guage can now be restrained from license and preserved from corruption. Criticism cannot at once, with absolute and omnipotent voice, banish the evil, and introduce or establish the good; but by watchfulness and reason it may gradually form such a taste in those who are, if not the framers, at least the arbiters, of linguistic law, that thus, by indirection finding direction out, it may insure the effectual condemnation of that which itself could not exclude.

And

Until comparatively late years language was formed by the intuitive sense of those who spoke it; but now, among highly civilized peoples, the element of consciousness is entering into its production. If consciousness must be present, it should be, at least in the last resort, the consciousness of trained and cultivated minds; and such consciousness is critical, indeed is criticism. those who feel the need of support in giving themselves to the study of verbal criticism may find it in the comfortable words of Scaliger the younger, who says, "The sifting of these subtleties, although it is of no use to machines for grinding corn, frees the mind from the rust of ignorance, and sharpens it for other matters." * And it may reassure us to remember that, in the crisis of the great struggle between Cæsar and Pompey, Cicero, being then in the zenith of his power, turned aside, in a letter to Atticus upon weighty affairs of state, to discuss a point of grammar with that eminent critic.

* Harum indagatio subtilitatum, etsi non est utilis ad machinas farinarias conficiendas, exuit animum tamen inscitiæ rubigine, acuit-que ad alia.

CHAPTER II.

NEWSPAPER ENGLISH. BIG WORDS FOR SMALL THOUGHTS.

·IMPLE and unpretending ignorance is always respectable, and sometimes charming; but there is little that more deserves contempt than the pretence of ignorance to knowledge. The curse and the peril of language in this day, and particularly in this country, is, that it is at the mercy of men who, instead of being content to use it well according to their honest ignorance, use it ill according to their affected knowledge; who, being vulgar, would seem elegant; who, being empty, would seem full; who make up in pretence what they lack in reality; and whose little thoughts, let off in enormous phrases, sound like fire-crackers in an empty barrel.

How I detest the vain parade

Of big-mouthed words of large pretence!
And shall they thus my soul degrade,
O tongue so dear to common sense!
Shouldst thou accept the pompous laws
By which our blustering tyros prate,
Soon Shakespeare's songs and Bunyan's saws
Some tumid trickster must translate.

Our language like our daily life,
Accords the homely and sublime,
And jars with phrases that are rife
With pedantry of every clime.

For eloquence it clangs like arms,
For love it touches tender chords,
But he to whom the world's heart warms

Must speak in wholesome, home-bred words.

To the reader who is familiar with Beranger's "Derniers Chansons" these lines will bring to mind two stanzas in the poet's "Tambour Major," in which he compares pretentious phrases to a big, bedizened drum-major, and simple language to the little gray-coated Napoleon at Austerlitz-a comparison which has been brought to my mind very frequently during the writing of this book.

It will be well for us to examine some examples of this vice of language in its various kinds; and for them we must go to the newspaper press, which reflects so truly the surface of modern life, although its surface only.

There is, first, the style which has rightly come to be called newspaper English, and in which we are told, for instance, of an attack upon a fortified position on the Potomac, that "the thousand-toned artillery duel progresses magnificently at this hour, the howling shell bursting in wild profusion in camp and battery, and among the trembling pines." I quote this from the columns of a first-rate New York newspaper, because the real thing is so much more characteristic than any imitation could be, and is quite as ridiculous. This style has been in use so long, and has, day after day, been impressed upon the minds of so many persons to whom newspapers are authority, as to language no less than as to facts, that it is actually coming into vogue in daily life with some of our people. Not long ago

my attention was attracted by a building which I had not noticed before, and, stepping up to a policeman who stood hard by, I asked him what it was. He promptly replied (I wrote down his answer within the minute), "That is an institootion inaugurated under the auspices of the Sisters of Mercy, for the reformation of them young females what has deviated from the paths of rectitood." It was in fact an asylum for women of the town; but my informant would surely have regarded such a description of it as inelegant, and perhaps as indelicate. True, there was a glaring incongruity between the pompousness of his phraseology and his use of those simple and common parts of speech, the pronouns; but I confess that, in his dispensation of language, "them" and "what" were the only crumbs from which I received any comfort. But could I find fault with my civil and obliging informant, when I knew that every day he might read in the leading articles of our best newspapers such sentences, for instance, as the following? —

"There is, without doubt, some subtle essence permeating the elementary constitution of crime which so operates that men and women become its involuntary followers by sheer force of attraction, as it were."

I am sure, at least, that the policeman knew better what he meant when he spoke than the journalist did what he meant when he wrote. Policeman and journalist both wished not merely to tell what they knew and thought in the simplest, clearest way; they wished to say something elegant, and to use fine language; and both made themselves ridiculous. Neither this fault nor this complaint is

new; but the censure seems not to have diminished the fault, either in frequency or in degree. Our every-day writing is infested with this silly bombast, this stilted nonsense. One journalist, reflecting upon the increase of violence, and wishing to say that ruffians should not be allowed to go armed, writes, "We cannot, however, allow the opportunity to pass without expressing our surprise that the law should allow such abandoned and desperate characters to remain in possession of lethal weapons." Lethal means deadly, neither more nor less; but it would be very tame and unsatisfying to use an expression so common and so easily understood. Another journalist, in the course of an article upon a murder, says of the murderer that "a policeman went to his residence, and there secured the clothes that he wore when he committed the murderous deed; " and that, being found in a tub of water, "they were so smeared by blood as to incarnadine the water of the tub in which they were deposited." To say that "the policeman went to the house or room of the murderer, and there found the clothes he wore when he did the murder, which were so bloody that they reddened the water into which they had been thrown," would have been far too homely.

But not only are our journals and our speeches to Buncombe infested with this big-worded style, the very preambles to our acts of legislature, and the official reports upon the dryest and most matterof-fact subjects, are bloated with it. It appears in the full flower of absurdity in the following sentence, which I find in the report of a committee of the