‘chicken’{179}, which are dealt with as singulars, the singulars, like ‘riches’ (richesse){180}, ‘pease’ (pisum, pois){181}, ‘alms’, ‘eaves’{182}, which are assumed to be plurals. {Sidenote: _The Genitival Inflexion ‘-s’_} There is one example of this, familiar to us all; probably so familiar that it would not be worth while adverting to it, if it did not illustrate, as no other word could, this forgetfulness which may overtake a whole people, of the true meaning of a grammatical form which they have never ceased to employ. I refer to the mistaken assumption that the ‘s’ of the genitive, as ‘the king’s countenance’, was merely a more rapid way of pronouncing ‘the king _his_ countenance’, and that the final ‘s’ in ‘king’s’ was in fact an elided ‘his’. This explanation for a long time prevailed almost universally; I believe there are many who accept it still. It was in vain that here and there a deeper knower of our tongue protested against this “monstrous syntax”, as Ben Jonson in his _Grammar_ justly calls it{183}. It was in vain that Wallis, another English scholar of the seventeenth century, pointed out in _his_ Grammar that the slightest examination of the facts revealed the untenable character of this explanation, seeing that we do not merely say “the _king’s_ countenance”, but “the _queen’s_ countenance”; and in this case the final ‘s’ cannot stand for ‘his’, for “the queen _his_ countenance” cannot be intended{184}; we do not say merely “the _child’s_ bread”, but “the _children’s_ bread”, where it is no less impossible to resolve the phrase into “the children _his_ bread”{185}. Despite of these protests the error held its ground. This much indeed of a plea it could make for itself, that such an actual employment of ‘his’ _had_ found its way into the language, as early as the fourteenth century, and had been in occasional, though rare use, from that time downward{186}. Yet this, which has only been elicited by the researches of recent scholars, does not in the least justify those who assumed that in the habitual ‘s’ of the genitive were to be found the remains of ‘his’--an error from which the books of scholars in the seventeenth, and in the early decades of the eighteenth, century are not a whit clearer than those of others. Spenser, Donne, Fuller, Jeremy Taylor, all fall into it; I cannot say confidently whether Milton does. Dryden more than once helps out his verse with an additional syllable gained by its aid. It has even forced its way into our Prayer Book itself, where in the “Prayer for all sorts and conditions of men”, added by Bishop Sanderson at the last revision of the Liturgy in 1661, we are bidden to say, “And this we beg for Jesus Christ _his_ sake”{187}. I need hardly tell you that this ‘s’ is in fact the one remnant of flexion surviving in the singular number of our English noun substantives; it is in all the Indo-Germanic languages the original sign of the genitive, or at any rate the earliest of which we