f its _case_, the learned author will have us to understand to be
absolute, because the phrase _resembles an interjection!_ But the noun
"_world_" which is also absolute, and which still more resembles an
interjection, he will have to be so for a different reason--because it is
in what he chooses to call the _vocative case_. But, according to custom,
he should rather have put his interjection absolute _with_ the noun, and
written it, "_O world_," and not, "_Oh, world_." What he meant to do with
"_Oh me!_ and _Ah me!_" is doubtful. If any phrases come fairly under his
rule, these are the very ones; and yet he seems to introduce them as
exceptions! Of these, it can hardly be said, that they "_frequently_
occur." Lowth notices only the latter, which he supposes elliptical. The
former I do not remember to have met with more than three or four times;
except in grammars, which in this case are hardly to be called authorities:
"_Oh! me_, how fared it with me then?"--_Job Scott_. "_Oh me!_ all the
horse have got over the river, what shall we do?"--WALTON: _Joh. Dict._

"But when he was first seen, _oh me!_
What shrieking and what misery!"--_Wordsworth's Works_, p. 114.

OBS. 10.--When a declinable word not in the nominative absolute, follows an
interjection, as part of an imperfect exclamation, its construction (if the
phrase be good English) depends on something understood; as, "Ah
_me!_"--that is, "Ah! _pity_ me;" or, "Ah! _it grieves_ me;" or, as some
will have it, (because the expression in Latin is "_Hei mihi!_") "Ah _for_
me!"--_Ingersoll_. "Ah! _wo is to_ me."--_Lowth_. "Ah! _sorrow is to_
me."--_Coar_. So of "_oh me!_" for, in these expressions, if not generally,
_oh_ and _ah_ are exactly equivalent the one to the other. As for "_O me_"
it is now seldom met with, though Shakspeare has it a few times. From these
examples, O. B. Peirce erroneously imagines the "independent case" of the
pronoun _I_ to be _me_, and accordingly parses the word without supposing
an ellipsis; but in the plural he makes that case to be _we_, and not _us_.
So, having found an example of "Ah _Him!_" which, according to one half of
our grammarians, is bad English, he conceives the independent case of _he_
to be _him_; but in the plural, and in both numbers of the words _thou_ and
_she_, he makes it the nominative, or the same in form as the nominative.
So builds he "the temple of Grammatical consistency!"--P. 7. Nixon and
Cooper must of cour