A parenthetical expression-one that serves merely for illustration will, in general, be discriminated from a restrictive expression-one vitally connected with the element modified:

(1) Man, who is born of woman, is of few days and full of trouble.-Job.

(2) It [reading] calls for no bodily exertion, of which he has had enough or too much. It relieves his home of its dulness and sameness, which. is what drives him out to the ale-houses.—Sir

John Herschel.

(3) Let the half-witted say what they will of delusions, no thorough reader ever ceased to believe in his books, whatever doubts they might have taught him by the way.-Leigh Hunt.

(4) A book is a sure friend, always ready at your first leisure.— Emerson.

(5) The moment any book, even the greatest, takes the place to us of insight and inward seeing of the truth, that moment it becomes an injury.-Ibid.

In all the foregoing the italicized portions are explicative. In (1) the relative clause is simply illustrative, pointing out some circumstance connected with the antecedent yet leaving that antecedent with its full extent of meaning,— all men. Each of the clauses in (2) could be omitted without changing the essence of the assertion to which it pertains. The leading thought of (3) is true in just the same sense, whether the clauses be retained or omitted. In (4) the final phrase only unfolds what is implied in 'sure.' 'Even the greatest' adds nothing essential - it is contained in 'any.' Contrast with these the following:

(1) That man lives twice that lives the first life well.-Herrick. (2) I know that all words which are signs of complex ideas, furnish matter of mistake and cavil.—Bolingbroke.

(3) They [books] are pleasures too palpable and too habitual for him to deny.-Hunt.

(4) Whoever expresses to us a just thought makes ridiculous the pains of the critic who should tell him where such a word has been said before.-Emerson.

(5) The highest morality of a great work of art depends upon the power with which the essential beauty and ugliness of virtue and vice are exhibited by an impartial observer.-Leslie Stephen.

Here, all modifying elements are determinative. Not every man lives twice, but only such as live the first life well. A comma between the antecedent and relative of (2) would pervert the author's meaning, for it would then. appear, not that some words furnish matter of cavil, but that all do so. Not all pleasures are affirmed of books, but a certain class. In (4) and (5) every clause, every phrase, is essential to the meaning of the whole. No marks are admissible, for every modifier is closely connected, logically and positionally, with the element modified. Compare, however, the following:

(1) Of all our senses, sight is the most perfect and the most delightful.-Bain.

(2) Thought is the most volatile of all things.- Emerson.

(3) I hate a style, as I do a garden, that is wholly flat and regular. Shenstone.

(4) He [Carlyle] wants altogether the plastic imagination, the shaping faculty, which would have made him a poet in the highest sense.-Lowell.

(1) and (2) are constructed alike. In both, the adjuncts are restrictive, but the transposed order in (1) makes the comma necessary. In (3) an explanatory clause is thrust in between 'style' and 'that.' The latter introduces an important limitation of the former; but omit either comma, and the meaning is wholly changed. There being in (4) a comma after 'imagination,' the common dependence of 'which' (though restrictive) upon the two antecedents is best shown by a point after 'faculty.'

It is thus seen not only that judgment determines the

relations which marks of punctuation indicate, but that the application of a principle varies according to circumstances. This will appear more satisfactorily by the fuller consideration of a single case—the appositive.

(1) Weeping again the king my father's wreck.—Shakespeare. (2) How pleasant it is to reflect that the greatest lovers of books have themselces become books!- Hunt.

(3) My father Shandy solaced himself with Bruscambille. Hazlitt.

(4) The diffusion of these silent teachers, books, through the whole community, is to work greater effects than artillery, machinery, and legislation.-Channing.

(5) Do not fear that I shall read you a homily on that hackneyed theme - contentment.—Carlyle.

(6) I sit down to it as I should to a strange dish,— turn and pick out a bit here and there.-Hazlitt.

(7) I take mine ease at mine inn,' beside the blazing hearth, and shake hands with Signor Orlando Friscobaldo [a character in one of Dekkar's plays], as the oldest acquaintance I have.—Ibid.

