sixteenth century writings could be multiplied, and that it was then a rather favourite competitor in certain districts with his, her, of it, thereof, etc., for the place of the possessive neuter of the third personal pronoun. In the Lancashire dialect the idiom still lasts, "it mother" still passing there for "its mother." (4) But a possessive in t was an anomaly; and so there sprang up a fourth device. As it was a stray and seemingly kinless word, why not subject it to the common rule, and form a possessive for it by the ordinary plan of clapping on an s? As they said "Kit's hat," or "Bet's bonnet," why not say of the hat "it's band," or of the bonnet "it's ribbon"? The only impediment seemed to be that colloquially the form it's was in use for it is, as in the phrase "it's true." But then that could be got rid of by pronouncing and writing the contraction for it is in another way, 'tis, so as to leave it's free for the new purpose. Accordingly we find it's as a possessive creeping into use late in the sixteenth century. Where, or by whom, it was first used will perhaps never be known. I should not wonder if the form was of northern origin, s being a favourite inflectional factotum in northern parts, and the form it having been adopted there for book-use, though hit was vernacular. The oldest instances of it's quoted by Mr. Aldis Wright are from Florio's Worlde of Wordes (1598), and the same writer's Montaigne (1603); but, as instances are frequent there—" for it's owne sake," "science had it's of-spring," "doe it's best," "it's name," etc.—it seems likely that Florio only confirmed a previous custom. At all events, the mongrel had been born in Florio's time, and had begun a career more remarkable than has fallen to the chance of perhaps any other word in the English language.

The career, as we now know, was to end in absolute victory. Its has become the established neuter possessive of the third personal pronoun in English; it is so habitual a word with us that it is almost sure to occur once or twice in any few continuous sentences; we are puzzled to think how it could ever have been opposed, or how people could have got on without it. And yet it was opposed; it had to fight its way, and beat its competitors by long effort and trial; and it was not till late in the seventeenth century that the victory was finally won. The further history of the word as far as 1674, the date of Milton's death, is all that concerns us here.

In our authorised version of the Bible (1611) the word its does not once occur. In one passage in our modern copies, indeed (Levit. xxv. 5), we read "That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap"; but this is a printer's substitution for the text of the original edition, "That which groweth of it owne accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reape." While in this passage the authorised version uses that now obsolete possessive form it

which we have marked as the third method in our historical enumeration, the prevailing methods there are the first and second. Evasion by "of it," "thereof," etc., is common enough; but, where the evasion is not resorted to, the true old form his, without recourse to the alternative her, is the rule. Whether this was from a cognisance of the fact that his was the true old neuter form, as well as the masculine, it might be difficult to determine. The example already given from Numbers iv. 9-"the candlestick of the light, and his lamps, and his tongs, and his snuffdishes, and all the oil vessels thereof, wherewith they minister unto it"-rather suggests that it was; and so do Gen. i. 11, “The fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself," and the phrase, Luke xiv. 34, "If the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be seasoned?" In any case, the utter omission of the word its from the authorised version, though that word was already in existence in London, seems to prove that it was not considered sufficiently respectable for an elevated purpose.

Nevertheless, the word was pushing itself into use at that time colloquially, and in popular, and especially dramatic, literature. Shakespeare's practice with respect to it may be taken as significant of what was going on around him. Mr. Aldis Wright finds the possessive form it in the First Folio exactly fifteen times, and the form its exactly ten times; and he quotes (Bible Word-Book) all the instances of each. Shakespeare, he proves, accepted its as a word that might be used occasionally, and that sometimes recommended itself by a necessity or a kind of emphatic fitness. Overwhelmingly predominant, however, in his text is the continued use of his where we should now employ its. Hardly a page or two of any good edition, when carefully read, but will furnish an example. Thus :

"When yond same star that's westward from the pole
Had made his course to illume that part of heaven
Where now it shines."-Hamlet, I. 1.

"Give thy thoughts no tongue,

Nor any unproportioned thought his act.”—Ibid. I. 3. "The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,

Though to itself it only live and die;

But, if that flower with base infection meet,

The basest weed outbraves his dignity."-Sonnet xciv.

"Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind;
And that which governs me to go about
Doth part his function and is partly blind,
Seems seeing, but effectually is out;

For it no form delivers to the heart

Of bird, of flower, or shape, which it doth latch :

Of his quick objects hath the mind no part,

Nor his own vision holds what it doth catch."-Sonnet cxiii. "Since nature cannot choose his origin."—Hamlet, I. 4.

There are also instances in Shakespeare of her where we should now use its, though these are rarer, and in some of them one may detect a tinge of that personifying mode of thought which might suggest her now in similar cases: e.g.—

"Let virtue be as wax,

And melt in her own fire."—Hamlet, III. 4.
"For holy offices I have a time; a time
To think upon the part of business which

I bear i' the state; and nature does require

Her times of preservation."-Henry VIII., III. 2.

Some instances of its have been produced, I believe, from Bacon; and it has been found in Sylvester's Du Bartas (1605), and not unfrequently in Ben Jonson, and the dramatists and other popular writers of the reigns of James and Charles I. I have myself come upon it easily enough in the prose and verse of Drummond of Hawthornden between 1616 and 1630, sometimes in cases where a contemporary southern writer would pretty surely have used his; I have, on the whole, an impression that the northern writers and speakers of that time used it more frequently than the southern ; but, as I have found it in the title of a London book of 1651 in so emphatic a form as this, "England's Deliverance from the Northern Presbyter compared with itt's deliverance from the Roman Papacy," and as I have also found it apparently quite at home in Sir Henry Vane's mystical treatise "The Retired Man's Meditations," published in 1655, and in other writings of that date, I cannot doubt that the word was quite an acceptable one in London in the middle of the seventeenth century.

