“Tell who loves who; what favours some partake,
And who is jilted for another’s sake.”
Dryden, Juvenal, Sat. vi.
“Those, who he thought true to his party.” Clarendon, Hist. Vol. I. p. 667. 8ᵛᵒ. “Who should I meet the other night, but my old friend?” Spect. Nᵒ 32. “Who should I see in the lid of it, but the Doctor?” Addison, Spect. Nᵒ 57. “He knows, who it is proper to expose foremost.” Swift, Tale of a Tub, Conclusion. It ought in all these places to be whom.
[45] “And restores to his Island that tranquillity and repose, to which they had been strangers during his absence.” Pope, Dissertation prefixed to the Odyssey. Island is not a Noun of Multitude: it ought to be, his people; or, it had been a stranger. “What reason have the Church of Rome to talk of modesty in this case?” Tillotson, Vol. I. Serm. 49. “All the virtues of mankind are to be counted upon a few fingers, but his follies and vices are innumerable.” Swift, Preface to Tale of a Tub. Is not mankind in this place a Noun of Multitude, and such as requires the Pronoun refering to it to be in the Plural Number, their?
[46] “Whom do men say, that I am?⸺But whom say ye, that I am?” Matt. xvi. 13, 15. So likewise Mark viii. 27, 29. Luke ix. 18, 20. “Whom think ye, that I am?” Acts xiii. 25. It ought in all these places to be who; which is not governed by the Verb say or think, but by the Verb am: or agrees in Case with the Pronoun I. If the Verb were in the Infinitive Mode, it would require the Objective Case of the Relative, agreeing with the Pronoun me: “Whom think ye, or do ye think, me to be?”
⸺“To that, which once was thee.”
Prior.
It ought to be, which was thou; or, which thou wast.
[47] On which place says Dr. Bentley, “The Context demands that it be,⸺Him descending, Illo descendente.” But him is not the Ablative Case, for the English knows no such Case; nor does him without a Preposition on any occasion answer to the Latin Ablative illo. I might with better reason contend, that it ought to be “his descending,” because it is in Greek αυτου καταβαινοντος in the Genitive; and it would be as good Grammar, and as proper English. This comes of forcing the English under the rules of a foreign Language, with which it has little concern: and this ugly and deformed fault, to use his own expression, Bentley has endeavoured to impose upon Milton in several places: see P. L. vii. 15. ix. 829, 883, 1147. x. 267, 1001. On the other hand, where Milton has been really guilty of this fault, he, very inconsistently with himself, corrects him, and sets him right. His Latin Grammar Rules were happily out of his head, and by a kind of vernacular instinct (so, I imagine, he would call it) he perceived that his Author was wrong.