it is used.”—­Octavo Gram., p. 1; Fisk’s, p. 11; et al. According to Priestley and himself, the great Compiler is here in an error.  The rule is perhaps too stringent; but whoever teaches it, should keep it.  If he did not like to say, “the best speakers and writers that it is used by;” he ought to have said, “the best speakers and writers that use it.”  Or, rather, he ought to have said nothing after the word “writers;” because the whole relative clause is here weak and useless.  Yet how many of the amenders of this grammar have not had perspicacity enough, either to omit the expression, or to correct it according to the author’s own rule!

OBS. 26.—­Relative pronouns are capable of being taken in two very different senses:  the one, restrictive of the general idea suggested by the antecedent; the other, resumptive of that idea, in the full import of the term—­or, in whatever extent the previous definitives allow.  The distinction between these two senses, important as it is, is frequently made to depend solely upon the insertion or the omission of a comma.  Thus, if I say, “Men who grasp after riches, are never satisfied;” the relative who is taken restrictively, and I am understood to speak only of the avaricious.  But, if I say, “Men, who grasp after riches, are never satisfied;” by separating the terms men and who, I declare all men to be covetous and unsatisfied.  For the former sense, the relative that is preferable to who; and I shall presently show why.  This example, in the latter form, is found in Sanborn’s Grammar, page 142d; but whether the author meant what he says, or not, I doubt.  Like many other unskillful writers, he has paid little regard to the above-mentioned distinction; and, in some instances, his meaning cannot have been what his words declare:  as, “A prism is a solid, whose sides are all parallelograms.”—­Analytical Gram., p. 142.  This, as it stands, is no definition of a prism, but an assertion of two things; that a prism is a solid, and that all the sides of a solid are parallelograms.  Erase the comma, and the words will describe the prism as a peculiar kind of solid; because whose will then be taken in the restrictive sense.  This sense, however, may be conveyed even with a comma before the relative; as, “Some fictitious histories yet remain, that were composed during the decline of the Roman empire.”—­Blair’s Rhet., p. 374.  This does not suggest that there are no other fictitious histories now extant, than such as were composed during the decline of the Roman empire; but I submit it to the reader, whether the word which, if here put for that, would not convey this idea.