[440] “Oh is used to express the emotion of pain, sorrow, or surprise. O is used to express wishing, exclamation, or a direct address to a person.”—­Lennie’s Gram., 12th Ed., p. 110.  Of this distinction our grammarians in general seem to have no conception; and, in fact, it is so often disregarded by other authors, that the propriety of it may be disputed.  Since O and oh are pronounced alike, or very nearly so, if there is no difference in their application, they are only different modes of writing the same word, and one or the other of them is useless.  If there is a real difference, as I suppose there is, it ought to be better observed; and O me! and oh ye! which I believe are found only in grammars, should be regarded as bad English.  Both O and oh, as well as ah, were used in Latin by Terence, who was reckoned an elegant writer; and his manner of applying them favours this distinction:  and so do our own dictionaries, though Johnson and Walker do not draw it clearly, for oh is as much an “exclamation” as O.  In the works of Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, we find O or o used frequently, but nowhere oh.  Yet this is no evidence of their sameness, or of the uselessness of the latter; but rather of their difference, and of the impropriety of confounding them. O, oh, ho, and ah, are French words as well as English.  Boyer, in his Quarto Dictionary, confounds them all; translating “O!” only by “Oh!” “OH! ou HO!” by “Ho!  Oh!” and “AH!” by “Oh! alas! well-a-day! ough!  A! ah! hah! ho!” He would have done better to have made each one explain itself; and especially, not to have set down “ough!” and “A!” as English words which correspond to the French ah!

[441] This silence is sufficiently accounted for by Murray’s; of whose work, most of the authors who have any such rule, are either piddling modifiers or servile copyists.  And Murray’s silence on these matters, is in part attributable to the fact, that when he wrote his remark, his system of grammar denied that nouns have any first person, or any objective case.  Of course he supposed that all nouns that were uttered after interjections, whether they were of the second person or of the third, were in the nominative case; for he gave to nouns two cases only, the nominative and the possessive.  And when he afterwards admitted the objective case of nouns, he did not alter his remark, but left all his pupils ignorant of the case of any noun that is used in exclamation or invocation.  In his doctrine of two cases, he followed Dr. Ash:  from whom also he copied the rule which I am criticising:  “The Interjections, O, Oh, and Ah, require the accusative case of a pronoun in the first Person:  as, O me, Oh me, Ah me:  But the Nominative in the second: