[185] This example, and several others that follow it, are no ordinary solecisms; they are downright Irish bulls, making actions or relations reciprocal, where reciprocity is utterly unimaginable.  Two words can no more be “derived from each other,” than two living creatures can have received their existence from each other.  So, two things can never “succeed each other,” except they alternate or move in a circle; and a greater number in train can “follow one an other” only in some imperfect sense, not at all reciprocal.  In some instances, therefore, the best form of correction will be, to reject the reciprocal terms altogether—­G.  BROWN.

[186] This doctrine of punctuation, if not absolutely false in itself, is here very badly taught.  When only two words, of any sort, occur in the same construction, they seldom require the comma; and never can they need more than one, whereas these grammarians, by their plural word “commas,” suggest a constant demand for two or more.—­G.  BROWN.

[187] Some grammarians exclude the word it from the list of personal pronouns, because it does not convey the idea of that personality which consists in individual intelligence.  On the other hand, they will have who to be a personal pronoun, because it is literally applied to persons only, or intelligent beings.  But I judge them to be wrong in respect to both; and, had they given definitions of their several classes of pronouns, they might perhaps have found out that the word it is always personal, in a grammatical sense, and who, either relative or interrogative.

[188] “Whoso and whatso are found in old authors, but are now out of use.”—­Churchill’s Gram., p. 76.  These antiquated words are equivalent in import to whosoever and whatsoever.  The former, whoso, being used many times in the Bible, and occasionally also by the poets, as by Cowper, Whittier, and others, can hardly be said to be obsolete; though Wells, like Churchill, pronounced it so, in his first edition.

[189] “‘The man is prudent which speaks little.’  This sentence is incorrect, because which is a pronoun of the neuter gender.”—­Murray’s Exercises, p. 18. “Which is also a relative, but it is of [the] neuter gender.  It is also interrogative.”—­Webster’s Improved Gram., p. 26.  For oversights like these, I cannot account.  The relative which is of all the genders, as every body ought to know, who has ever heard of the horse which Alexander rode, of the ass which spoke to Balaam, or of any of the animals and things which Noah had with him in the ark.