and unicus implies singularity,-unitas, association. Many other examples might be cited to show that " as rays of light may be reflected and refracted in all possible ways from the primary direction, so the meaning of a word. may be deflected from its original bearing in a variety of manners; and consequently we cannot well reach the primitive force of the term unless we know the precise gradations through which it has gone."

Several writers on our language have noticed a singular tendency to limit or narrow the signification of certain words, whose etymology would suggest a far wider application. Why should we not "retaliate" (that is, pay back in kind, res, talis) kindnesses as well as injuries? Why should we "resent" (feel again) insults, and not affectionate words and deeds? Why should our hate, animosity, hostility, and other bad passions, be "inveterate' (that is, gain strength by age), but our better feelings, love, kindness, charity, never? Byron showed a true appreciation of the better uses to which the word might be put, when he subscribed a letter to a friend, "Yours inveterately, BYRON."

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In some of our nouns there is a nice distinction of meaning between the singular and the plural. A "minute" is a fraction of time; "minutes" are notes of a speech, conversation, etc. The manner in which a man enters a drawing-room may be unexceptionable, while his 99 manners are very bad. When the "Confederates " threatened to pull down the American "colors at New Orleans, they did it under "color" of right. A person was once asked whether a certain lawyer had got rich by his practice. "No," was the sarcastic reply, "but by his practices."

CHAPTER XVI.

COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH.

In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold,
Alike fantastic if too new or old;

Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.-POPE.

If a gentleman be to study any language, it ought to be that of his own country.-LoCKE.

Aristocracy and exclusiveness tend to final overthrow, in language as well as in politics.-W. D. WHITNEY.

People who write essays to prove that though a word in fact means one thing, it ought to mean another, or that though all well educated Englishmen do conspire to use this expression, they ought to use that, are simply bores. -EDINBURGH REVIEW.

ON

NE of the most gratifying signs of the times is the deep interest which both our scholars and our people are beginning to manifest in the study of our noble English tongue. Perhaps nothing has contributed more to awaken a public interest in this matter, and to call attention to some of the commonest improprieties of speech, than the publication of "The Queen's English" and "The Dean's English," and the various criticisms which have been provoked in England and in the United States by the MoonAlford controversy. Hundreds of persons who before felt a profound indifference to this subject, have had occasion to thank the Dean for awakening their curiosity in regard to it; and hundreds more who otherwise would never have read his dogmatic small-talk, or Mr. Moon's trenchant dissection of it, have suddenly found themselves, in consequence of the newspaper criticisms of the two books,

keenly interested in questions of grammar, and now, with their appetites whetted, will continue the study of their own language, till they have mastered its difficulties, and familiarized themselves with all its idioms and idiotisms. / Of such discussions we can hardly have too many, and just now they are imperiously needed to check the deluge of barbarisms, solecisms, and improprieties, with which our language is threatened. Not only does political freedom make every man in America an inventor, alike of laborsaving machines and of labor-saving words, but the mixture of nationalities is constantly coining and exchanging new forms of speech, of which our busy Bartletts, in their lists of Americanisms, find it impossible to keep account.

It is not merely our spoken language that is disfigured by these blemishes; but our written language,the prose of the leading English authors,-exhibits more slovenliness and looseness of diction than is found in any other literature. That this is due in part to the very character of the language itself, there can be no doubt. Its simplicity of structure and its copiousness both tend to prevent its being used with accuracy and care; and it is so hospitable to alien words that it needs more powerful. securities against revolution than other languages of less heterogeneous composition. But the chief cause must be found in the character of the English-speaking race. There is in our very blood a certain lawlessness, which makes us intolerant of syntactical rules, and restive under pedagogical restraints. "Our sturdy English ancestors," says Blackstone, "held it beneath the condition of a freeman to appear, or to do any other act, at the precise time appointed." The same proud, independent spirit which made the Saxons of old rebel against the servitude

of punctuality, prompts their descendants to spurn the yoke of grammar and purism. In America this scorn of obedience, whether to political authority or philological, is fostered and intensified by the very genius of our institutions. We seem to doubt whether we are entirely free, unless we apply the Declaration of Independence to our language, and carry the Monroe doctrine even into our grammar.

The degree to which this lawlessness has been carried will be seen more strikingly if we compare our English literature with the literature of France. It has been justly said that the language of that country is a science in itself, and the labor bestowed on the acquisition of it has the effect of vividly impressing on the mind both the faults and the beauties of every writer's style. Method and perspicuity are its very essence; and there is hardly a writer of note who does not attend to these requisites with scrupulous care. Let a French writer of distinction violate any cardinal rule of grammar, and he is pounced upon instantly by the critics, and laughed at from Calais to Marseilles. When Boileau, who is a marvel of verbal and grammatical correctness, made a slip in the first line of his Ninth Satire,

"C'est à vous, mon Esprit, à qui je veux parler,"

the grammatical sensibility of the French ear was shocked to a degree that we, who tolerate the grossest solecisms, find it hard to estimate. For two centuries the blunder has been quoted by every writer on grammar, and impressed on the memory of every schoolboy. Indeed, such is the national fastidiousness on this subject, that it has been doubted whether a single line in Boileau has been

so often quoted for its beauty, as this unfortunate one for its lack of grammar. When did an English or an

American writer thus offend the critical ears of his countrymen, even though he were an Alison, sinning against Lindley Murray on every page?

We are no friends to hypercriticism, or to that finical niceness which cares more for the body than for the soul of language, more for the outward expression than for the thought which it incarnates. Too much rigor is as unendurable as laxity. It is, no doubt, possible to be so over-nice in the use of words and the construction of sentences as to sap the vitality of our speech. We may so refine our expression, by continual straining in our critical sieves, as to impair both the strength and the flexibility of our noble English tongue. There are some verbal critics, who, apparently go so far as to hold that every word must have an invariable meaning, and that all relations of thoughts must be indicated by absolute and invariable formulas, thus reducing verbal expression to the rigid inflexibility of a mathematical equation. If we understand Mr. Moon's censures of Murray and Alford, some of them are based on the assumption that an ellipsis is rarely, if ever, permissible in English speech. We have no sympathy with such extremists, nor with the verbal purists who challenge all words and phrases that cannot be found in the "wells of English undefiled," that have been open for more than a hundred years. We must take the good with the bad in the incessant changes and masquerades of language. "The severe judgment of the scholar may condemn as verbiage that undergrowth of words which threatens to choke up and impoverish the great roots that have occupied the soil from the earliest times;