Rampart Timber, earth, and stone They (six or seven millions of men) -composed. -supported. -were pleased to call. Here one subject and one predicate have 4 modifiers of the second class, 15 of the third class, 22 of the fourth class, 13 of the fifth class, 21 of the sixth class, 7 of the seventh class, and 3 of the eighth class. Think of a sentence having 21 modifiers of modifiers of modifiers of modifiers of modifiers ! Once more: Knowing on the one side so well the distinguished and masterly speakers who, to your pleased profit and to their own enhanced fame, had preceded me upon this stage of perfect speech and purest song, and had made this oration at once a high honor and a toil fraught duty; and knowing upon the other side even better at once my native inability to stand a peer of such famous forerunners, and also the stern, distracting pressure of clamant and incessant work in this fresh field and amid a thousand thought-troubling circumstances which made adequate preparation for me an insuperable impossibility, I had twice felt it my plain duty to put away from me the delightful labor and the tempting request. -REV. JOHN I. MACINTOSH, D.D., Oration on " The White Sunlight of Potent Words." Here, out of one hundred and twenty-one words, twenty-one are qualifying adjectives. The speakers are distinguished and masterly; the profit is pleased; this stage is of speech and song; and the speech is perfect, the song purest. This oration is (predicatively) not only an honor and a duty, but a high honor, and a toil-f, aught duty. The speaker's inability is native, his fore-runners, though already called distinguished and masterly, must be referred to as famous, his pressure is stern and distra ting, his work is clamant and incessant, his field is fresh, and his thousand circumstances are thoughttroubling. Preparation is for him so meaningless that he tacks adequate upon it, and impossibility is so slight an obstacle that to give it force he puts before it insuperable. His duty is plain, his labor is delightful, the request is tempting. His first definition in etymology would be: NOUN: A dummy to hang adjectives upon. Now, to find fitting adjectives to cover the supposed nakedness of all these nouns (as some conceited reformers would envelop the Apollo Belvedere in a plaid ulster), requires both a broad vocabulary and a discriminating judgment. The author lacks both, or he would never talk of pleased profit and insuperable impossibi ity. Nor is work harder in a field because it is fresh. What he means is that the field is unaccustomed. No heavier burden can fall upon a would-be orator than to establish a sort of ideal rhythin and conform his ideas to it, instead of letting his ideas determine the form of their expression. The same false taste that leads the author to insert superfluous adjec tives, leads him to double his phrases. In this one sentence he see-saws to your profil and to their fume; perfect speech and purest song; high honor and toil-fraught duty; stern pressure and thought-troubling circumstances; delightful la' or and tempting request. This results, as it always must, in nonsense. Take the last pair, for instance. Which comes first, the request or the labor? To gratify an unhealthy rhythmical taste, the speaker falls into an absurd anti-climax. Again, look at the arrangement. "Knowing on the one side so well the distinguished speakers"--which side does he know them on, the right side or the left side, the outside or the inside? Manifestly the phrase on the one side should have begun the sentence, instead of being thrown between knowing and its object. So again, upon the other side even better at once - what an array of adverbs, which might easily be distributed. But we cannot go into further details. The sentence is a comprehensive embodiment of the worst errors in composition, and may be studied with abundant profit. TOPICAL ANALYSIS. Noun Sentences, p. xcv. Ex. XXXVI.-Noun, adjective, and adverb sentences, p. xcvi. Obs. 61.-Connecting particle unnecessary, p. xcvii. Obs. 62.-"That sometimes omitted, p. xcvii. Obs. 63.-Dependent clauses distinct from independent, p. xcvii. Ex. XXXVIII. -Changing from direct to indirect mode of speech, p. xcvii. Ex. XXXIX.-Changing from indirect to direct form, p. c. Adjective Sentences, p. ci. Ex. XL.-Inserting adjective sentences, p. ci. Obs. 64. Relative nominative omitted, p. cii. Obs. 65.-"And" before ad ective sentence, p. cii. Obs. 66.-Relative to be near antecedent, p. cii. Obs. 67.-Pronouns to be near nouns to which they refer, p. cii. Obs. 68. --Antecedent never an ad ective, p civ. Obs. 69.-Antecedent implied in possessive, p. civ. Obs. 70.-Ambiguity of antecedent, noun or clause, p. civ. Obs. 71.-Antecedent often repeated. p. cvi ་ད Obs. 72. "Which-craft to be avoided, p. cvi. Ex. XLIII-Which with heterogeneous clauses, p. cvii. Adverb Sentences, p. cviii. Ex. XLIV.-Inserting adverb sentences, p. cix. Ex. XLV.-Improvement in construction, p. cix. SECTION THIRD. COMPOUND SENTENCES. A Compound Sentence contains two or more principal and co-ordinate assertions; as, I came, saw, conquered. NOTE. For convenience, "if" sentences, often called complex, are here treated as compound. Obs. 79. The members of a compound sentence. must have a natural and perceptible connection in thought. Thus, The procession was very fine, and nearly two miles long, as was also the report of Dr. Perry, the chaplain. Here the reporter mentally connected the procession and the report by thinking of them both as fine, and endeavoring to say so. But, except as an expression of approval, the adjective fine has no common application to a procession and to a report, and though no ambiguous clause intervened, the members of the sentence would be incongruous. The last clause should therefore be a separate sentence, something like this: The report of Dr. Perry, the chaplain, was able and comprehensive. He expired. having enjoyed, by the benefit of his regimen, a long and healthy life, and a gentle and easy death. -JOHNSON's Life of Morin. This extraordinary person not only enjoyed his death, but first died and then expired.