OBS. 17.—­When any two declinable words are connected by than or as, they are almost always, according to the true idiom of our language, to be put in the same case, whether we suppose an ellipsis in the construction of the latter, or not; as, “My Father is greater than I.”—­Bible.  “What do ye more than others?”—­Matt., v, 47.  “More men than women were there.”—­Murray’s Gram., p. 114.  “Entreat him as a father, and the younger men as brethren.”—­1 Tim., v, 1.  “I would that all men were even as I myself.”—­1 Cor., vii, 7.  “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these?”—­John, xxi, 15.  This last text is manifestly ambiguous; so that some readers will doubt whether it means—­“more than thou lovest these,” or—­“more than these love me.”  Is not this because there is an ellipsis in the sentence, and such a one as may be variously conceived and supplied?  The original too is ambiguous, but not for the same reason:  “[Greek:  Simon Iona, agapas me pleion touton];”—­And so is the Latin of the Vulgate and of Montanus:  “Simon Jona, diligis me plus his?” Wherefore Beza expressed it differently:  “Simon fili Jonae, diligis me plus quam hi?” The French Bible has it:  “Simon, fils de Jona, m’aimes-tu plus que ne font ceux-ci?” And the expression in English should rather have been, “Lovest thou me more than do these?”

OBS. 18.—­The comparative degree, in Greek, is said to govern the genitive case; in Latin, the ablative:  that is, the genitive or the ablative is sometimes put after this degree without any connecting particle corresponding to than, and without producing a compound sentence.  We have examples in the phrases, “[Greek:  pleion touton]” and “plus his,” above.  Of such a construction our language admits no real example; that is, no exact parallel.  But we have an imitation of it in the phrase than whom, as in this hackneyed example from Milton: 

   “Which, when Beelzebub perceived, than whom,
    Satan except, none higher sat,” &c.—­Paradise Lost, B. ii, l. 300.

The objective, whom, is here preferred to the nominative, who, because the Latin ablative is commonly rendered by the former case, rather than by the latter:  but this phrase is no more explicable according to the usual principles of English grammar, than the error of putting the objective case for a version of the ablative absolute.  If the imitation is to be judged allowable, it is to us a figure of syntax—­an obvious example of Enallage, and of that form of Enallage, which is commonly called Antiptosis, or the putting of one case for an other.