imprudently.”—­Ib., p. 263.  Say, “I hope I shall never again act so imprudently.” (7.) “If I were to give a reason for their looking so well, it would be, that they rise early.”—­Ib., p. 263.  Say, “I should attribute their healthful appearance to their early rising.” (8.) “The tutor said, that diligence and application to study were necessary to our becoming good scholars.”—­Cooper’s Gram., p. 145.  Here is an anomaly in the construction of the noun scholars.  Say, “The tutor said, that diligent application to study was necessary to our success in learning.” (9.) “The reason of his having acted in the manner he did, was not fully explained.”—­Murray’s Key, p. 263.  This author has a very singular mode of giving “STRENGTH” to weak sentences.  The faulty text here was.  “The reason why he acted in the manner he did, was not fully explained.”—­Murray’s Exercises, p. 131.  This is much better than the other, but I should choose to say.  “The reason of his conduct was not fully explained.”  For, surely, the “one idea or circumstance” of his “having acted in the manner in which he did act,” may be quite as forcibly named by the one word conduct, as by all this verbiage, this “substantive phrase,” or “entire clause,” of such cumbrous length.

OBS. 17.—­The foregoing observations tend to show, that the government of possessives by participles, is in general a construction little to be commended, if at all allowed.  I thus narrow down the application of the principle, but do not hereby determine it to be altogether wrong.  There are other arguments, both for and against the doctrine, which must be taken into the account, before we can fully decide the question.  The double construction which may be given to infinitive verbs; the Greek idiom which allows to such verbs an article before them and an objective after them; the mixed character of the Latin gerund, part noun, part verb; the use or substitution of the participle in English for the gerund in Latin;—­all these afford so many reasons by analogy, for allowing that our participle—­except it be the perfect—­since it participates the properties of a verb and a noun, as well as those of a verb and an adjective, may unite in itself a double construction, and be taken substantively in one relation, and participially in an other.  Accordingly some grammarians so define it; and many writers so use it; both parties disregarding the distinction between the participle and the participial noun, and justifying the construction of the former, not only as a proper participle after its noun, and as a gerundive after its preposition; not only as a participial adjective before its noun, and as a participial noun, in the regular syntax of a noun; but also as a mixed term, in the double character of noun and participle at once.  Nor are these its only uses; for, after an auxiliary, it is the main verb; and in a few instances,