“You were the quarrel,” says Petulant in “The Way of the World.” Millamant answers, “Me!” For the reason just given it should be “I.”
“Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.” As the relative refers to persons, it should be who.
“Nor is mankind so much to blame, in his choice thus determining him.”—Swift. Mankind is a collective noun, and is uniformly considered as plural; his, therefore, is a gross solecism.
“By this institution, each legion, to whom a certain portion of auxiliaries was allotted, contained within itself every species of lighter troops, and of missile weapons.”—Gibbon. It ought to be, to which—the pronoun itself, which follows, referring to a noun of the neuter gender. To whom and itself cannot each agree with one common antecedent.
“The seeming importance given to every part of female dress, each of which is committed to the care of a different sylph.”—Essay on the Writings of Pope. This sentence is ungrammatical. Each implying “one of two,” or “every one singly of more than two,” requires the correlative to be considered as plural; yet the antecedent part, to which it refers, is singular. It should be “all parts of female dress.”
“To be sold, the stock of Mr. Smith, left off business.” This is an ungrammatical and very offensive vulgarism. The verb left off, as Baker observes, has no subject, to which it can grammatically belong. It should be, “who has left off,” or “leaving off business” “A. B. lieutenant, vice C. D. resigned.” Here is a similar error. Is C. D. resigned? or is it the office which has been resigned? An excessive love of brevity gives occasion to such solecisms.
“He was ignorant, the profane historian, of the testimony which he is compelled to give.”—Gibbon’s Decline of the Roman Empire.
“The youth and inexperience of the prince, he was only fifteen years of age, declined a perilous encounter.”—Ib.
In the former sentence the historian appears neither as the nominative, nor the regimen to any verb. If it be intended to agree with he by apposition, it should have immediately followed the pronoun. If it be designed emphatically, and ironically, to mark the character of the historian, it should have been thrown into the form of a parenthetic exclamation. In the latter sentence a phraseology occurs, which, notwithstanding its frequency in Gibbon, is extremely awkward and inelegant. The fault may be corrected either by throwing the age of the prince into a parenthesis, or, preferably, by the substitution of who for he.
“Fare thee well” is a phraseology which, though sanctioned by the authority of a celebrated poet, and also by other writers, involves a solecism. The verb is intransitive, and its imperative is fare thou. No one would say, “I fare me well,” “we fare us well.”