Webster, and perhaps others, teach us to point it, when we mean to tell somebody else that all three are here!  In his pretended “Abridgment of Murray’s English Grammar,” (a work abounding in small thefts from Brown’s Institutes,) Cooper has the following example:  “John, James or Joseph intends to accompany me.”—­Page 120.  Here, John being addressed, the punctuation is right; but, to make this noun a nominative to the verb, a comma must be put after each of the others.  In Cooper’s “Plain and Practical Grammar,” the passage is found in this form:  “John, James, or Joseph intends to accompany us.”—­Page 132.  This pointing is doubly wrong; because it is adapted to neither sense.  If the three nouns have the same construction, the principal pause will be immediately before the verb; and surely a comma is as much required by that pause, as by the second.  See the Note on Rule 3d, above.

[464] In punctuation, the grammar here cited is unaccountably defective.  This is the more strange, because many of its errors are mere perversions of what was accurately pointed by an other hand.  On the page above referred to, Dr. Bullions, in copying from Lennie’s syntactical exercises a dozen consecutive lines, has omitted nine needful commas, which Lennie had been careful to insert!

[465] Needless abbreviations, like most that occur in this example, are in bad taste, and ought to be avoided.  The great faultiness of this text as a model for learners, compels me to vary the words considerably in suggesting the correction.  See the Key.—­G.  B.

[466] “To be, or not to be?—­that’s the question.”—­Hallock’s Gram., p. 220.  “To be, or not to be, that is the question.”—­Singer’s Shak., ii. 488.  “To be, or not to be; that is the Question.”—­Ward’s Gram., p 160.  “To be, or not to be, that is the Question.”—­Brightland’s Gram., p 209.  “To be, or not to be?”—­Mandeville’s Course of Reading, p. 141.  “To be or not to be!  That is the question.”—­Pinneo’s Gram., p. 176.  “To be—­or not to be—­that is the question—­“—­Burgh’s Speaker, p. 179.

[467] In the works of some of our older poets, the apostrophe is sometimes irregularly inserted, and perhaps needlessly, to mark a prosodial synsaeresis, or synalepha, where no letter is cut off or left out; as,

   “Retire, or taste thy folly’, and learn by proof,
    Hell-born, not to contend with spir’its of Heaven.”
        —­Milton, P. L., ii, 686.

In the following example, it seems to denote nothing more than the open or long sound of the preceding vowel e: 

   “That sleep and feeding may prorogue his honour,
    Even till a lethe’d dulness.”
        —­Singer’s Shakspeare, Vol. ii, p. 280.