Before quitting this subject, let me instance one example more of that which is commonly accounted ungrammatical usage, but which is really the retention of old grammar by some, where others have substituted new; I mean the constant application by our rustic population in the south, and I dare say through all parts of England, of ‘his’ to inanimate objects, and to these not personified, no less than to persons; where ‘its’ would be employed by others. This was once the manner of speech among all; for ‘its’ is a word of very recent introduction, many would be surprised to learn of how recent introduction, into the language. You will look for it in vain through the whole of our Authorized Version of the Bible; the office which it now fulfils being there accomplished, as our rustics accomplish it at the present, by ‘his’ (Gen. i. 11; Exod. xxxvii. 17; Matt. v. 15) or ‘her’ (Jon. i. 15; Rev. xxii. 2) applied as freely to inanimate things as to persons, or else by ‘thereof’ (Ps. lxv. 10) or ‘of it’ (Dan. vii. 5). Nor may Lev. xx. 5 be urged as invalidating this assertion; for reference to the exemplar edition of 1611, or indeed to any earlier editions of King James’ Bible, will show that in them the passage stood, “of _it_ own accord”{147}. ‘Its’ occurs very rarely in Shakespeare, in many of his plays it will not once be found. Milton also for the most part avoids it, and this, though in his time others freely allowed it. How soon all this was forgotten we have striking evidence in the fact that when Dryden, in one of his fault-finding moods with the great men of the preceding generation, is taking Ben Jonson to task for general inaccuracy in his English diction, among other counts of his indictment, he quotes this line from _Catiline_ “Though heaven should speak with all _his_ wrath at once”, and proceeds, “_heaven_ is ill syntax with _his_”; while in fact up to within forty or fifty years of the time when Dryden began to write, no other syntax was known; and to a much later date was exceedingly rare. Curious also, is it to note that in the earnest controversy which followed on Chatterton’s publication of the poems ascribed by him to a monk Rowlie, who should have lived in the fifteenth century, no one appealed to such lines as the following, “Life and all _its_ goods I scorn”, as at once deciding that the poems were not of the age which they pretended. Warton, who denied, though with some hesitation, the antiquity of the poems, giving many and sufficient reasons for this denial, failed to take note of this little word; while yet there needed no more than to point it out, for the disposing of the whole question; the forgery at once was betrayed. {Sidenote: _American English_}