LESSON 41.

ARRANGEMENT OF WORDS, PHRASES, AND CLAUSES.

Perspicuity, we have seen, depends, I. Upon the author's mastery of his subject, and II. Upon his use of words. Through some nine Lessons we have insisted (1) that you use simple words; (2) that you use words which express your meaning with propriety and with precision; (3) that you use personal pronouns with care; (4) that you avoid words and constructions which have no good footing in the language; (5) that you avoid an excess of words; and (6) that you use a sufficient number of words. We add that perspicuity depends also

III. UPON THE ARRANGEMENT OF WORDS, PHRASES, AND CLAUSES. This is a matter of supreme importance, and one not always carefully attended to even by the best of authors. One cannot rely upon punctuation to correct blunders of position.

Place (1) the subject before the object, or object complement, if there would be a doubt which word is subject and which is object in case the positions were reversed. Place (2) all single word modifiers, such as adjectives and adverbs, (3) all phrase modifiers, prepositional and participial, and (4) all clause modifiers, adjective or adverb, where their position will raise no doubt as to what they modify.

This rule does not rigidly exclude words from between these modifiers and the words they qualify or limit; but it does exclude them in case their insertion would raise a reasonable question as to what you intend these words,

phrases, or clauses to modify, or even when a second reading to ascertain this would be needed. Great freedom of position is allowed, provided the grammatical relations of the words are kept obvious, and the thought is kept clear.

Direction. Study these sentences carefully, determine what they were intended to express, and then recast them, placing the italicized expressions where you think they belong:

1. Hard by a butcher, on a block, had laid his whittle down. 2. I have thought over what you said the other night very carefully. 3. If I love him, when I die, he will take me home on high. 4. Operators are wanted on cloaks. 5. Thos. W. Coke put an end to the American war by moving its cessation in the House of Commons, 6. The farmer's orchard is respected by the boy who owns a large dog. 7. Mary's sister, who was the first queen of England, was a protestant. 8. D's fortune is equal to one-half of E's which is one thousand dollars. 9. A scientist read a paper on the catastrophe of geology at Yale College. 10. A straight line can only cut the circumference of a circle at two points. II. In one evening I counted twenty-seven meteors sitting on my piazza. 12. The savage here the settler slew. 13. From a shoal of richest rubies, clear and cold, broke the morning. 14. The man struck his friend while looking him straight in the face. 15. He saw the place where Warren had fallen for the first time, yesterday. 16. I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny it. 17. The grave of Robt. Bruce was only marked by two broad flagstones. 18. I saw that they had been building a bridge at the foot of Chatham St., in the evening paper. 19. The Prince of Wales was forbidden to become king or any other man.

Direction.-Bring in sentences illustrating all these faulty arrangements, and correct them,

LESSON 42.

ARRANGEMENT OF WORDS, PHRASES, AND CLAUSES.

Direction.-Do with these sentences as required with those in the preceding Lesson:—

1. A robin sees a worm while it is flying. 2. There is a great lack of disposition to hoe among the educated. 3. Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride, on the opposite shore walked Paul Revere. 4. Sewal refused to accept of inexperienced persons recommended by the pontiff to benefices, on the ground of their ignorance of the English language. 5. The Sultan of Mysore was again defeated and slain. 6. Jas, II. retained the great officers who had served under his brother that he could trust. 7. The warp of English is Anglo-Saxon, but the woof is Roman as well as the embroidery. 8. The voice is only suspended for a moment. 9. He is to speak of the landing of the Pilgrims, at the Academy of Music. 10. The journals not only spoke in high terms of Mr. Moon's powers as a critic but also as a writer. II. The first word of an example may also properly begin with a capital letter. 12. A servant will obey a master's orders that he likes. 13. He celebrated the triumphs of Marlborough in verse. 14. Lord Brooke was shot from the church, in the eye, as he stood in a door, of which he instantly died. 15. The man came to his death by excessive drinking, producing apoplexy, in the minds of the jury. 16. And keep the flame from wasting by repose. 17. I did not hear what you said coming so suddenly into the noisy room.

Direction. Bring in sentences illustrating the faulty position of single words, of phrases, and of clauses, and place these where they should stand.

LESSON 43.

UNITY OF THE SENTENCE-MISCELLANEOUS ERRORS.

Perspicuity depends

IV. UPON THE UNITY OF THE SENTENCE.-A sentence is not a bag to be stuffed with miscellaneous matter, its value increasing with the quantity crowded into it. It is rather a picture, aiming to present a single object with or without accessories. As you saw in Lessons 12 and 13, a sentence may have more than a single leading clause, each modified, if need be, by dependent clauses. But the thoughts of these leading clauses must be closely related one continuing the other, in contrast with it, a consequence of it, or an inference from it, and all the clauses must combine to form a unit and not a mass of units. Unity is often violated by a change of subject, by heterogeneous material, by long sentences, and especially by long parentheses, the matter of which might be dropped outright or be absorbed into the body of the sentence by a careful recast of it.

Direction.-Rewrite these sentences, (1) omitting, or (2) connecting more closely, the parts that destroy the unity, or (3) resolving each sentence into two or more sentences:

1. For who knows not that truth is strong next to the Almighty; she needs no policies, no stratagems, no licensing to make her victorious, those are the shafts and the defences that error uses against her power: give her but room, and do not bind her when she sleeps? 2. The Spartans were censured by the ancient writers for their inhuman treatment of the Helots, a race long subject to the Lacedemonians, who, when the former became too numerous, ordered the youth to hunt them down like beasts. 3. Here also would properly arise the question, started

by Charles Fox, (but probably due originally to the conversation of some far subtler friend, such as Edmund Burke,) how far the practice of foot-notes (a practice purely modern in its form) is reconcilable with the laws of just composition; and whether in virtue, though not in form, such foot-notes did not exist for the ancients, by an evasion we could point out. 4. The Spanish fleet continued its retreat, but, in its passage around Scotland and Ireland, a terrible storm arose, and the vessels dashed against the rock-bound coasts, and not more than fifty reached Spain, and the greater part of these were worthless.

MISCELLANEOUS VIOLATIONS OF PERSPICUITY.

Direction.-Classify and correct these violations of perspicuity:→ 1. Dr. Arnold wrote a History of Rome in three volumes, which was broken off by his death at the end of the second Punic war. 2. The editors went off on a jamboree. 3. Contraction only takes place before a vowel. 4. There is no reason why a prose-writer should not avail himself, as well as a poet, of all means of expressing nice shades of meaning. 5. In the temper he is now, I cannot speak to him. 6. But there here suggests itself to us an interesting question. 7. There is no stond or impediment to the wit but may be wrought out by fit studies. 8. We extend our classification from the more clearly to the more obscurely, from the more closely to the more remotely connected. 9. Charles V., wishing to aggrandize his family, he negotiated for the marriage of Philip to Mary. 10. The farmer went to his neighbor, and said that he knew his cattle were in his field. II. The brother of my friend who was married last year died yesterday. 12. After the Phonicians discovered the glass, they made money out of it. 13. Kneller used to send away the ladies who sat to him as soon as he had sketched their faces. 14. It received the popular assent of the people. 15. When the Spaniards saw the fireships bearing down upon them, every cable was cut, and the fleet drifted out into the open sea, and several vessels were lost, and the English pursued them, fighting all the time, and, had not the pow