relate to a noun or pronoun going before them; for who may be a direct substitute for what person; and which may mean which person, or which thing:  as, “And he that was healed, wist not who it was.”—­John, v, 13.  That is, “The man who was healed, knew not what person it was.”  “I care not which you take; they are so much alike, one cannot tell which is which.”

OBS. 4.—­A pronoun with which a question is asked, usually stands for some person or thing unknown to the speaker; the noun, therefore, cannot occur before it, but may be used after it or in place of it.  Examples:  “In the grave, who shall give thee thanks?”—­Ps., vi, 5.  Here the word who is equivalent to what person, taken interrogatively.  “Which of you convinceth me of sin?”—­John, viii, 46.  That is, “Which man of you?” “Master, what shall we do?”—­Luke, iii, 12.  That is, “What act, or thing?” These solutions, however, convert which and what into adjectives:  and, in fact, as they have no inflections for the numbers and cases, there is reason to think them at all times essentially such.  We call them pronouns, to avoid the inconvenience of supposing and supplying an infinite multitude of ellipses.  But who, though often equivalent (as above) to an adjective and a noun, is never itself used adjectively; it is always a pronoun.

OBS. 5.—­In respect to who or whom, it sometimes makes little or no difference to the sense, whether we take it as a demonstrative pronoun equivalent to what person, or suppose it to relate to an antecedent understood before it:  as, “Even so the Son quickeneth whom he will.”—­John, v, 21.  That is—­“what persons he will,” or, “those persons whom he will;” for the Greek word for whom, is, in this instance, plural.  The former is a shorter explanation of the meaning, but the latter I take to be the true account of the construction; for, by the other, we make whom a double relative, and the object of two governing words at once.  So, perhaps, of the following example, which Dr. Johnson cites under the word who, to show what he calls its “disjunctive sense:”—­

   “There thou tellst of kings, and who aspire;
    Who fall, who rise, who triumph, who do moan.”—­Daniel.

OBS. 6.—­It sometimes happens that the real antecedent, or the term which in the order of the sense must stand before the pronoun, is not placed antecedently to it, in the order given to the words:  as, “It is written, To whom he was not spoken of, they shall see; and they that have not heard, shall understand.”—­Romans, xv, 21.  Here the sense is, “They to whom he was not spoken of, shall see.”  Whoever takes the passage otherwise, totally misunderstands it.  And yet the same order of the words might be used to signify, “They shall see to whom (that is, to what persons) he was not spoken of.”  Transpositions of this kind, as well as of every other, occur most frequently in poetry.  The following example is from an Essay on Satire, printed with Pope’s Works, but written by one of his friends:—­