“But he, our gracious Master, kind as just,
    Knowing our frame, remembers we are dust.”—­Barbauld.

OBSERVATIONS ON RULE III.

OBS. 1—­Apposition is that peculiar relation which one noun or pronoun bears to an other, when two or more are placed together in the same case, and used to designate the same person or thing:  as, “Cicero the orator;”—­“The prophet Joel;”—­“He of Gath, Goliah;”—­“Which ye yourselves do know;”—­“To make him king;”—­“To give his life a ransom for many;”—­“I made the ground my bed;”—­“I, thy schoolmaster;”—­“We the People of the United States.”  This placing-together of nouns and pronouns in the same case, was reckoned by the old grammarians a figure of syntax; and from them it received, in their elaborate detail of the grammatical and rhetorical figures, its present name of apposition.  They reckoned it a species of ellipsis, and supplied between the words, the participle being, the infinitive to be, or some other part of their “substantive verb:”  as, “Cicero being the orator;”—­“To make him to be king;”—­“I who am thy schoolmaster.”  But the later Latin grammarians have usually placed it among their regular concords; some calling it the first concord, while others make it the last, in the series; and some, with no great regard to consistency, treating it both as a figure and as a regular concord, at the same time.

OBS. 2.—­Some English grammarians teach, “that the words in the cases preceding and following the verb to be, may be said to be in apposition to each other.”—­Murray’s Gram., 8vo, p. 181; R.  C. Smith’s, 155; Fisk’s, 126; Ingersoll’s, 146; Merchant’s, 91.  But this is entirely repugnant to the doctrine, that apposition is a figure; nor is it at all consistent with the original meaning of the word apposition; because it assumes that the literal reading, when the supposed ellipsis is supplied, is apposition still.  The old distinction, however, between apposition and same cases, is generally preserved in our grammars, and is worthy ever to be so.  The rule for same cases applies to all nouns or pronouns that are put after verbs or participles not transitive, and that are made to agree in case with other nouns or pronouns going before, and meaning the same thing.  But some teachers who observe this distinction with reference to the neuter verb be, and to certain passive verbs of naming, appointing, and the like, absurdly break it down in relation to other verbs, neuter or active-intransitive.  Thus Nixon:  “Nouns in apposition are in the same case; as, ‘Hortensius died a martyr;’ ’Sydney lived the shepherd’s friend.’”—­English Parser, p. 55.  It is remarkable that all this author’s examples of “nominatives in apposition,” (and he gives eighteen in the exercise,) are precisely of this sort, in which there is really no apposition at all.