The first illustration, given above, is from a ballad called “Billy Taylor,” popular in my young days, in which Billy’s true love—with the reluctance to part from him common to persons suffering from that passion—disguises herself as a man before the mast, and shares the dangers of the sea with her sailor-lover:
| “Ven as the Captain comed for to hear on’t, Wery much applauded vot she’d done.” |
The verb “applauded” has here no nominative case, whereas it ought to have been governed by the pronoun “he.” “He very much applauded,” etc., says the writer of the “Comic Grammar” for our instruction. The second example, given above, seems to me capital fooling, and an excellent proof of the necessity for care in punctuation and accent.
“Imagine,” says the writer, “an actor commencing Hamlet’s famous soliloquy thus:
“‘To be or not to be; that is. The question,’ etc.
Or saying, in the person of Duncan in ‘Macbeth’:
“‘This castle hath a pleasant seat, the air.’
Or, as the usurper himself, exclaiming: