by personification. The distinction of sexes not being generally marked in English nouns, the same affix, er, is usually employed, whether the agent be male, female, or inanimate. The few substantives in ess, or ix, are exceptions; but otherwise, though the agent be of the feminine gender, it still retains the termination er (or our), which, being naturally accounted masculine, presents an incongruity when we know that the agent of whom we speak is a female. The list of terminations in ess is, however, gradually increasing, according as it is found, or believed, that women are capable of those employments which were formerly deemed beyond their powers.

From the reciprocal transmutation of 7 and r, the termination el, or le, is also expressive of the agent of an action. Its most gencral use is to denote an instrument only,—an inanimate, or secondary, agent; and, accordingly, some have derived it from the Gothic el, or ell, an arm. This affix, marking the instrument, is very common, as in shovel, from shove; stopple from stop; and needle from the Dutch naad, a seam. Many of our monosyllables, as flail, nail, &c. will be found of similar formation. In comparing nouns in er with those in el, or the agent with the instrument, a striking resemblance is observed. Thus, a poker is either the person or the thing which pokes. In the former case it is an agent, and in the latter an instrument. It is from our practice of personification that this partial confusion arises. We are perpetually raising qualities to the rank of substances, and instruments to that of agents; while they are qualities alone, and not substances, with which we are conversant; and while we are uncertain

that an agent, in its literal sense, as distinguished from an instrument, exists in the world.

Those seemingly unconscious instruments, not having life, are consequently of no sex. They cannot literally be characterized by either he or she.

In

modern English they are said to be of the neuter (that is, no) gender, and as such are referred to by the neuter pronoun it. A dagger, for example, is an instrument, as when we say that a man was stabbed with a dagger;' but when we say that the dagger pierced his heart,' the instrument is spoken of as if it were a conscious agent, acting of its own accord. In English prose, the metaphor is carried no farther, being dropt at the very moment when we have, without perhaps perceiving it, endowed the dagger with life. The word is still neuter and remains an it. In poetry, however, the animation is more complete. The lifeless dagger is personified. We assume it to have a will. We give it the epithets of ruthless and cruel; and it is the poverty of our language only that makes us hesitate to which of the two sexes (into which we conceive all living beings to be distributed) it should belong. The first-mentioned semi-personification may be observed in every substantive when it is employed as the agent of an action, and every substantive may be so employed.

The Articles a (or an) and the are not confined to gender; for we apply them indifferently to a male, a female, or a stone. But it is otherwise with regard to the Articles of many other languages. The French, for example, have a masculine and a feminine, both of the definite and of the indefinite article. Thus, they

say un roy, or le roy, for a king, or the king; and une reine, or la reine, for a queen, or the queen. Every substantive may be thus characterized by un or le, une or la; that is, every substantive is understood, grammatically, to be either masculine or feminine, he or she and the capability of giving to each the proper gender, which custom has assigned it, constitutes one of the greatest niceties of that language.

:

Though English substantives, except such as denote living beings, are all of the Neuter Gender,—that is, are considered as belonging to no sex,-yet, when their agency is forcibly represented, a vague idea of sex is introduced; and hence the poet, in his personifications, frequently speaks of them, not merely as if they were conscious beings, but describes them as either male or female, according to the practice of his predecessors, or as his own imagination suggests. Thus Milton not only personifies a cloud, but endows it with sex:

"Was I deceiv'd, or did a sable cloud

Turn forth her silver lining on the night?"

This metaphorical creation of life and sex gives a spirit to English poetry that is unfelt in those languages in which the gender of every substantive is fixed in the Dictionary, and prostituted to ordinary prose. Before the seventeenth century, however, the genders of English substantives appear to have been also fixed to masculine or feminine; for, when individually referred to, it was necessarily by the words his or her; the neuter possessive pronoun its not being then in existence. In colloquial language, several of those genders have reached our time. Ships of every

species are always feminine; and workmen, generally, when speaking of the implements of their trade, use the epithet she. This arrangement of the inanimate substantives of a language into genders would seem to have been the effect of accident rather than of any natural law. Things that are masculine in one language are feminine in another, and neuter in a third. The Sun and Moon, which we call he and she, (probably because they have been so termed in the Greek and Latin,) are reversed in the Gothic dialects, in all of which, not even excepting the Anglo-Saxon, the Moon is masculine and the Sun feminine.

57

CHAPTER VIII.

CASES. THE LATIN AND ENGLISH CASES OF NOUNS

CONTRASTED.

EVERY sentence must consist of at least two words. It must contain an assertion,—that is a verb; as also a substantive (or a pronoun) which is, or does, what the assertion implies, and which is called the NOMINATIVE to that verb. Thus, John sleeps,' John walks,' 'John strikes; or, He sleeps,' He walks,' 'He strikes,' are different assertions by means of the verbs sleeps, walks, and strikes, of which John and He are severally the nominatives.

Other substantives, however, besides such as we have here called the Nominatives, may enter into the composition of a sentence. For example, we may say that John sleeps in a Chair;''He walks on the Road;''He strikes James:' in which the words Chair, Road, and James, though substantives, having no action upon the verb, are in a different state from that which we call the nominative. Again: The ministers of the crown plunged the country into war, for no end,' is a sentence containing five substantives, of which only one (the ministers) is the nominative of the verb plunged, which, being what is termed a TRANSITIVE VERB, acts upon the word country. The other substantives are each preceded by a PREPOSITION, which is the denomination of a class of words