If so, this lovely drama was Shakespeare's unconscious apostrophe to America, for in Arielseeking to be freecan be symbolized her awakening spirit, while Prospero, with his thaumaturgic achievements, suggests a constructive genius, which in a little more than a century has made one of the least of the nations to-day one of the greatest.

This voyage is the subject of a well-known apostrophe in The Pleasures of Hope, beginning

But the colouring of Ariosto's narration is peculiarly his own; and his apostrophe at the close beautiful.] TASSO: Critical Notice of his Life and Genius.

No passionate apostrophes of his golf stockings come to my mind, nor wistful recollections of the trousers he wore on that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon.

42.It was once a very common practice, to retain the final y, in contractions of the preterit or of the second person of most verbs that end in y, and to add the consonant terminations d, st, and dst, with an apostrophe before each; as, try'd for tried, reply'd for replied, try'st for triest, try'dst for triedst.

"The apostrophe with s ('s) is an abbreviation for is, the termination of the old English genitive.

"I apprehend," says Churchill, "it has been from an erroneous notion of proper names being unchangeable, that some, feeling the necessity of obviating this mispronunciation, have put an apostrophe between the o and the s in the plural, in stead of an e; writing Cato's, Nero's; and on a similar principle, Ajax's, Venus's; thus using the possessive case singular for the nominative or objective plural.

I have heard a still coarser apostrophe by the same gentleman.

At times there seems to be as many apostrophes as characters!