Two reasons may be given for the use of the marks in No. 4, while one reason is sufficient for their absence in No. 3. “Our Boatman” is the title of the painting, and is treated as a quotation, and therefore requires the quotation-marks. Secondly, the words “Our Boatman” are not used in their literal sense as descriptive of a man who acts as our boatman,—that is, the picture is not a photograph of John Smith, our boatman, but is an idealization of a man of his class. To give the words other than a literal meaning, the marks are used.
In No. 3 the language is taken in its literal meaning, and even may be that of the editor of the magazine, thus requiring no marks. Probably no painter would put upon his canvas “A Portrait of John Smith.”
5. “Justice,” said Webster, “is the great interest of man on earth”; and Mr. Root laid it down as a rule, when Secretary of State, that we should not only observe justice in our relations, but that we should be just.
6. Professor John Finley, in “The French in the Heart of America,” insists, with pardonable enthusiasm, that we got our finest democratic ideals from the French settlers in the Mississippi Valley, and that here was nourished
a national democracy founded on the equalities, the freedoms, and the fraternities of the frontier so vital, so powerful, that it became the dominant nationalistic force in a continent-wide republic.
CHAPTER XII
BRACKETS AND PARENTHESES
The principal use of brackets is to show that a bracketed word or group of words in a quotation is inserted by the writer using the quoted language, and not by the author of such language. Parentheses, on the other hand, are used by a writer, as we have already seen, to enclose a parenthetical word or group of words in his own language.
Some examples that furnish apparent exceptions to these general statements considered as rules, may serve to emphasize the principle of this punctuation.