Dealer, Act ii. Sc. 1, Lady Froth complains that Mellefont wants " something of his own that should look a little je-ne-scay-quoyish" Church of England too having been often used as an epithet — South for instance talks of the Church-of-England royalists (I. p. 276), the Church-of-England clergy (i. 347)5 — Mr Bentham — for even he could not devise words which were utterly repugnant to all analogy—publisht a volume on what he called Church-of-Englandism.
The very same blindness to the meaning of a flexional termination, and the same notion that the s of the genitive ought to stand immediately before the noun by which it is governed, led us further, when two distinct nouns connected by a conjunction depend upon the same noun, to affix it only to the latter. The earliest instance I have remarkt of this usage is in the Morte d'Archur, B. i. ch. 13 : "by kyng Ban and Bors counceill they let brenne and de- stroye all the contrey afore them:" but to be sure these two kings are mostly spoken of as if they had but one soul, and hardly more than one tongue, between them. Chaucer indeed in his Jack Upland says, " And why clepest thou the rather of S. Francis or S. Dominiks rule or religion or order, than of Christes rule or order?"' This passage however settles nothing : for with Chaucer the genitive of nouns in s does not change ; and a little before we find S. Francis rule. A translation of Dares and Dlctys's Trojan war in verse was publisht in 1555. In the old ballad of the Taming of the Shrew (publisht in Utterson's Early Popular Poetry, p. 185), we read "How the bryde was maryed with her father and mothers good will." To refer to the instances cited by G. C. L., nobody would say he had been at Rundell's and Bridge's; nobody would talk about Beaumont's and Fletcher's plays. The same idiom may perhaps be found in Germany. The example quoted by G. C. L. however does not altogether prove that it is: for Ersch is a name which the Germans never decline when they can help it: just as when they quote any work by Thiersch, his name is usually left standing without any modification. The ordinary practice, at least in books, when two names are coupled in this way, is to put them both in the genitive. W. Schlegel in his Dramatic Lectures speaks of Beaumonts und Fletchers Werke. Ritter
