Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/169
publisher to have rebutted a statement which he knew to be a calumny.—Borrow.
I was going to have asked, when...—Sladen.
But other perfects, while they are still more illogical than these, differ as little in meaning from the present as the deposuisse, dear to the hearts of elegiac writers ancient and modern, differs from deponere. And whereas there is at least metre, and very useful metre, in deposuisse, there is in our corresponding perfect infinitive neither rhyme nor reason. Thus,
With whom on those golden summer evenings I should have liked to have taken a stroll in the hayfield.—Thackeray.
To have taken means simply to take; the implication of non-fulfilment that justified the perfects above is here needless, being already given in I should have liked; and the doubled have is ugly in sound. Similar are
If my point had not been this, I should not have endeavoured to have shown the connexion.—Times.
The author can only wish it had been her province to have raised plants of nobler growth.—S. Ferrier.
Had you given your advice in any determined or positive manner, I had been ready to have been concluded by it.—Richardson.
Jim Scudamore would have been the first man to have acknowledged the anomaly.—Crockett.
Though certainly before she commenced her mystic charms she would have liked to have known who he was.—Beaconsfield.
Peggy would have liked to have shown her turban and bird of paradise at the ball.—Thackeray.
It might have been thought to be a question of bare alternatives, and to have been susceptible of no compromise.—Bagehot.
The less excusable that Bagehot has started with the correct to be.
Another very common form, still worse, occurs especially after seem and appear, and results from the writer's being too lazy to decide whether he means He seems to have been, or He seemed to be. The mistake may be in either verb or both.
[Repudiating the report of an interview] I warned him when he spoke to me that I could not speak to him at all if I was to be quoted as an