govern those cases; and this office of the interjection is in perfect accordance with that which it performs in the Latin, and many other languages.”—­Kirkham’s Gram., According to this, every interjection has as much need of an object after it, as has a transitive verb or a preposition!  The rule has, certainly, no “accordance” with what occurs in Latin, or in any other language; it is wholly a fabrication, though found, in some shape or other, in well-nigh all English grammars.

OBS. 4.—­L.  MURRAY’S doctrine on this point is thus expressed:  “The interjections O!  Oh! and Ah! require the objective case of a pronoun in the first person after them, as, ‘O me! oh me!  Ah me!’ But the nominative case in the second person:  as, ‘O thou persecutor!’ ‘Oh ye hypocrites!’ ’O thou, who dwellest,’ &c.”—­Octavo Gram., INGERSOLL copies this most faulty note literally, adding these words to its abrupt end,—­i. e., to its inexplicable “&c.” used by Murray; “because the first person is governed by a preposition understood:  as, ‘Ah for me!’ or, ’O what will become of me!’ &c., and the second person is in the nominative independent, there being a direct address.”—­Conversations on E. Gram., So we see that this grammarian and Kirkham, both modifiers of Murray, understand their master’s false verb “require” very differently.  LENNIE too, in renouncing a part of Murray’s double or threefold error, “Oh! happy us!” for, “O happy we!” teaches thus:  “Interjections sometimes require the objective case after them, but they never govern it.  In the first edition of this grammar,” says he, “I followed Mr. Murray and others, in leaving we, in the exercises to be turned into us; but that it should be we, and not us, is obvious; because it is the nominative to are understood; thus, Oh happy are we, or, Oh we are happy, (being) surrounded with so many blessings.”—­Lennie’s Gram., Fifth Edition, Twelfth, Here is an other solution of the construction of this pronoun of the first person, contradictory alike to Ingersoll’s, to Kirkham’s, and to Murray’s; while all are wrong, and this among the rest.  The word should indeed be we, and not us; because we have both analogy and good authority for the former case, and nothing but the false conceit of sundry grammatists for the latter.  But it is a nominative absolute, like any other nominative which we use in the same exclamatory manner.  For the first person may just as well be put in the nominative absolute, by exclamation, as any other; as, “Behold I and the children whom God hath given me!”—­Heb., “Ecce ego et pueri quos mihi dedit Deus!”—­Beza.  “O brave we!”—­Dr. Johnson, often.  So Horace:  “O ego laevus,” &c.—­Ep. ad Pi., 301.