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Those simple sentences which admit of no transposition while nakedly expressed may, notwithstanding, be variously arranged when clothed with adjectives and adverbs. Peter loves Mary' is a sentence of this kind. Its construction is invariable; but The farmer Peter passionately loves the shepherdess Mary' may be written in twelve different ways, all of which are good English. Thus:

The farmer Peter passionately loves the shepherdess Mary.

The farmer Peter passionately loves Mary the shepherdess.

The farmer Peter loves passionately the shepherdess Mary.

The farmer Peter loves passionately Mary the shepherdess.

The farmer Peter loves the shepherdess Mary passionately.

The farmer Peter loves Mary the shepherdess passionately.

Peter the farmer passionately loves the shepherdess Mary.

The others are obvious, and may be extended by the reader. Besides, were the sentence

changed into the passive form, thus,

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The shepherdess Mary is passionately beloved by the farmer Peter,"

we should have a choice of other twelve different forms of arrangement.

It will be observed that, in the preceding example, there are four different substantives; the Farmer, Peter, the Shepherdess, and Mary. There is, notwithstanding, only one nominative and one accusative; for the Farmer is merely another name for Peter, as the Shepherdess is for Mary. But other independent substantives may enter into the composition of an expression, without taking away its character as a simple sentence. For instance,-"The Highwayman took a watch from a gentleman's servant by force," has only one verb, but contains five separate substantives, each of which is in a different state from the others. The Highwayman is the agent or nominative to the verb; the Watch is the thing acted upon,—the accusative; the Gentleman's is the possessive case, the person to whom the servant belongs; the Servant is he from whom the Watch was taken; and Force is the means by which the robbery was committed. In the Latin language, the nouns Highwayman, Watch, Gentleman's, Servant and Force would be put, respectively, in the Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, and Ablative cases; and in those several states they, in fact, stand in English, though not so obviously, on account of

their want of specific terminations. The state in which each substantive exists in a sentence is more easily perceived when we are able to make use of the pronouns, most of which have three forms or cases. I, He and They, for example, are changed into Me, Him and Them to mark the accusative, or object, on which the action falls; and (by the help of the prepositions to, for, by, with, &c.) the same words supply the place of the Datives and Ablatives; while the Possessives, My, His and Their, perform, to a certain extent, the functions of the Genitives of the Latin tongue.

Though the English language has no regulated Dative case, there is, nevertheless, a form of construction (not generally attended to) which in a great degree supplies its place. When two substantives, or pronouns, are relative to the same transitive verb as accusative and dative, the latter is sufficiently marked, without a preposition, provided it is put immediately after the verb. Thus, we may write 'He gave Peter the book,' and 'I bought my boy a book,' instead of 'He gave the book to Peter,' and 'I bought a book for my boy.' Bring me my horse,'' Pay them their wages,' I wrote him a letter,' &c. are every day expressions of the same kind. Neither is this form of construction confined to the lan

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guage of common life; for examples might be cited from our most approved writers:

"Fetch me that flower: the herb I show'd thee once."

"And if I give thee honour due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew.”

Shakspeare.

Milton.

This twofold method of expressing the dative, by prepositive particles or by position, is ресиliarly advantageous. It gives always a choice with regard to the harmony, and often directs the emphasis to the most effective part of the

sentence,

Whatever may be the number of nouns, adjectives, participles, or other words, if there be only one verb, with its nominative, or nominatives, we should still call the whole a simple sentence. Such sentences, however, often contain several divisions, which, for the sake of clearness, requiring some mark of separation, are termed CLAUSES: because they are inclosed between commas, or other points. This combination of clauses is especially to be found in Poetry. The following, from Thomson, may serve as an in

stance:

"For,-In her helpless years, deprived of all,
Of every stay, save innocence and Heaven,

She, with her widow'd mother, feeble, old,
And poor, lived in a cottage, far retired
Amid the windings of a woody vale;
By solitude and deep surrounding shades,
But more by bashful modesty, conceal'd."

66 She lived" is the assertion: all the rest are trappings and circumstances. The 'For,' at the beginning, does not belong to these verses, considered as a simple sentence. It is a reference to the preceding lines, and indeed only to one word, as the cause of her living in retirement:

'The lovely young Lavinia once had friends;
And fortune smiled, deceitful, on her birth:
For,-in her helpless years,' &c.

It would be no unprofitable exercise for students to mark the different arrangements of which the sentence is capable; not only by shifting the position of words, but by the transposition of entire clauses. Some of these inversions, which would be easy in prose, are prevented by reason of the versification, but others,-even whole lines,-may change places, with little injury, either to the music or the measure. To a writer like Thomson, such changes would seldom produce an improvement upon his first sketch, but young authors, and especially poets, would, ge

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