(8) There are Robinson Crusoes in the moral as well as physical world, and even a universalist may be one of them;-men cast on desert islands of thought and speculation.—Hunt.

(9) Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a true book! . Yearly comes its new produce of leaves (commentaries, deductions, journalistic essays), every one of which is talismanic.—Carlyle. In (1), (2), and (3), the appositive coalesces readily with the rest of the sentence. In (4), though but a single word, it is interruptive. In (5) it is preceded by a dash, as more formal and emphatic. In (6) its greater length seems to justify the addition of a comma. In (7) it consists of words not the writer's, and therefore is enclosed by brackets. In (8), in view of its remoteness from 'Crusoes' and the comma after 'world,' the semicolon and the dash were, perhaps, deemed preferable for distinctness. In (9) the specifications must be set off by

dashes or curves, else they would appear to be coördinate with the subject.

From all of which it is evident that the principles of capitalization and punctuation are not without subtlety, and that habits of reflection are requisite for the just application of them. It is equally clear that no system can provide for every case that may arise, and that a mastery of the fundamentals of construction is worth more than a set of formulas loaded with exceptions that a knowledge based upon principle is better than a knowledge based upon rules. Of these we shall attempt to state and exemplify only the most important.

1. Begin with capitals: every sentence (u); every line of poetry (b); every direct quotation one entire or complete, and not introduced by a conjunction (c, d); formal statements, propositions separately numbered (e, f); illustrative examples (quotations, or assumed to be such), if sentences (g, h); proper names, hence also names of months and days, leading words in titles of books and essays, and all appellations of the Deity (i,j, k, l); proper adjectives (m); names of things vividly personified ("); titles of office and honor when embodied in proper names, or, as a rule, when used alone in address (0, P, q); the pronoun I, the interjection O, and (though not always) single letters forming abbreviations, should be capitals (r, s).

(a) Books are the true Elysian fields where the spirits of the dead converse, and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled.--Alexander Smith.

(b) Who breathes must suffer, and who thinks must mourn; And he alone is blessed who ne'er was born.-Prior.

(c) Petrarch said of his books considered as his friends: I have friends whose society is extremely agreeable to me; they are of all ages, and of every country.'-Professor C. F. Richardson.

(d) Possibly, too, you may have heard it said that the course of centuries has changed all this; and that the true University of our days is a Collection of Books.'--Carlyle.

(e) I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, 'Tis all barren.-Sterne.

(f) My lord, the new way of ideas, and the old way of speaking intelligibly, was always, and ever will be, the same. And if I may take the liberty to declare my sense of it, herein it consists: (1) That a man use no words but such as he makes the signs of certain determined objects of his mind in thinking, which he can make known to another. (2) Next, that he use the same word steadily for the sign of the same immediate object of his mind in thinking. (3) That he join those words together in propositions, according to the grammatical rules of that language he speaks in. (4) That he unite those sentences in a coherent discourse.-Locke.

(g) The distinction was that yea and nay were answers to questions framed in the affirmative; as, Will he go?—Marsh.

(h) When from sudden and intense emotion, we give utterance to some abrupt, inverted, or elliptical expression, we are said to use an exclamation; as, 'bravo,' 'dreadful,' 'the fellow,' 'what a pity!'— Bain.

(i) Why will you break the Sabbath of my days?-Pope.

(j) Men are April when they woo, December when they wed; maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives. Shakespeare.

·

(k) I believe great authorities admit that if Paradise Lost' did not exist, 'Paradise Regained' would be the finest poem in our language.—John Bright.

(7) He who in any way shows us better than we knew before that a lily of the fields is beautiful, does he not show it us as an effluence of the Fountain of all Beauty; as the handwriting, made visible there, of the great Maker?-Carlyle.

(m) The noblest souls of whatever creed, the pagan Empedocles as well as Christian Paul, have insisted on the necessity of an inspiration, a living emotion, to make moral action perfect.-Matthew Arnold.

(n) Before the porch itself, within the jaws of Hell, Grief and avenging Care have placed their couches: there dwell pale Disease.