for who is very common in the Bible, and in other books of the seventeenth century; but all good writers now avoid the construction.  It occurs seventy-five times in the third chapter of Luke; as, “Joseph, which was the son of Heli, which was the son of Matthat,” etc. etc.  After a personal term taken by metonymy for a thing, which is not improper; as, “Of the particular author which he is studying.”—­Gallaudet.  And as an interrogative or a demonstrative pronoun or adjective, the word which is still applicable to persons, as formerly; as, “Which of you all?”—­“Which man of you all?”—­“There arose a reasoning among them, which of them should be the greatest.”—­Luke, ix, 46.  “Two fair twins—­the puzzled Strangers, which is which, inquire.”—­Tickell.

OBS. 7.—­If which, as a direct relative, is inapplicable to persons, who ought to be preferred to it in all personifications:  as,

   “The seal is set.  Now welcome thou dread power,
    Nameless, yet thus omnipotent, which here
    Walk’st in the shadow of the midnight hour.” 
        BYRON:  Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cant, iv, st. 138.

What sort of personage is here imagined and addressed, I will not pretend to say; but it should seem, that who would be more proper than which, though less agreeable in sound before the word here.  In one of his notes on this word, Churchill has fallen into a strange error.  He will have who to represent a horse! and that, in such a sense, as would require which and not who, even for a person.  As he prints the masculine pronoun in Italics, perhaps he thought, with Murray and Webster, that which must needs be “of the neuter gender.” [189] He says, “In the following passage, which seems to be used instead of who:—­

’Between two horses, which doth bear him best;
I have, perhaps, some shallow spirit of judgment’
SHAKS., 1 Hen.  VI.”—­Churchill’s Gram., p. 226.

OBS. 8.—­The pronoun what is usually applied to things only.  It has a twofold relation, and is often used (by ellipsis of the noun) both as antecedent and as relative, in the form of a single word; being equivalent to that which, or the thing which,—­those which, or the things which.  In this double relation, what represents two cases at the same time:  as, “He is ashamed of what he has done;” that is, “of what [thing or action] he has done;”—­or, “of that [thing or action] which he has done.”  Here are two objectives.  The two cases are sometimes alike, sometimes different; for either of them may be the nominative, and either, the objective.  Examples:  “The dread of censure ought not to prevail over what is proper.”—­Kames,