It is a trite remark that words are the representatives of things and thoughts, as coin represents wealth. You carry in your pocket a doubloon or a dollar, stamped by the king or state, and you are the virtual owner of whatever it will purchase. But who affixes the stamp upon a word? No prince or potentate was ever strong enough to make or unmake a single word. CÆsar confessed that with all his power he could not do it, and Claudius could not introduce even a new letter. He attempted to introduce the consonant V, as distinct from U, the Roman alphabet having but one character for both; but he could not make his subjects accept the new letter, though he could kill or plunder them at pleasure. Cicero tried his hand at word-coining; but though he proved a skilful mint-master, and struck some admirable trial pieces, which were absolutely needed to facilitate mental exchanges, yet they did not gain circulation, and were thrown back upon his hands. But that which defied the power of CÆsar and of Cicero does not transcend the ability of many writers of our own day, some of whom are adepts in the art of word-coining, and are daily minting terms and phrases which must make even Noah Webster, boundless as was his charity for new words, turn in his grave. It is doubtful, however, whether these persons do so much damage to our noble English language as those who vulgarize it by the use of penny-a-liner phrases. There is a large and growing class of speakers and writers, on both sides of the Atlantic, who, apparently despising the homely but terse and telling words of their mother tongue, never use a Saxon term, if they can find what Lord Brougham calls a “long-tailed word in ’osity or ’ation” to do its work.

What is the cause of this? Is it the extraordinary, not to say excessive, attention now given by persons of all ages to foreign languages, to the neglect of our own? Is it the comparative inattention given to correct diction by the teachers in the schools of to-day; or is it because the favorite books of the young are sensational stories, made pungent, and, in a sense, natural, through the lavish use of all the colloquialisms and vulgarisms of low life? Shall we believe that it is because there is little individuality and independence in these days, that the words of so few persons are flavored with their idiosyncrasies; that it is from conscious poverty of thought that they try to trick out their ideas in glittering words and phrases, just as, by means of high-heeled boots, a laced coat, and a long feather, a fellow with a little soul and a weak body might try to pass muster as a bold grenadier? Or is it because of the prevalent mania for the sensational,—the craving for novelty and excitement, which is almost universal in these days,—that so many persons make sense subservient to sound, and avoid calling things by their proper names? Or, finally, to take a more charitable view of the case, is it because it is impossible for inaccurate minds to hit the exact truth, and describe a thing just as they have seen it,—to express degrees of feeling, to observe measures and proportions, and define a sensation as it was felt? Was Talleyrand wrong when he said that language was given to man to conceal his thought; and was it really given to hide his want of thought? Is it, indeed, the main object of expression to convey the smallest possible amount of meaning with the greatest possible amount of appearance of meaning; and, since nobody can be “so wise as Thurlow looked,” to look as wise as Thurlow while uttering the veriest truisms?

Be all this as it may, in nothing else is the lack of simplicity, which is so characteristic of our times, more marked than in the prevailing forms of expression. “The curse and the peril of language in our day, and particularly in this country,” says an American critic, who may, perhaps, croak at times, but who has done much good service as a literary policeman in the repression of verbal licentiousness, “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.” In the estimation of many writers at the present day, the great, crowning vice in the use of words is, apparently, to employ plain, straightforward English. The simple Saxon is not good enough for their purposes, and so they array their ideas in “big, dictionary words,” derived from the Latin, and load their style with expletives as tasteless as the streamers of tattered finery that flutter about the person of a dilapidated belle. The “high polite,” in short, is their favorite style, and the good old Spartan rule of calling a spade a spade they hold in thorough contempt. Their great recipe for elegant or powerful writing is to call the most common things by the most uncommon names. Provided that a word is out-of-the-way, unusual, or far-fetched,—and especially if it is one of many syllables,—they care little whether it is apt and fit or not.

With them a fire is always “the devouring element,” or a “conflagration”; and the last term is often used where there is no meeting of flames, as when a town is fired in several places, but when only one building is burned; the fire never burns a house, but it always “consumes an edifice,” unless it is got under, in which case “its progress is arrested.” A railroad accident is always “a holocaust,” and its victims are named under the “death roll.” A man who is the first to do a thing “takes the initiative.” Instead of loving a woman, a man “becomes attached” to her; instead of losing his mother by death, he “sustains a bereavement of his maternal relative.” A dog’s tail, in the pages of these writers, is his “caudal appendage”; a dog breaker, “a kunopÆdist”; and a fish-pond they call by no less lofty a title than “piscine preserve.” Ladies, in their classic pages, have ceased to be married, like those poor, vulgar creatures, their grandmothers; they are “led to the hymeneal altar.” Of the existence of such persons as a man, a woman, a boy, or a girl, these writers are profoundly ignorant; though they often speak of “individuals,” “gentlemen,” “characters,” and “parties,” and often recognize the existence of “juveniles” and “juvenile members of the community.” “Individual” is another piece of pompous inanity which is very current now. In “Guesses at Truth” mention is made of a celebrated preacher, who was so destitute of all feeling for decorum in language, as to call our Saviour “this eminent individual.” “Individual” is a good Latin word, and serves a good purpose when it distinguishes a person from a people or class, as it served a good purpose in the scholastic philosophy; but would Cicero or Duns Scotus have called a great man an eminens individuum? These “individuals,” strange to say, are never dressed, but always “attired”; they never take off their clothes, but “divest themselves of their habiliments,” which is so much grander.

