OBS. 2.—­The apposition of one possessive with an other, (as, “For David my servant’s sake,”) might doubtless be consistently made a formal exception to the direct government of the possessive by its controlling noun.  But this apposition is only a sameness of construction, so that what governs the one, virtually governs the other.  And if the case of any noun or pronoun is known and determined by the rule or relation of apposition, there can be no need of an exception to the foregoing rule for the purpose of parsing it, since that purpose is already answered by rule third.  If the reader, by supposing an ellipsis which I should not, will resolve any given instance of this kind into something else than apposition, I have already shown him that some great grammarians have differed in the same way before.  Useless ellipses, however, should never be supposed; and such perhaps is the following:  “At Mr. Smith’s [who is] the bookseller.”—­See Dr. Priestley’s Gram., p. 71.

OBS. 3.—­In all our Latin grammars, the verb sum, fui, esse, to be, is said (though not with strict propriety) sometimes to signify possession, property, or duty, and in that sense to govern the genitive case:  as, “Est regis;”—­“It is the king’s.”—­“Hominis est errare;”—­“It is man’s to err.”—­“Pecus est Melibœi;”—­“The flock is Meliboeus’s.”  And sometimes, with like import, this verb, expressed or understood, may govern the dative; as, “Ego [sum] dilecto meo, et dilectus meus [est] mihi.”—­Vulgate.  “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.”—­Solomon’s Song, vi, 3.  Here, as both the genitive and the dative are expressed in English by the possessive, if the former are governed by the verb, there seems to be precisely the same reason from the nature of the expression, and an additional one from analogy, for considering the latter to be so too.  But all the annotators upon the Latin syntax suggest, that the genitive thus put after sum or est, is really governed, not by the verb, but by some noun understood; and with this idea, of an ellipsis in the construction, all our English grammarians appear to unite.  They might not, however, find it very easy to tell by what noun the word beloved’s or mine is governed, in the last example above; and so of many others, which are used in the same way:  as, “There shall nothing die of all that is the children’s of Israel.”—­Exod., ix, 4.  The Latin here is, “Ut nihil omnino pereat ex his quae pertinent ad filios Israel.”—­Vulgate.  That is,—­“of all those which belong to the children of Israel.”

   “For thou art Freedom’s now—­and Fame’s,
    One of the few, the immortal names,
    That were not born to die.”—­HALLECK:  Marco Bozzaris.