A sharp-eyed gamekeeper nails up rows of dead vermin on a barn door. Even so our Editors ought once a month or so to head their columns with a list of new-fangled words, the use of which should be forbidden to every writer for their journals; to be sure, the vermin unhappily are not yet dead. In this list would come, I hope, many words already gibbeted in this chapter, together with postprandial, solidarity, egoism, collaborator, acerbity, dubiety, donate. Some of these words, I believe, came to us from America. Our kinsmen there have made noble contributions to our common stock of literature; the works of Irving, Motley, Marsh, Bryant, Longfellow, are prized on both sides of the Atlantic alike. Dr. March by his Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon language, a work to which I owe so much, has shown us that in some things American scholarship aims at rivalling German thoroughness. But Englishmen cannot help being astonished at one thing in his book: he writes labor, honor, &c., instead of following the good old English spelling. Here is one of the few instances in which the pupil, strong in his right, may make bold to correct the master. Our English honour, the French honure or honneur, takes us back eight hundred years to the bloody day, big with our island's doom, when the French knights were charging up the slope at Senlac again and again, when striving to break the stubborn English shield-wall. The word honure, which had already

1 Every writer, who prints his travels, calls his book Personal Adventures.' Lord Plunkett, when asked the meaning of this, supposed that there was the same difference between what was Real and what was Personal in travels, as in the law of property.

thriven in Gaul for eleven hundred years, must have been often in the conquerors' mouths all through those long weary hours; it was one of the first French words that we afterwards admitted to English citizenship; and it should abide with us in the shape that it has always hitherto worn. If we change it into honor, we pare down its history, and we lower it to the level of the Fuldler many Latin words that came in at the Reformation: from the Bastard of Falaise to the English Josiah is a sticks ! great drop. Let us in this, as in everything else, hold to the good old way; and let our kinsmen, like ourselves, turn with dislike from changes, utterly needless, that spoil a word's pedigree. To maul an old term, whether English or French, is to imitate the clerical boors who wrought such havock at Durham and Canterbury within the last Century.

America and England alike are too much given to slang and to clipping old words. Nothing in the speech of the former country, so far as I know, can match our awfully nice,' or our 'what say?' but one comfort is, that slang takes hundreds of years before it can creep into Standard English. Mob and sham were slang in 1680, and smack strongly of that year's peculiarities ; on the other hand, humbug, though as old as Bonnell Thornton, can as yet be employed by no grave author. Addison had before protested against curtailing words, as in the case of incog.; what would he have said to our exam.? Fine writing has set its dingy mark upon America as well as England; I think it was President Pierce who, in his opening address at the Capitol, twenty years ago, spoke of slavery as

yes

'involuntary servitude.' New habits stand in need of new words; one verb, that has come to us within the last four years from the American mint, is 'to interview.' Nothing can better express the spirit of our age, ever craving to hear something new; the verb calls up before us a queer pair: on the one side stands the great man, not at all sorry at the bottom of his heart that the rest of mankind are to learn what a fine fellow he is; on the other side fussily hovers the pressman, a Boswell who sticks at nothing in the way of questioning, but who outdoes his Scotch model in being wholly unshackled by any weak feeling of veneration. This Nineteenth Century of ours is a grand age of inventions. Thus we know to our cost what a Sensation Novel means; yet Mr. Edgeworth, writing in 1808, lets us see that the word sensation in his day was wholly confined to France (Memoirs, p. 192). Now and then innovators make a lucky hit. 'Why so much weep?' (fletus) asked Artemus Ward; he little knew that he was reviving the Old English word wóp. It is well known that phrases, called Americanisms, are often relics of a remote age. Thus, where an Englishman American concludes to do it. battle of St. Albans (written in 1455), we read that the King and Lords 'kept resydens, concludyng to holde the

resolves to do a thing, an Yet, in an account of the

1 Philology crops up in strange places; I once heard a clown in a circus propound the question, 'If you may say I freeze, I froze, why not also say I sneeze, I snoze?' Yet he most likely never heard of Strong and Weak Verbs, or as the vile English Grammars of old used to call them, Irregular and Regular Verbs. We may remember that Wamba the son of Witless plays the philologer in the opening scene of Ivanhoe.

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parlement.' The fact that America speaks of the Fall and not of the Autumn, ought in a Philologer's eyes to atone for a multitude of her sins of the tongue.

As I have made a few strictures upon American vagaries, I ought, in common fairness, to acknowledge that no American fault comes up to the revolting habit, spread over too many English shires, of dropping or wrongly inserting the letter h. Those whom we call self-made men' are much given to this hideous barbarism; their hopes of Parliamentary renown are too often nipped in the bud by the speaker's unlucky tendency to throw himself upon the 'Ouse.' An untaught peasant will often speak better English than a man worth half a million. Many a needy scholar might turn an honest penny by offering himself as an instructor of the vulgar rich in the pronunciation of the fatal letter. Our public schools are often railed against as teaching but little; still it is something that they enforce the right use of the h upon any lad who has a mind to lead a quiet life among his mates. Few things will the English youth find in after-life more profitable than the right use of the aforesaid letter.3 The

1 Paston Letters (Gairdner's edition), i. 331.

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2 I make a present of this hint to those whom it may concern; took it from Thackeray, who introduces a Frenchman, the instructor of Mr. Jeames in the art of garnishing his English talk with French phrases.

The following story sets in a strong light the great difference between the speech of the well-bred and of the untaught in England. A servant, who had dropped into a large fortune, asked his master how he was to pass muster in future as a gentleman. The answer was, 'Dress in black and hold your tongue.'

abuse of it jars upon the ear of any well-bred man far more than the broadest Scotch or Irish brogue can do. These dialects, as I have shown, often preserve good old English forms that have long been lost to London and Oxford.1

There are two things which are supposed to bring fresh ideas before the minds of the middle class—the newspaper on week days, and the sermon on Sundays. We have seen the part played by the former; I now turn to the latter. Many complaints have lately been made on the scarcity of good preachers; one cause of these complaints I take to be, the diction of the usual run of sermons. The lectern and the reading desk speak to the folk, Sunday after Sunday, in the best of English; that is, in old Teutonic words, with a dash of French terms mostly naturalized in the Thirteenth Century. The pulpit, on the other hand, too often deals in an odd jargon of Romance, worked up into long-winded sentences, which shoot high above the heads of the listeners.2 complained bitterly of this a hundred and fifty years ago; and the evil is rife as ever now. Is it any wonder then that the poor become lost to the Church, or that they go to the meeting-house, where they can hear the way to Heaven set forth in English, a little uncouth it may be,

Swift

1 A Scotch farmer's wife once said to me, finding me rather slow in following her talk when she spoke at all fast, I beg your pardon, Sir, for my bad English.' I answered, 'It is I that speak the bad English; it is you that speak the true old English.' It is delightful to hear the peasantry talk of sackless (innocens), and he coft (emit).

2 How charming, in Memorials of a Quiet Life, is the account of the scholarlike Augustus Hare's style of preaching to his Wiltshire shepherds! He had a soul above the Romance hodgepodge.