“In the church,” says St. Paul, “I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue.” Not so think some of the preachers of the Gospel of the present day, if we may judge them by the language they use in their discourses. To give their sermons a philosophical air, or because simple language is not to their taste, they invest their discourses with the technicalities of science and philosophy. They never speak of so old-fashioned a thing as the will, but always of “volition”; duty, with them, is never duty simply, but always “moral obligation”; and their sermons abound in “necessary relations,” “moral and physical necessities,” “intellectual processes,” “laws of nature,” and “arguments a priori and a posteriori.” It was a preacher of this class, who having occasion to tell his hearers that there was not one Gospel for the rich and another for the poor, informed them that, “if they would not be saved on ‘general principles,’ they could not be saved at all.” Who can doubt that such language as this is not only poorly understood, if understood it is, by the ordinary hearer, but is far less effective than the simple Saxon words which might be used to convey the same ideas? Some years ago a white minister preached in a plain, direct style to a church of negroes in the South, whose “colored” pastor was greatly addicted to the use of high-flown language in his sermons. In the season of exhortation and prayer that followed, an old negro thanked the Lord for the various blessings of the Sabbath and the sanctuary, and especially, he added, “we thank Thee that to-day we have been fed from a low crib.” Would it not be well for preachers generally to remember that many of Christ’s flock are “little ones,” whose necks are short, and that they may consequently starve, if their food, however nutritious, is placed in too lofty a crib?

But preachers are not the only anti-Saxons of our day; we may find them in nearly all the classes of society,—persons who never tell us that a man is asleep, but say that he is “locked in slumber”; who deem it vulgar, and perhaps cruel, to say that a criminal was hanged, but very elegant to say that he was “launched into eternity.” A person of their acquaintance never does so low a thing as to break his leg; he “fractures his limb.” They never see a man fall; but sometimes see “an individual precipitated.” Our Latin friends,—fortunate souls,—never have their feelings hurt, though it must be confessed that their “sensibilities” are sometimes dreadfully “lacerated.” Above the necessities of their poor fellow-creatures, they never do so vulgar a thing as to eat a meal; they always “partake of a repast,” which is so much more elegant. They never do so commonplace a thing as to take a walk; they “make a pedestrian excursion.” A conjurer with them is a “prestidigitator”; a fortune-teller, a “vaticinator.” As Pascal says, they mask all nature. There is with them no king, but an “august monarch”; no Paris, but a “capital of a kingdom.” Even our barbers have got upon stilts. They no longer sell tooth-powder and shaving-soap, like the old fogies, their fathers, but “odonto,” and “dentifrice,” and “rypophagon”; and they themselves, from the barber-ous persons they once were, have been transformed into “artists in hair.” The medical faculty, too, have caught the spirit of the age. Who would suspect that “epistaxis” means simply bleeding at the nose, and “emollient cataplasm” only a poultice? Fancy one schoolboy doubling up his fist at another, and telling him to look out for epistaxis! Who would dream that “anheidrohepseterion” (advertised in the London “Times”) means only a saucepan, or “taxidermist” a bird-stuffer? Is it not remarkable that tradesmen have ceased “sending in” their “little bills,” and now only “render their accounts”?

“There are people,” says Landor, “who think they write and speak finely, merely because they have forgotten the language in which their fathers and mothers used to talk to them.” As in dress, deportment, etc., so in language, the dread of vulgarity, as Whately has suggested, constantly besetting those who are half conscious that they are in danger of it, drives them into the opposite extreme of affected finery. They act upon the advice of Boileau:

and, to avoid the undignified, according to them, it is only necessary not to call things by their right names. Hence the use of “residence” for house, “electric fluid” for lightning, “recently deceased” for lately dead, “encomium” for praise, “location” for place, “locate” for put, “lower limb” for leg, “sacred edifice” for church, “attired” for clad,—all of which have so learned an air, and are preferred to the simpler words for the same reason, apparently, that led Mr. Samuel Weller, when writing his famous valentine to Mary, to prefer “circumscribed” to “circumvented,” as having a deeper meaning.

