2.  Professor Hart has an indecisive remark on this construction, as follows:  “Sometimes a verb in the infinitive mood has a noun after it without any other noun before it; as, ’To be a good man, is not so easy a thing as many people imagine.’  Here ‘man’ may be parsed as used indefinitely after the verb to be.  It is not easy to say in what case the noun is in such sentences.  The analogy of the Latin would seem to indicate the objective.—­Thus, ’Not to know what happened in past years, is to be always a child,’ Latin, ‘semper esse puerum.’ In like manner, in English, we may say, ’Its being me, need make no change in your determination.’”—­Hart’s English Gram., p. 127.

3.  These learned authors thus differ about what certainly admits of no other solution than that which is given in the Observation above.  To parse the nouns in question, “as used indefinitely,” without case, and to call them “objectives indefinite,” without agreement or government, are two methods equally repugnant to reason.  The last suggestion of Hart’s is also a false argument for a true position.  The phrases, “Its being me,” and “To be a good man,” are far from being constructed “in like manner.”  The former is manifestly bad English; because its and me are not in the same case.  But S. S. Greene would say, “Its being I, is right.”  For in a similar instance, he has this conclusion:  “Hence, in abridging the following proposition, ‘I was not aware that it was he,’ we should say ‘of its being he,’ not ‘his’ nor ‘him.’”—­Greene’s Analysis, 1st Ed., p. 171.  When being becomes a noun, no case after it appears to be very proper; but this author, thus “abridging” four syllables into five, produces an anomalous construction which it would be much better to avoid.

[361] Parkhurst and Sanborn, by what they call “A NEW RULE,” attempt to determine the doubtful or unknown case which this note censures, and to justify the construction as being well-authorized and hardly avoidable.  Their rule is this:  “A noun following a neuter or [a] passive participial noun, is in the nominative independent.  A noun or pronoun in the possessive case, always precedes the participial noun, either expressed or understood, signifying the same thing as the noun does that follows it.”  To this new and exceptionable’ dogma, Sanborn adds:  “This form of expression is one of the most common idioms of the language, and in general composition cannot be well avoided.  In confirmation of the statement made, various authorities are subjoined.  Two grammarians only, to our knowledge, have remarked OH this phraseology:  ’Participles are sometimes preceded by a possessive case and followed by a nominative; as, There is no doubt of his being a great