“Ah! luckless I! who purge in spring my spleen—­
    Else sure the first of bards had Horace been.”
        —­Francis’s Hor., ii, 209.

OBS. 5.—­Whether Murray’s remark above, on “O!  Oh! and Ah!” was originally designed for a rule of government or not, it is hardly worth any one’s while to inquire.  It is too lame and inaccurate every way, to deserve any notice, but that which should serve to explode it forever.  Yet no few, who have since made English grammars, have copied the text literally; as they have, for the public benefit, stolen a thousand other errors from the same quarter.  The reader will find it, with little or no change, in Smith’s New Grammar, p. 96 and 134; Alger’s, 56; Allen’s, 117; Russell’s, 92; Blair’s, 100, Guy’s, 89; Abel Flint’s, 59; A Teacher’s, 43, Picket’s, 210; Cooper’s[439] Murray, 136; Wilcox’s, 95; Bucke’s, 87; Emmons’s, 77; and probably in others.  Lennie varies it indefinitely, thus:  “RULE.  The interjections Oh! and Ah! &c. generally require the objective case of the first personal pronoun, and the nominative of the second; as, Ah me! O thou fool!  O ye hypocrites!”—­Lennie’s Gram., p. 110; Brace’s, 88.  M’Culloch, after Crombie, thus:  “RULE XX.  Interjections are joined with the objective case of the pronoun of the first person, and with the nominative of the pronoun of the second; as, Ah me!  O ye hypocrites.”—­Manual of E. Gram., p. 145; and Crombie’s Treatise, p. 315; also Fowler’s E. Language, p. 563.  Hiley makes it a note, thus:  “The interjections.  O!  Oh!  Ah! are followed by the objective case of a pronoun of the first person; as, ’Oh me!’ ’Ah me!’ but by the nominative case of the pronoun in the second person; as, ’O thou who dwellest.’ “—­Hiley’s Gram., p. 82.  This is what the same author elsewhere calls “THE GOVERNMENT OF INTERJECTIONS;” though, like some others, he had set it in the “Syntax of PRONOUNS.”  See Ib., p. 108.  Murray, in forming his own little “Abridgment,” omitted it altogether.  In his other grammars, it is still a mere note, standing where he at first absurdly put it, under his rule for the agreement of pronouns with their antecedents.  By many of his sage amenders, it has been placed in the catalogue of principal rules.  But, that it is no adequate rule for interjections, is manifest; for, in its usual form, it is limited to three, and none of these can ever, with any propriety, be parsed by it.  Murray himself has not used it in any of his forms of parsing.  He conceived, (as I hinted before in Chapter 1st,) that, “The syntax of the Interjection is of so very limited a nature, that it does not require a distinct, appropriate rule.”—­Octavo Gram., i. 224.