e life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear.--SHELLEY.

Most excellent stranger, as you come to the lakes simply to see
their loveliness, _might_ it not _be_ as well to ask after the
most beautiful road, rather than the shortest?--DE QUINCEY.

Subjunctive in Dependent Clauses.

I. Condition or Supposition.

221. The most common way of representing the action or being as
merely thought of, is by putting it into the form of a _supposition_
or _condition_; as,--

Now, if the fire of electricity and that of lightning _be_ the
same, this pasteboard and these scales may represent electrified
clouds.--FRANKLIN.

Here no assertion is made that the two things _are_ the same; but, if
the reader merely _conceives_ them for the moment to be the same, the
writer can make the statement following. Again,--

If it _be_ Sunday [supposing it to be Sunday], the peasants sit
on the church steps and con their psalm books.--LONGFELLOW.

STUDY OF CONDITIONAL SENTENCES.

222. There are three kinds of conditional sentences:--

[Sidenote: _Real or true._]

(1) Those in which an assumed or admitted fact is placed before the
mind in the form of a condition (see Sec. 215, 2); for example,--

If they _were_ unacquainted with the works of philosophers and
poets, they were deeply read in the oracles of God. If their
names _were not found_ in the registers of heralds, they were
recorded in the Book of Life.--MACAULAY.

[Sidenote: _Ideal,--may or may not be true._]

(2) Those in which the condition depends on something uncertain, and
_may or may not be regarded true, or be fulfilled_; as,--

If, in our case, the representative system ultimately _fail_,
popular government must be pronounced impossible.--D. WEBSTER.

If this _be_ the glory of Julius, the first great founder of the
Empire, so it is also the glory of Charlemagne, the second
founder.--BRYCE.

If any man _consider_ the present aspects of what is called by
distinction society, he will see the need of these ethics.
--EMERSON.

[Sidenote: _Unreal--cannot be true._]

(3) Suppositions _contrary to fact_, which cannot be true, or
conditions that cannot be fulfilled, but are presented only in order
to suggest what _might be_ or _might have been_ true; thus,--

If these things _were_ true, society could not hold together.
--LOWELL.

_D