derived from it more than they are in English. My, me, we, our, us are not inflections of I; but no more are meus, mihi, me, nos, nostrum, nobis inflections of ego. The oblique cases of pronouns are furnished by other parts of speech, or by other pronouns, from which they are taken bodily or composed in the early and, generally, unwritten stages of a language. Between the pronoun and the article, in all tongues, there is a very close relation. It is in allusion to this fact that Sir Hugh Evans, putting William Page to school ("Merry Wives of Windsor," act iv., scene i), and endeavoring to trip the lad—though he learned the trick of William Lilly—asks: "What is he, William, that doth lend articles?" But the boy is too quick for him, and replies: "Articles are borrowed of the pronoun, and be thus declined: singulariter, nominativo, hie, hœc, hoc."
A marked instance of this relationship between the pronoun and the article, and an instructive example of the manner in which pronouns come into a language, is our English she, which is borrowed from the Anglo-Saxon definite article se, the feminine form of which was seó; and this definite article itself originally was or was used as a demonstrative pronoun, corresponding to who, that. For se is a softened form of the older the; and Ic the, he the are Anglo-Saxon for I who, he who. The Anglo-Saxon for she was heó; the masculine being as in English, he. And as a definite feminine object was expressed by the article seó, the likeness and the difference between this and heó, the feminine pronoun, caused a sort of coalition between the two, as our language was losing its old inflectional form and passing from Anglo-Saxon into Early English. Something of the same sort is done by the feminization of the word Hebrew, and the calling of a woman of that race a Shebrew.
Our possessive neuter pronoun its, to which reference has been made before, came into the language last of all its kin, in this manner. As heó was the feminine of he, hit was the neuter. From hit the h was dropped by some of the vicissitudes which have so often damped the aspirations of that unfortunate letter. Now in it the t, half the word, is no part of the original pronoun, but the mere inflectional termination by which it is formed from he. But by long usage, in a period of linguistic disintegration, the t came to be looked upon as an essential part of the word, one really original letter of which, h, had been dropped by the most cultivated writers. This letter, however, long held its place; and in the usage of the common people and in that of some writers, the Anglo-Saxon hit was the neuter pronoun close down to the Elizabethan period. Of both the masculine he and the neuter hit, the possessive case was his, just as ejus is the genitive of both ille and illud; and so his was the proper lineal possessive case of it, the successor of hit. If his had been subjected to a like deprivation to that of the nominative, by an elision of the hi, and made into is, there would have been no-apparent reason to question its relationship to it. But this was not to be. The t, not the h, had come to be regarded as the essential letter of the word; his was looked upon as belonging to he and not to it; and to the latter was added the s, which is a sign of the possessive thought in so many of the Indo-European languages. But there lingered long, not only among the uneducated people who continued to use hit, but among writers and scholars a consciousness that his was the true possessive of it, and still more a feeling that its was an illegitimate pretender. And, indeed, if ever word was justly called bastard, this deserves the stigma. But like some other bastards it has held the place it seized, and justified the usurpation by the service it has rendered. This is the story, hitherto untold consecutively, I believe, of a pronoun which as late as
