OBS. 8.—­The word worth is often followed by an objective, or a participle, which it appears to govern; as, “If your arguments produce no conviction, they are worth nothing to me.”—­Beattie.  “To reign is worth ambition.”—­Milton.  “This is life indeed, life worth preserving.”—­Addison.  It is not easy to determine to what part of speech worth here belongs.  Dr. Johnson calls it an adjective, but says nothing of the object after it, which some suppose to be governed by of understood.  In this supposition, it is gratuitously assumed, that worth is equivalent to worthy, after which of should be expressed; as, “Whatsoever is worthy of their love, is worth their anger.”—­Denham.  But as worth appears to have no certain characteristic of an adjective, some call it a noun, and suppose a double ellipsis; as, “’My knife is worth a shilling;’ i. e.  ’My knife is of the worth of a shilling.’”—­Kirkham’s Gram., p. 163. “‘The book is worth that sum;’ that is, ‘The book is (the) worth (of) that sum;’ ‘It is worth while;’ that is, ‘It is (the) worth (of the) while.’”—­Nixon’s Parser, p. 54.  This is still less satisfactory;[368] and as the whole appears to be mere guess-work, I see no good reason why worth is not a preposition, governing the noun or participle.[369] If an adverb precede worth, it may as well be referred to the foregoing verb, as when it occurs before any other preposition:  as, “It is richly worth the money.”—­“It lies directly before your door.”  Or if we admit that an adverb sometimes relates to this word, the same thing may be as true of other prepositions; as, “And this is a lesson which, to the greatest part of mankind, is, I think, very well worth learning.”—­Blair’s Rhet., p. 303.  “He sees let down from the ceiling, exactly over his head, a glittering sword, hung by a single hair.”—­Murray’s E. Reader, p. 33.  See Exception 3d to Rule 21st.

OBS. 9.—­Both Dr. Johnson and Horne Tooke, (who never agreed if they could help it,) unite in saying that worth, in the phrases, “Wo worth the man,”—­“Wo worth the day,” and the like, is from the imperative of the Saxon verb wyrthan or weorthan, to be; i. e., “Wo be [to] the man,” or, “Wo betide the man,” &c.  And the latter affirms, that, as the preposition by is from the imperative of beon, to be, so with, (though admitted to be sometimes from withan, to join,) is often no other than this same imperative verb wyrth or worth:  if so, the three words, by, with, and worth, were originally synonymous, and should now be referred at least to one and the same class.  The dative case, or oblique object, which they governed as Saxon verbs,