While I was trying to puzzle out the Hebrew for ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people’ last week my husband was moved to begin a series of Christmas carols from the shelter of his armchair, occasionally waving a little mat soiled with the glass-rings of ages in time to the music. Lovely.
There was method, or at least a tenuous anchorhold on reality, in his madness, for he began with ‘God rest ye merry gentlemen’. He tried it out alternately with ‘God rest you’, and seemed equally happy with either. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has it as ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen’, the version given in the Oxford Book of Carols. It is anonymous.
The first thing is that merry is not an adjectival qualification of gentlemen. Gentlemen is the noun for which the pronoun you stands, hence the Oxford people’s use of a comma before the word.
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