maidens white-veiled and rose-wreathed, paced demurely, swinging silver censers to and fro.–Corelli.
Swift's view of human nature, is too black to admit of any hopes of their millennium.–L. Stephen.
Loveliness, maidens, view, the strict subjects, have adjectival phrases attached after them. The temptation to insert the comma is comprehensible, but slight, and should have been resisted.
In the three that come next, the considerable length of the subject, it must be admitted, makes a comma comforting; it gives us a sort of assurance that we have kept our hold on the sentence. It is illogical, however, and, owing to the importance of not dividing subject from verb, unpleasantly illogical. In each case the comfort would be equally effective if it were legitimized by the insertion of a comma before as well as after the clause or phrase at the end of which the present comma stands. The extra commas would be after earth, victims, Schleiden.
To see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth when such as her die, makes me think God did never intend life for a blessing.–Swift.
An order of the day expressing sympathy with the families of the victims and confidence in the Government, was adopted.–Times.
The famous researches of Schwann and Schleiden in 1837 and the following years, founded the modern science of histology.–Huxley.
It may be said that it is 'fudging' to find an excuse, as we have proposed to do, for a stop that we mean really to do something different from its ostensible work. But the answer is that with few tools and many tasks to do much fudging is in fact necessary.
A special form of this, in protest against which we shall give five examples, each from a different well-known author, is when the subject includes and ends with a defining relative clause, after which an illogical comma is placed. As the relative clause is of the defining kind (a phrase that has been explained[1]), it is practically impossible to fudge in these
- ↑ See chapter Syntax, section Relatives.
