great exploit;’ or more properly, ‘I remember its being reckoned,’ &c.  The following sentence is correct and proper:  ’Much will depend on the pupil’s composing, but more on his reading frequently.’  It would not be accurate to say, ’Much will depend on the pupil composing.’ &c.  We also properly say; ’This will be the effect of the pupil’s composing frequently;’ instead of, ’Of the pupil composing frequently.’  The participle, in such constructions, does the office of a substantive; and it should therefore have a CORRESPONDENT REGIMEN.”—­Murray’s Gram., Rule 10th, Note 7; Ingersoll’s, p. 180; Fisk’s, 108; R.  C. Smith’s, 152; Alger’s, 61; Merchant’s, 84.  See also Weld’s Gram., 2d Ed., p. 150; “Abridged Ed.,” 117.[348]

OBS. 12.—­Now, if it were as easy to prove that a participle, as such, or (what amounts to the same thing) a phrase beginning with a participle, ought never to govern the possessive case, as it is to show that every part and parcel of the foregoing citations from Priestley, Murray, and others, is both weakly conceived and badly written, I should neither have detained the reader so long on this topic, nor ever have placed it among the most puzzling points of grammar.  Let it be observed, that what these writers absurdly call “an entire CLAUSE of a sentence,” is found on examination to be some short PHRASE, the participle with its adjuncts, or even the participle alone, or with a single adverb only; as, “holding up her train,”—­“dismissing his servant so hastily,”—­“composing,”—­“reading frequently,”—­“composing frequently.”  And each of these, with an opposite error as great, they will have to be “one name,” and to convey but “one idea;” supposing that by virtue of this imaginary oneness, it may govern the possessive case, and signify something which a “lady,” or a “person,” or a “pupil,” may consistently possess.  And then, to be wrong in every thing, they suggest that any noun on which such a participle, with its adjuncts, “depends, may be put in the genitive case;” whereas, such a change is seldom, if ever, admissible, and in our language, no participle ever can depend on any other than the nominative or the objective case.  Every participle so depending is an adjunct to the noun; and every possessive, in its turn, is an adjunct to the word which governs it.  In respect to construction, no terms differ more than a participle which governs the possessive case, and a participle which does not.  These different constructions the contrivers of the foregoing rule, here take to be equivalent in meaning; whereas they elsewhere pretend to find in them quite different significations.  The meaning is sometimes very different, and sometimes very similar; but seldom, if ever, are the terms convertible.  And even if they were so, and the difference were nothing, would