Quick! Begone! Out of my sight!

Heaven preserve us!

Would that better feelings moved them!

O Lord, be merciful unto me, a sinner!

Interjections are not always followed immediately, and are sometimes
not allowed at all, by a mark of exclamation. No rule can be given
more precise than this: (1) That we should not insert a mark of
exclamation immediately after an interjection, unless we should make a
distinct pause after it in speaking; and (2) that no mark of
exclamation is to be used at all, unless the exclamatory nature of the
sentence is more or less strongly marked. It is useful to notice the
difference between "O" and "Oh." The former is used only before the
vocative case, and never has a mark of exclamation, or indeed any
point, placed immediately after it.

Alas! all our hopes are blasted.
Lo, he cometh!
O Dido, Dido, most unhappy Dido!
Unhappy wife, still more unhappy widow!
Oh, do not reckon that old debt to my account to-day!

XXXV. The mark of exclamation is placed after sentences which, though
interrogatory in form, are really exclamatory.

How could he have been so foolish!

And shall he never see an end to this state of things! Shall
he never have the due reward of labour! Shall unsparing
taxation never cease to make him a miserable dejected being,
a creature famishing in the midst of abundance, fainting,
expiring with hunger's feeble moan, surrounded by a
carolling creation!

This rule might be put in another way by saying that a mark of
exclamation, and not a point of interrogation, is placed after what
are called rhetorical questions, or statements made more striking by
being put in the form of questions. They are not asked for the sake of
receiving a direct answer, and are in reality exclamations. Still all
rhetorical questions are not thus punctuated; the point of
interrogation is sometimes more effective. The sentences quoted under
Rule XXXI. would lose much of their force if marks of exclamation were
used. In each case we must decide whether the sentence strikes us most
as a question or as the expression of emotion.

XXXVI. The mark of exclamation is sometimes placed after an ironical
statement.

They did not fight, tens against thousands; they did not
fight for wives and children, but for lands and plunder:
therefore they are heroes!

The mark of exclamation keeps up the semblance of ser