[165] The authorities cited by Felch, for his doctrine of “possessive adnouns,” amount to nothing.  They are ostensibly two.  The first is a remark of Dr. Adam’s:  “’John’s book was formerly written Johnis book.  Some have thought the ’s a contraction of his, but improperly.  Others have imagined, with more justness, that, by the addition of the ’s, the substantive is changed into a possessive adjective.’—­Adam’s Latin and English Grammar, p. 7.”—­Felch’s Comp.  Gram., p. 26.  Here Dr. Adam by no means concurs with what these “others have imagined;” for, in the very same place, he declares the possessive case of nouns to be their only case.  The second is a dogmatical and inconsistent remark of some anonymous writer in some part of the “American Journal of Education,” a work respectable indeed, but, on the subject of grammar, too often fantastical and heterodox.  Felch thinks it not improper, to use the possessive case before participles; in which situation, it denotes, not the owner of something, but the agent, subject, or recipient, of the action, being, or change.  And what a jumble does he make, where he attempts to resolve this ungrammatical construction!—­telling us, in almost the same breath, that, “The agent of a nounal verb [i. e. participle] is never expressed,” but that, “Sometimes it [the nounal or gerundial verb] is qualified, in its nounal capacity, by a possessive adnoun indicative of its agent as a verb; as, there is nothing like one’s BEING useful he doubted their HAVING it:”  and then concluding, “Hence it appears, that the present participle may be used as agent or object, and yet retain its character as a verb.”—­Felch’s Comprehensive Gram., p. 81.  Alas for the schools, if the wise men of the East receive for grammar such utter confusion, and palpable self-contradiction, as this!

[166] A critic’s accuracy is sometimes liable to be brought into doubt, by subsequent alterations of the texts which, he quotes.  Many an error cited in this volume of criticism, may possibly not be found in some future edition of the book referred to; as several of those which were pointed out by Lowth, have disappeared from the places named for them.  Churchill also cites this line as above; (New Gram., p. 214;) but, in my edition of the Odyssey, by Pope, the reading is this:  “By lov’d Telemachus’s blooming years!”—­Book xi, L 84.

[167] Corpse forms the plural regularly, corpses; as in 2 Kings, xix, 35:  “In the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.”