P. 22 (5). Hume here accents difficultie on the antepenultimate instead of the first syllable.
P. 23 (7). He puts down outrage as an instance of two distinct words joined by a hyphen, which is the derivation given by Ash in his dictionary, in strange obliviousness of the French word _outrage_.
P. 27 (1, 6). _T_ is omitted after _s_ in the second person singular of the verb, and so no distinction is made between the second and the third persons; thus, thou wrytes, and at p. 32 thou was, and thou hes.
P. 29 (7). The supposition that the apostrophe ’s as a mark of the possessive case is a segment of his, a question which has been lately revived, is here denied.
P. 34. In this last chapter on Punctuation, which the author styles “of Distinctiones,” no mention whatever is made of the “semicolon,” though it occurs frequently in the MS., as, for instance, p. 30, cap. 6. This stop, according to Herbert, was first used by Richard Grafton in _The Byble_ printed in 1537: it occurs in the Dedication. Henry Denham, an English printer who flourished towards the close of the sixteenth century, was the first to use it with propriety.
P. 34 (6). The explanation of the mode of pronouncing the comma “with a short _sob_” is odd.[5]
[Footnote 5: It will be here as well to mention that as the punctuation in the MS. is extremely unsystematic, it has been dispensed with whenever the meaning was confused by it.]
The author continually uses a singular verb to a plural noun; for instance, “of this we, as the latines, hes almost no use” (p. 22), though on p. 20 he writes, “in our tongue we have some particles.”
With regard to the Manuscript, there are two corrections in it worth noting. At p. 10 (6), in the phrase, “the auctours _whole_ drift,” the word had been originally written _hael_, but is marked through, and _whole_ substituted for it in the same handwriting. At p. 21 (4), the word _frensh_ has been inserted before _exemples_, but has been afterwards struck through.
The numbering is wrong in three places, but it has not been corrected. At p. 8 there are no sections 12 and 13, at pp. 17, 19, there are two cap. 7, and at p. 19 there are two sections 4.
[The words in the present Tract that really required to be glossed are but few; I have, however, inserted in the following list most of the variations from ordinary modern usage, in order that it may serve as an Index.]