dashes or curves, else they would appear to be coördinate with the subject.

From all of which it is evident that the principles of capitalization and punctuation are not without subtlety, and that habits of reflection are requisite for the just application of them. It is equally clear that no system can provide for every case that may arise, and that a mastery of the fundamentals of construction is worth more than a set of formulas loaded with exceptions that a knowledge based upon principle is better than a knowledge based upon rules. Of these we shall attempt to state and exemplify only the most important.

1. Begin with capitals: every sentence (a); every line of poetry (b); every direct quotation - one entire or complete, and not introduced by a conjunction (c, d); formal statements, propositions separately numbered (e, f); illustrative examples (quotations, or assumed to be such), if sentences (g, h); proper names, hence also names of months and days, leading words in titles of books and essays, and all appellations of the Deity (i,j, k, l); proper adjectives (m); names of things vividly personified (n); titles of office and honor when embodied in proper names, or, as a rule, when used alone in address (0, p, q); the pronoun I, the interjection O, and (though not always) single letters forming abbreviations, should be capitals (r, 8).

(a) Books are the true Elysian fields where the spirits of the dead converse, and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled.--Alexander Smith.

(b) Who breathes must suffer, and who thinks must mourn; And he alone is blessed who ne'er was born.-Prior.

(c) Petrarch said of his books considered as his friends: 'I have friends whose society is extremely agreeable to me: they are of all ages, and of every country.'-Professor C. F. Richardson.

(d) Possibly, too, you may have heard it said that the course of centuries has changed all this; and that the true University of our days is a Collection of Books.'--Carlyle.

(e) I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, "Tis all barren.-Sterne.

(f) My lord, the new way of ideas, and the old way of speaking intelligibly, was always, and ever will be, the same. And if I may take the liberty to declare my sense of it, herein it consists: (1) That a man use no words but such as he makes the signs of certain determined objects of his mind in thinking, which he can make known to another. (2) Next, that he use the same word steadily for the sign of the same immediate object of his mind in thinking. (3) That he join those words together in propositions, according to the grammatical rules of that language he speaks in. (4) That he unite those sentences in a coherent discourse.-Locke.

(g) The distinction was that yea and nay were answers to questions framed in the affirmative; as, Will he go?—Marsh.

(h) When from sudden and intense emotion, we give utterance to some abrupt, inverted, or elliptical expression, we are said to use an exclamation; as, 'bravo,' 'dreadful,' the fellow,' what a pity!'

Bain.

(i) Why will you break the Sabbath of my days?—Pope.

() Men are April when they woo, December when they wed; maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.-Shakespeare.

(k) I believe great authorities admit that if not exist, 'Paradise Regained' would be the language.-John Bright.

Paradise Lost' did finest poem in our

(7) He who in any way shows us better than we knew before that a lily of the fields is beautiful, does he not show it us as an effluence of the Fountain of all Beauty; as the handwriting, made visible there, of the great Maker?—Carlyle.

(m) The noblest souls of whatever creed, the pagan Empedocles as well as Christian Paul, have insisted on the necessity of an inspiration, a living emotion, to make moral action perfect.-Matthew Arnold.

(n) Before the porch itself, within the jaws of Hell, Grief and avenging Care have placed their couches; there dwell pale Disease,

sorrowing Age, Despondency, and ill-prompting Hunger, and loathsome Want: . . . Death, and Labour, . . . and the iron bedchambers of the Furies and maddening Discord.— Virgil.

(0)

Happy is your Grace,

That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
Into so quiet and so sweet a style.-Shakespeare.
(p) A play there is, my lord, some ten words long,
Which is as brief as I have known a play;
But by ten words, my lord, it is too long,
Which makes it tedious.-Ibid.

(9)

(r)

(8)

My father, Earl of Cambridge, lost his head.-Ibid.

Listen! O listen!

Here ever hum the golden bees.-Lowell.

If the world be worth thy winning,

Think, oh! think it worth enjoying.-Dryden.

2. A period is put at the end of every declarative or imperative sentence; sometimes, modestly, after a sentence in the exclamatory or interrogative form (a, b); after abbreviations (c); after headings and sub-headings (d); after Roman capital and small letters used as numerals (e). The latter practice, however, is regarded less favorably now than formerly. Also, the period as an abbreviation mark supersedes no point except itself.

(a) What pleasure in science, in literature, in poetry, for any man who will but open his eye and his heart to take it in.—Parker.

(b) What would become of the finances, what of the marine, if the Whigs. were to manage the revenue, and Whigs who had never walked over a dock-yard, to fit out the fleet.—Macaulay.

(c) Water goes on contracting till it reaches the temperature of 39° Fahr., at which point the contraction ceases.— -Tyndall.

(d) Distribution of the Sciences.-Science and philosophy are conversant either about mind or about matter, etc.-Sir W. Hamilton.

(e) Pope Celestine III., A.D. 1191, kicked the Emperor Henry VI.'s crown off his head while kneeling to show his prerogative of making and unmaking kings.-Hayward.

3. An interrogation-point is put after complete questions, whether asked by the writer or quoted directly (a, b); after elliptical questions having a common dependence (c); within curves to express doubt without formal denial (d). This point may denote any degree of separation from a comma to a period (e).

(a)

Is it what we love, or how we love,

That makes true good?—George Eliot.

(b) The barren vine says to the fruitful one, 'Is not my root as good as yours?'-Beecher.

(c) How shall a man obtain the kingdom of God? by impiety? by murder? by falsehood? by theft?—Bible.

(d) If the immortal Bacon the wisest, greatest, meanest (?) of mankind — disgraced the judgment-seat, etc.-Edinburgh Review. (e) And are not my leaves as green? and have I not as many bugs creeping up and down? and am I not taller than you?-Beecher.

4. An exclamation-point is put after sentences and parts thereof, if sufficiently emotional (a, b); after interjections (c, d, e); within curves to denote irony or contempt (ƒ).

(a)

Those evening bells! those evening bells!
How many a tale their music tells!-Moore.

(b) Frailty, thy name is woman!-Shakespeare.

(c) Alas! how easily things go wrong!-McDonald.

(d) O fortune, fortune! all men call thee fickle.-Shakespeare. Oh! too convincing — dangerously dear —

(e)

In woman's eye the unanswerable tear!-Byron.

(f) This accurate scholar (!), who went to Eton and graduated at Cambridge, has actually made a dozen grammatical mistakes within the compass of one short paragraph.

5. A colon is put between the great divisions of a sentence when subdivisions require the semicolon (a); before an enumeration of particulars when the particulars are formally introduced, formally given, or are separated