nd superlatives hardly survive at all. We do not say
'willinger' or 'lovinger', and still less 'flourishingest', or
'shiningest', or 'surmountingest', all which Gabriel Harvey, a foremost
master of the English of his time, employs; 'plenteouslyer', 'fulliest'
(Wiclif), 'easiliest' (Fuller), 'plainliest' (Dryden), would be all
inadmissible at present.

In the manifest tendency of English at the present moment to reduce the
number of words in which this more vigorous scheme of expressing degrees
is allowed, we must recognize an evidence that the energy which the
language had in its youth is in some measure abating, and the stiffness
of age overtaking it. Still it is with us here only as it is with all
languages, in which at a certain time of their life auxiliary words,
leaving the main word unaltered, are preferred to inflections of this
last. Such preference makes itself ever more strongly felt; and, judging
from analogy, I cannot doubt that a day, however distant now, will
arrive, when the only way of forming comparatives and superlatives in
the English language will be by prefixing 'more' and 'most'; or, if the
other survive, it will be in poetry alone.

It will fare not otherwise, as I am bold to predict, with the flexional
genitive, formed in 's' or 'es' (see p. 161). This too will finally
disappear altogether from the language, or will survive only in poetry,
and as much an archaic form there as the 'pictai' of Virgil. A time will
come when it will not any longer be free to say, as now, either, "_the
king's sons_", or "_the sons of the king_", but when the latter will be
the only admissible form. Tokens of this are already evident. The region
in which the alternative forms are equally good is narrowing. We should
not now any more write, "When _man's son_ shall come" (Wiclif), but
"When _the Son of man_ shall come", nor yet, "_The hypocrite's hope_
shall perish" (Job viii. 13, Authorized Version), but, "_The hope of the
hypocrite_ shall perish"; not with Barrow, "No man can be ignorant _of
human life's brevity and uncertainty_", but "No man can be ignorant _of
the brevity and uncertainty of human life_". The consummation which I
anticipate may be centuries off, but will assuredly arrive{194}.

{Sidenote: _Lost Diminutives_}

Then too diminutives are fast disappearing from the language. If we
desire to express smallness, we prefer to do it by an auxiliary word;
thus a little fist, and not a 'fistock' (Golding), a l