disorder for its own sake. To say, with Frost, Hall, Smith,
Perley, Kirkham, Sanborn, Rand, and others, "The nominative case _governs_
the verb in number and person," and again, "A verb must _agree_ with its
nominative case in number and person," is to confound the meaning of
_government_ and _agreement_, to say the same thing in different words, and
to leave the subject of a verb still without a rule: for rules of
government are applicable only to the words governed, and nothing ever
agrees with that which governs it.[325] To say, with Murray and others,
"Participles have the same government as the verbs from which they are
derived," is to say nothing by which either verbs or participles may be
parsed, or any of their errors corrected: those many grammarians,
therefore, who make this their only rule for participles, leave them all
without any syntax. To say, with Murray, Alger, and others, "Adverbs,
_though they have no government of case, tense, &c._, require an
appropriate _situation_ in the sentence," is to squander words at random,
and leave the important question unanswered, "To what do adverbs relate?"
To say again, with the same gentlemen, "Conjunctions connect _the same
moods and tenses of verbs, and cases_ of nouns and pronouns," is to put an
ungrammatical, obscure, and useless assertion, in the place of an important
rule. To say merely, "Prepositions govern the objective case," is to rest
all the syntax of prepositions on a rule that never applies to them, but
which is meant only for one of the constructions of the objective case. To
say, as many do, "Interjections _require_ the objective case of a pronoun
of the first person after them, and the nominative case of the second," is
to tell what is utterly false as the words stand, and by no means true in
the sense which the authors intend. Finally, to suppose, with Murray, that,
"the Interjection _does not require a distinct, appropriate rule_," is in
admirable keeping with all the foregoing quotations, and especially with
his notion of what it _does_ require; namely, "the _objective case_ of the
first person:" but who dares deny that the following exclamation is good
English?

"_O_ wretched _we!_ why were we hurried down
This lubric and adulterate age!"--_Dryden_.

OBS. 6.--The _truth_ of any doctrine in science, can be nothing else than
its conformity to facts, or to the nature of things; and chiefly by what he
knows of the things themselves, must any