ine, thine, hers, ours, yours, theirs_, usually
denote possession, or the relation of property, with an _ellipsis_ of the
name of the thing possessed; as, "My sword and _yours_ are
kin."--_Shakspeare_. Here _yours_ means _your sword_. "You may imagine what
kind of faith _theirs_ was."--_Bacon_. Here _theirs_ means _their faith_.
"He ran headlong into his own ruin whilst he endeavoured to precipitate
_ours_."--_Bolingbroke_. Here _ours_ means _our ruin_. "Every one that
heareth these saying of _mine_."--_Matt._, vii, 26. Here _mine_ means _my
sayings_. "Sing unto the Lord, O ye saints of _his_."--_Psalms_, xxx, 4.
Here _his_ means _his saints_. The noun which governs the possessive, is
here _understood_ after it, being inferred from that which precedes, as it
is in all the foregoing instances. "And the man of _thine_, whom I shall
not cut off from _mine_ altar, shall be to consume _thine_ eyes, and to
grieve _thine_ heart."--_1 Samuel_, ii, 33. Here _thine_, in the first
phrase, means _thy men_; but, in the subsequent parts of the sentence, both
_mine and thine_ mean neither more nor less than _thy_ and _my_, because
there is no ellipsis. _Of_ before the possessive case, governs the noun
which is understood after this case; and is always taken in a _partitive_
sense, and not as the sign of the possessive relation: as, "When we say, 'a
soldier _of the king's_', we mean, '_one of_ the king's
_soldiers_.'"--_Webster's Improved Gram._, p. 29. There is therefore an
ellipsis of the word _soldiers_, in the former phrase. So, in the following
example, _mine_ is used elliptically for _my feet_; or rather, _feet_ is
understood after _mine_, though _mine feet_ is no longer good English, for
reasons before stated:--

"Ere I absolve thee, stoop I that on thy neck
Levelled with earth tins _foot of mine_ may tread."--_Wordsworth_.

OBS. 5.--Respecting the _possessive case_ of the simple personal pronouns,
there appears among our grammarians a strange diversity of sentiment. Yet
is there but one view of the matter, that has in it either truth or reason,
consistency or plausibility. And, in the opinion of any judicious teacher,
an erroneous classification of words so common and so important as these,
may well go far to condemn any system of grammar in which it is found. A
pronoun agrees in person, number, and gender, with the noun _for which it
is a substitute_; and, if it is in the possessive case, it is usually
governed by _an o