The exact position of the word in England in the beginning of Charles's reign is perhaps best indicated in Butler's English Grammar of 1633. There it distinctly figures as a recognised word; for Butler, in his table of the Possessives of the three Personal Pronouns, at p. 40, gives them, in due form, thus :-(1) Sing. MY, Plur. OUR ; (2) Sing. THY, Plur. YOUR; (3) Sing. HIS, HER, ITS, Plur. THEIR. Yet the reader is staggered by Butler's own practice in the pages of this very Grammar. Thus, speaking of the letter W, he writes, "W hath taken his name, not of his force, as other letters, but of his shape, which consisteth of two U's." Again he writes, "A vowel hath a perfect sound, without the help of another letter: and therefore his only force or sound is his name." So one of his sections is headed "Of a Verb: 1, Of His Cases and other Accidents." I have indeed met in his Grammar the phrase "What an eas and certainti it woolde bee, both to the readers and writers, that every letter were content with its own sound"; and there may be other such examples: but certainly his came more naturally to him

than its.

What of Milton? By diligent search one may come, here and there, on an its in his prose-writings; but that even in his prose he disliked and avoided the form seems proved by such passages as the following in his Elementary Latin Grammar entitled Accedence Commenc't Grammar (published in 1669, though doubtless written long before):-"The Superlative exceedeth his Positive in the highest degree, as durissimus, hardest; and it is formed of the first case "of his Positive that ends in is, by putting thereto simus"; "There "be three Concords or Agreements: The first is of the Adjective "with his Substantive; The Second is of the Verb with his Nomina"tive Case; The Third is of the Relative with his Antecedent." Here, it will be observed, Milton exactly conforms to Butler in 1633, or is even more resolute for the use of his as a true neuter possessive than Butler had been. Let us pass, however, from Milton's prose to his poetry.

In Milton's poetry, I believe, it has been definitely ascertained, he uses the word its only three times, viz. Od. Nat. 106, Par. Lost, I. 254, and Par. Lost, IV. 813. Here are those three memorable passages:

"Nature that heard such sound

Beneath the hollow round

Of Cynthia's seat, the Airy region thrilling,

Now was almost won

To think her part was don,

And that her raign had here its last fulfilling ;

She knew such harmony alone

Could hold all Heav'n and Earth in happier union.”—Od. Nat. 101-108.

"Hail horrours, hail

Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell

Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings

A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.

The mind is its own place, and in it self

Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."-Par. Lost, I. 250—255.

"Him thus intent Ithuriel with his Spear

Touch'd lightly; for no falshood can endure
Touch of Celestial temper, but returns

Of force to its own likeness: up he starts

Discoverd and surpriz’d.”—Par. Lost, IV. 810-814.

Three times, therefore, in his whole life did Milton use the word its in his poetry,-once about Christmas-day 1629, when he was one-and-twenty years of age; and twice between 1658 and 1665, when he was between his fiftieth year and his fifty-seventh. If the passages are studied, it will be seen that there was a certain necessity for using its in each case. Her in the first passage would have been ambiguous between "Nature" and "reign"; and, though his might have passed, hardly well. In the second passage his would have been ambiguous between the speaker, Satan, and "mind"; and,

though her might have passed, it would have been with a loss of the emphasis implied in its. In the third passage, his would again have been ambiguous between the person, Satan, and the abstract noun "falsehood"; and, though her might have passed, it would have personified "falsehood" rather incongruously with the occasion,which is Satan's return to his own shape, not a feminine one, at the touch of Ithuriel's spear.-The only wonder is that a similar stress of meaning and context did not oblige Milton to write or dictate its much more frequently.

How does he get on without it? Marvellously well. In the first place, the very idea or peculiar mental turn or act involved in the word its or its equivalents (of it, thereof, etc.) was somehow far rarer in the writing of Milton's time than it is in writing now. Mr. Craik's remark on this subject is both true and acute. "The most curious thing of all in the history of the word its," he says, "is the extent to which, before its recognition as a word admissible in serious composition, even the occasion for its employment was avoided or eluded. This is very remarkable in Shakespeare. The very conception which we express by its probably does not occur once in his works for ten times that it is to be found in any modern writer. So that we may say the invention, or adoption, of this form has changed not only our English style, but even our manner of thinking." What Mr. Craik here says of Shakespeare is true of Milton. Perhaps it is even truer of Milton. That he was much more chary of the use of the word its than Shakespeare had been appears from the fact that, though Shakespeare had used the word ten times before 1616, Milton in his literary life, stretching from 1625 to 1674, used it in his poetry but three times. But even of the substitutes or equivalents he is charier than Shakespeare. The odd possessive form it, found in Shakespeare fifteen times, is not found in Milton's poetry once. The word thereof, if Todd's verbal index is to be trusted, occurs but seven times, all in Paradise Lost. In not one of these occurrences, however, does the word stand for our possessive its, but only for "of it" in a different sense from its ; and indeed six of them are mere quotations of the Scripture text, "In the day that thou eatest thereof." In short, for the expression of our conception its in a single word, when he did want to express it, Milton confined himself, even more strictly than Shakespeare, to the alternative of his or her.

On the whole, her seems to have been Milton's favourite. Here are a few examples :

VOL. III

"His form had not yet lost

All her Original brightness.”—P. L., I. 592.

"Th' ascending pile

Stood fixt her stately highth."—P. L., I. 723.

F