rely "the _child's_ bread", but
"the _children's_ bread", where it is no less impossible to resolve the
phrase into "the children _his_ bread"{185}. Despite of these protests
the error held its ground. This much indeed of a plea it could make for
itself, that such an actual employment of 'his' _had_ found its way
into the language, as early as the fourteenth century, and had been in
occasional, though rare use, from that time downward{186}. Yet this,
which has only been elicited by the researches of recent scholars, does
not in the least justify those who assumed that in the habitual 's' of
the genitive were to be found the remains of 'his'--an error from which
the books of scholars in the seventeenth, and in the early decades of
the eighteenth, century are not a whit clearer than those of others.
Spenser, Donne, Fuller, Jeremy Taylor, all fall into it; I cannot say
confidently whether Milton does. Dryden more than once helps out his
verse with an additional syllable gained by its aid. It has even forced
its way into our Prayer Book itself, where in the "Prayer for all sorts
and conditions of men", added by Bishop Sanderson at the last revision
of the Liturgy in 1661, we are bidden to say, "And this we beg for Jesus
Christ _his_ sake"{187}. I need hardly tell you that this 's' is in fact
the one remnant of flexion surviving in the singular number of our
English noun substantives; it is in all the Indo-Germanic languages the
original sign of the genitive, or at any rate the earliest of which we
can take cognizance; and just as in Latin 'lapis' makes 'lapidis' in the
genitive, so 'king', 'queen', 'child', make severally 'kings', 'queens',
'childs', the comma, an apparent note of elision, being a mere modern
expedient, "a late refinement", as Ash calls it{188}, to distinguish the
genitive singular from the plural cases{189}.

{Sidenote: _Adjectives in '-en'_}

Notice another example of this willingness to dispense with inflection,
of this endeavour on the part of the speakers of a language to reduce
its forms to the fewest possible, consistent with the accurate
communication of thought. Of our adjectives in 'en', formed on
substantives, and expressing the material or substance of a thing, some
have gone, others are going, out of use; while we content ourselves with
the bare juxtaposition of the substantive itself, as sufficiently
expressing our meaning. Thus instead of "_golden_ pin" we say "_gold_
pin"; instead of "_eart