"The

which tide appears in the sense of season : grund's no in tid," i. e., The ground is not in season, not ready at the proper time for the earing.

The use of tide in its sense of hour, the hour, led naturally to a use of hour for tide. Among the examples that might be cited of this conversion, there is a passage in "Macbeth" which has long been a puzzle to readers and commentators, and upon which, in my own edition of Shakespeare, I have only given some not very relevant comments by the Rev. Mr. Hunter. Macbeth says (Act i. scene 3).

"Time and the hour runs through the roughest day."

As an hour is but a measured lapse of time, there has been much discussion as to why Shakespeare should have written "time and the hour," and many passages have been quoted from Shakespeare and other poets by the commentators, in which time and hour are found in close relation; but they are all, as such quotations are apt to be, quite from the purpose.

"Time and the hour" in this passage is merely an equivalent of time and tide the time and tide that wait for no man. Macbeth's brave but unsteadfast soul is shaken to its loose foundations by the prophecies of the witches, and the speedy fulfilment of the first of them. His ambition fires like tinder at the touch of temptation, and his quick imagination sets before him the bloody path by which he is to reach the last and highest prize, the promised throne. But his good instincts—for he has instincts, not purposes -revolt at the hideous prospect, and his whole nature is in a tumult of conflicting emotion. The soul

of the man that would not play false, and yet would wrongly win, is laid open at a stroke to us in this first sight we have of him. After shying at the ugly thing, from which, however, he does not bolt, at last he says, cheating himself with the thought that he will wait on Providence,

"If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me Without my stir."

And then he helps himself out of his tribulation, as men often do, with an old saw, and says it will all come right in the end. Looking into the black, turbulent future, which would be all bright and clear if he would give up his bad ambition, he neither turns back nor goes forward, but says,

"Come what come may,

Time and the hour runs through the roughest day." That is, time and opportunity, time and tide, run through the roughest day; the day most thickly bestead with trouble is long enough, and has occasions enough for the service and the safety of a ready, quick-witted man. But for the rhythm, Shakespeare would probably have written, Time and tide run through the roughest day; but as the adage in that form was not well suited to his verse, he used the equivalent phrase, time and the hour (not time and an hour, or time and the hours); and the appearance of the singular verb in this line, I am inclined to regard as due to the poet's own pen, not as accidental.

Tw

FORMATION OF PRONOUNS.

WO correspondents have laid before me the great need which they have discovered of a new pronoun in English, and both have suggested the same means of supplying the deficiency, which is, in the words of the first, "the use of en, or some more euphonious substitute, as a personal pronoun, common gender." "A deficiency exists there," he glibly continues, "and we should fill it.” My other correspondent has a somewhat juster notion of the magnitude of his proposition, or, as I should rather say, of its enormity. But, still, he insists that a new pronoun is "universally needed,” and as an example of the inconvenience caused by the want, he gives the following sentence:

"If a person wishes to sleep, they mustn't eat cheese for supper."

"Of course, he goes on to say, that is incorrect;

yet almost every one would say they." (This I venture to doubt.) "Few would say in common conversation, 'If a person wishes to sleep, he or she mustn't eat cheese for supper.' It is too much

trouble. We must have a word to take the place of he or she, his or hers, him or her, etc.

As the French make the little word en answer a great many purposes, suppose we take the same word, give it an English pronunciation (or any other word), and make it answer for any and every case of that kind, and thus tend to simplify the language."

To all this there are two sufficient replies. First, the thing can't be done; last, it is not at all necessary or desirable that it should be done. And to consider the last point first. There is no such dilemma as the one in question. A speaker of common sense and common mastery of English would say, "If a man wishes to sleep, he must not eat cheese at supper,' "* where man, as in the word mankind, is used in a general sense for the species. Any objection to this use of man, and of the relative pronoun, is for the consideration of the next Woman's Rights Convention, at which I hope it may be discussed with all the gravity beseeming its momentous significance. But as a slight contribution to the amenities of the occasion, I venture to suggest that to free the language from the oppression of the sex and from the outrage to its dignity, which have for centuries lurked in this use of man and he, it is not necessary to say, "If a person wishes to sleep, en mustn't eat cheese for supper," but merely, as the speakers of the best English now say, and have said for generations, "If one wishes to sleep, one mustn't, etc." One, thus used, is a

* Unless we mean that the supper consisted entirely or chiefly of cheese, we should not say cheese for supper, but cheese at supper.

good pronoun, of healthy, well-rooted growth. And we have in some another word which supplies all our need in this respect without our going to the French for their over-worked en; e. g., Voici des bonnes fraises. Voulez-vous en avoir? These are fine strawberries. Will you have some? Thus used, some is to all intents and purposes a pronoun which leaves nothing to be desired. With he, she, it, and we, and one, and some, we have no need of en or any other outlandish pronoun.

Or we should have had one long ere this. For the service to which the proposed pronoun would be put, if it were adopted, is not new. The need is one which, if it exists at all, must have been felt five hundred years ago as much as it can be now. At that period, and long before, a noun in the third person singular was represented, according to its gender, by the pronouns he, she, or it, and there was no pronoun of common gender to take place of all of them. In the matter of language, popular need is inexorable, and popular ingenuity inexhaustible; and it is not in the nature of things that, if the imagined need had existed, it should not have been supplied during the formative stages of our language, particularly at the Elizabethan period, to which we owe the pronoun its. The introduction of this word, although it is merely the possessive form of it, was a work of so much time and difficulty, that an acquaintance with the struggle would alone deter a considerate man from attempting to make a new pronoun. Although, as I have said, it is the mere possessive case of a word which had been on the lips of all men of Anglo-Saxon blood