authority. He seemed to have taken this as applying only to the first question he asked me.—Westminster Gazette. (seems)
They, as it has been said of Sterne, seemed to have wished, every now and then, to have thrown their wigs into the faces of their auditors.—I. Disraeli. (seem to have wished...to throw)
Lady Austen's fashionable friends occasioned no embarrassment; they seemed to have preferred some more fashionable place for summering in, for they are not again spoken of.—Southey.
Sometimes have is even transferred from the verb with which it would make sense to the other with which it makes nonsense.
On the point of church James was obdurate...He would like to have insisted on the other grudging items.—Sladen.
In the next, the perfect is wanted; for a child that has been flogged cannot be left unflogged—not, that is, in the past; and the future is not meant.
A child flogged left-handedly had better be left unflogged.—Poe.
We add, for the reader's refreshment rather than for practical purposes, an illustration of where careless treatment of have may end:
Oh, Burgo, hadst thou not have been a very child, thou shouldst have known that now, at this time of day—after all that thy gallant steed had done for thee—it was impossible for thee or him.—Trollope.
Conditionals
These, which cost the schoolboy at his Latin and Greek some weary hours, need not detain us long. The reader passes lightly and unconsciously in his own language over mixtures that might have caused him searchings of heart in a dead one.
But there is one corrupt and meaningless form, apparently gaining ground, that calls for protest. When a clause begins with as if, it must be remembered that there is an ellipse. I treat her as tenderly as if she were my daughter would be in full I treat her as tenderly as I should if she were, &c. If this is forgotten, there is danger in some sentences, though not in this one, of using a present indicative in the place where the verb were stands. So:
