he will have to be so for a different reason—­because it is in what he chooses to call the vocative case.  But, according to custom, he should rather have put his interjection absolute with the noun, and written it, “O world,” and not, “Oh, world.”  What he meant to do with “Oh me! and Ah me!” is doubtful.  If any phrases come fairly under his rule, these are the very ones; and yet he seems to introduce them as exceptions!  Of these, it can hardly be said, that they “frequently occur.”  Lowth notices only the latter, which he supposes elliptical.  The former I do not remember to have met with more than three or four times; except in grammars, which in this case are hardly to be called authorities:  “Oh! me, how fared it with me then?”—­Job Scott. “Oh me! all the horse have got over the river, what shall we do?”—­WALTON:  Joh.  Dict.

   “But when he was first seen, oh me!
    What shrieking and what misery!”—­Wordsworth’s Works, p. 114.

OBS. 10.—­When a declinable word not in the nominative absolute, follows an interjection, as part of an imperfect exclamation, its construction (if the phrase be good English) depends on something understood; as, “Ah me!”—­that is, “Ah! pity me;” or, “Ah! it grieves me;” or, as some will have it, (because the expression in Latin is “Hei mihi!”) “Ah for me!”—­Ingersoll.  “Ah! wo is to me.”—­Lowth.  “Ah! sorrow is to me.”—­Coar.  So of “oh me!” for, in these expressions, if not generally, oh and ah are exactly equivalent the one to the other.  As for “O me” it is now seldom met with, though Shakspeare has it a few times.  From these examples, O. B. Peirce erroneously imagines the “independent case” of the pronoun I to be me, and accordingly parses the word without supposing an ellipsis; but in the plural he makes that case to be we, and not us.  So, having found an example of “Ah Him!” which, according to one half of our grammarians, is bad English, he conceives the independent case of he to be him; but in the plural, and in both numbers of the words thou and she, he makes it the nominative, or the same in form as the nominative.  So builds he “the temple of Grammatical consistency!”—­P. 7.  Nixon and Cooper must of course approve of “Ah him!” because they assume that the interjection ah “requires” or “governs” the objective case of the third person.  Others must condemn the expression, because they teach that ah requires the nominative case of this person.  Thus Greenleaf sets down for false syntax, “O! happy them, surrounded with so many blessings!”—­Gram.  Simplified, p. 47.  Here, undoubtedly, the word should be they; and, by analogy, (if indeed the instances are analogous,) it would seem more proper