y, are
repeated and expounded by Latham, in his Hand-Book, Sec.481; but would
probably say, "Madam, _what do you mean_ by holding up your train?" It was
folly for the doctor to ask _an other person_, as if an other could _guess_
her meaning better than he. The text with the possessive is therefore not
to be corrected by inserting a hyphen and an _of_, after Murray's doctrine
before cited; as, "What is the meaning of this _lady's holding-up of_ her
train?" Murray did well to reject this example, but as a specimen of
English, his own is no better. The question which he asks, ought to have
been, "_Why did this person dismiss_ his servant so hastily?" Fisk has it
in the following form: "What is the reason of this _person's dismissing his
servant_ so hastily?"--_English Grammar Simplified_, p. 108. This amender
of grammars omits the _of_ which Murray and others scrupulously insert to
govern the noun _servant_, and boldly avows at once, what their rule
implies, that, "Participles are sometimes used both as verbs and as nouns
at the same time; as, 'By the _mind's changing the object_,' &c."--_Ib._,
p. 134; so _Emmons's Gram._, p. 64. But he errs as much as they, and
contradicts both himself and them. For one ought rather to say, "By the
_mind's changing of_ the object;" else _changing_, which "does the office
of a noun," has not truly "a correspondent regimen." Yet _of_ is useless
after _dismissing_, unless we take away the _adverb_ by which the
participle is prevented from becoming a noun. "Dismissing _of_ his servant
so _hastily_," is in itself an ungrammatical phrase; and nothing but to
omit either the preposition, or the two adverbs, can possibly make it
right. Without the latter, it may follow the possessive; but without the
former, our most approved grammars say it cannot. Some critics, however,
object to the _of_, because _the dismissing_ is not _the servant's_ act;
but this, as I shall hereafter show, is no valid objection: they stickle
for a false rule.

OBS. 15.--Thus these authors, differing from one an other as they do, and
each contradicting himself and some of the rest, are, as it would seem, all
wrong in respect to the whole matter at issue. For whether the phrase in
question be like Priestley's, or like Murray's, or like Fisk's, it is
still, according to the best authorities, unfit to govern the possessive
case; because, in stead of being a substantive, it is something more than a
participle, and yet they take i