-HALL. At the upper Methodist conference, at Marion, the other day, the Rev. R. W. Coates, in making a report of his stewardship, said he had passed three very successful and pleas ant years at Le Clair, having had an unusual number of funeral services during that time.-Sioux City Journal. Of course judgment will differ as to whether the connection of thought in two sentences is sufficient to warrant their combination into one. For instance: I am an early riser, but my wife is a Presbyterian.-A. WARD. "Have you ever been much at sea?" "Why, no, not exactly: but my brother married a canal-captain's daughter." "Were you ever abroad?" "Why, no, not exactly; but my mother's maiden name was French." Marshal Soult was accustomed to say of a Spanish painting which he had compelled two persons to surrender on pain of death: "That picture I value highly; it saved the lives of two persons." This is almost equal to the school-boy's statement in a composition, that pins have saved the lives of a good many people; being asked how, he replied, By their not swallowing them." Prisoner at the bar, nature has endowed you with a good education and respectable family connections, instead of which you go around about the country stealing ducks. A Western paper announced as follows: "Mr. Maguire will wash himself before he assumes the office of sheriff." This made Maguire angry, and he demanded a retraction, which the paper made thus: "Mr. Maguire requests us to deny our statement that he will wash himself before he assumes the office of sheriff." Oddly enough, this only enraged Maguire the more. Some people are so hard to please. It is not the form of the compound sentence that makes the inconsecutiveness of two thoughts manifest. This may be just as marked in successive single sentences. Thus: One of the passengers on the ill-fated Metis, at the time of the disaster, was an exceedingly nervous man, who, while floating in the water, imagined how his friends would acquaint his w fe of his fate. Saved at last, he rushed to the telegraph office and sent this message: "Dear P, I am saved. Break it gently to my wife!"-Springfield Republican. The Hon. Newton Bateman, LL. D., has accepted the presidency of Knox College, Galesburg, Ill., but will not enter upon its duties till near the close of the academic year. This gives great satisfaction to the friends of the college.-College Courant. The church was erected during the ministry of the Rev. Elihu Whitcomb; and the dedication sermon was preached February 12, 1806. It was ninety feet in length and fifty-four in breadth.-Newspaper in Saco, Me. A young lady went to a drug store for a prescription. "How much?" she asked. "Fifty cents," said the clerk. "But I have only forty-five cents with me," replied the customer; me have it for that?" "can't you let "No, ma'am," said the clerk, "but you can pay me five cents when you come in again." "But suppose I were to die?" said the lady, jocularly. 66 Well, it wouldn't be a very great loss," was the smiling response. The smiling clerk gathered from the indignant flush on the lady's face that he had been misunderstood, but before he could assure her that it was the little balance that would be no great loss, she was beyond the sound of his voice. EXERCISE XLVI.-Resolve the following sentences into simpler ones, so far as necessary to preserve unity of thought. Example.-The dog, which had previously bitten his wife, died on the Monday following. The dog had previously bitten his wife, and on the Monday following it died. The town farm-house and alms-house have been carried on the past year to our reasonable satisfaction, especially the alms-house, at which there have been an unusual amount of sickness and three deaths. Any person driving over this bridge in a faster pace than a walk shall, if a white person be fined five dollars, and if a negro, receive twenty-five lashes, half the penalty to be bestowed on the informer. Wanted, by an apothecary, an assistant to take an interest in a small first-class trade and in a quiet family. Even Mrs. H. B. Stowe, in her great work, "Uncle Tom," and in other writings, uses this phrase incessantly, and although, perhaps, not exactly a model of composition, her authority is of some weight, as she puts it into the mouth of educated as well as of illiterate people.—SCHELE DE VERE. Chaucer seems to affect monosyllabic rhymes in verse, and indeed seldom employs double ones, unless we count as such words in e final, which perhaps we should do, for there is no doubt but this letter was sounded in Chaucer's time, as it is now in the cognate languages and in French verse.-MARSH. There are a great many different kinds of trees, some furnishing us with wood for common purposes, such as flooring for our houses and frames for the windows, while others afford us more beautiful wood, which, when polished, is made into tables and chairs and various articles of furniture. Boast not thyself of to-morrow, for thou knowest not what a |