“And children are more busy in their play
    Than those that wisely’st pass their time away.”—­Butler, p. 163.

CHAPTER IX.—­CONJUNCTIONS.

A Conjunction is a word used to connect words or sentences in construction, and to show the dependence of the terms so connected:  as, “Thou and he are happy, because you are good.”—­Murray.

OBSERVATIONS.

OBS. 1.—­Our connective words are of four kinds; namely, relative pronouns, conjunctive adverbs,[312] conjunctions, and prepositions.  These have a certain resemblance to one another, so far as they are all of them connectives; yet there are also characteristical differences by which they may in general be easily distinguished.  Relative pronouns represent antecedents, and stand in those relations which we call cases; conjunctive adverbs assume the connective power in addition to their adverbial character, and consequently sustain a double relation; conjunctions, (except the introductory correspondents,) join words or sentences together, showing their relation either to each other or to something else; prepositions, though naturally subject themselves to something going before, assume the government of the terms which follow them, and in this they differ from all the rest.

OBS. 2.—­Conjunctions do not express any of the real objects of the understanding, whether things, qualities, or actions, but rather the several modes of connexion or contrast under which these objects are contemplated.  Hence conjunctions were said by Aristotle and his followers to be in themselves “devoid of signification;” a notion which Harris, with no great propriety, has adopted in his faulty definition[313] of this part of speech.  It is the office of this class of particles, to link together words, phrases, or sentences, that would otherwise appear as loose shreds, or unconnected aphorisms; and thus, by various forms of dependence, to give to discourse such continuity as may fit it to convey a connected train of thought or reasoning.  The skill or inability of a writer may as strikingly appear in his management of these little connectives, as in that of the longest and most significant words in the language.

   “The current is often evinced by the straws,
    And the course of the wind by the flight of a feather;
    So a speaker is known by his ands and his ors,
    Those stitches that fasten his patchwork together.”—­Robert F. Mott.