Such persons forget that glass will obstruct the light quite as much when beautifully painted as when discolored with dirt; and that a style studded with far-fetched epithets and high-sounding phrases may be as dark as one abounding in colloquial vulgarisms. Who does not sympathize with the indignation of Dr. Johnson, when, taking up at the house of a country friend a so called “Liberal Translation of the New Testament,” he read, in the eleventh chapter of John, instead of the simple and touching words, “Jesus wept,”—“Jesus, the Saviour of the world, overcome with grief, burst into a flood of tears”? “Puppy!” exclaimed the critic, as he threw down the book in a rage; and had the author been present, Johnson would doubtless have thrown it at his head. Yet the great literary bashaw, while he had an eagle’s eye for the faults of others, was unconscious of his own sins against simplicity, and, though he spoke like a wit, too often wrote like a pedant. He had, in fact, a dialect of his own, which has been wittily styled Johnsonese. Goldsmith hit him in a vulnerable spot when he said: “Doctor, if you were to write a fable about little fishes, you would make them talk like whales.” The faults of his pompous, swelling diction, in which the frivolity of a coxcomb is described in the same rolling periods and with the same gravity of antithesis with which he would thunder against rebellion and fanaticism, are hardly exaggerated by a wit of his own time who calls it

One of the latest “modern improvements” in speech is the substitution of “lady” and “female” for the good old English “woman.” On the front of Cooper’s Reading Room, in the city of New York, is the sign in golden letters, “Male and Female Reading Rooms.” Suppose Scott, in his noble tribute to women for their devotion and tenderness to men in their hour of suffering, had sung

would not the lines have been far more touching? An English writer says truly that the law of euphemisms is somewhat capricious; “one cannot always tell which words are decent and which are not.... It really seems as if the old-fashioned feminine of ‘man’ were fast getting proscribed. We, undiscerning male creatures that we are, might have thought that ‘woman’ was a more elegant and more distinctive title than ‘female.’ We read only the other day a report of a lecture on the poet Crabbe, in which she who was afterward Mrs. Crabbe was spoken of as ‘a female to whom he had formed an attachment.’ To us, indeed, it seems that a man’s wife should be spoken of in some way which is not equally applicable to a ewe lamb or a favorite mare. But it was a ‘female’ who delivered the lecture, and we suppose the females know best about their own affairs.”

Can any person account for the apparent antipathy which many writers and speakers have to the good Saxon verb “to begin”? Ninety-nine out of every hundred persons one talks with are sure to prefer the French words “to commence” and “to essay,” and the tendency is strong to prefer “to inaugurate” to either. Nothing in our day is begun, not even dinner; it is “inaugurated with soup.” In their fondness for the French words, many persons are betrayed into solecisms. Forgetting, or not knowing, that, while “to begin” may be followed by an infinitive or a gerund, “to commence” is transitive, and must be followed by a noun or its equivalent, they talk of “commencing to do” a thing, “essaying to do well,” etc. Persons who think that “begin” is not stately enough, or that it is even vulgar, would do well to look into the pages of Milton and Shakespeare. With all his fondness for Romanic words, the former hardly once uses “commence” and “commencement”; and the latter is not only content with the idiomatic word, but even shortens it, as in the well known line that depicts so vividly the guilt-wasted soul of Macbeth:

What a shock would every right-minded reader receive if, upon opening his Bible, he should find, in place of the old familiar words, the following: “In the commencement God created the heavens and the earth,”—“The fear of the Lord is the commencement of wisdom!” Well did Coleridge say: “Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar in point of style.” “Commence” is a good word enough, but, being of outlandish origin, should never take the place of “begin,” except for the sake of rhythm or variety.

Another of these grand words is “imbroglio.” It is from the Italian, and means an intricate or complicated plot. Why, then, should a quarrel in the Cabinet at Washington, or a prospective quarrel with France or England, be called an “imbroglio”? Again, will any one explain to us the meaning of “interpellation,” so often used by the correspondents of our daily newspapers? The word properly means an interruption; yet when an opposition member of the French or Italian Parliament asks a question of a minister, he is said “to put an interpellation.” Why should an army be said to be “decimated,” without regard to the number or nature of its losses? The original meaning of this term was grave, and often terrible; it meant no less than taking the tenth of a man’s substance, or shooting every tenth man in a mutinous regiment, the victims being called out by lot. “This appalling character of decimation lay in the likelihood that innocent persons, slain in cold blood, might suffer for the guilty. But the peculiar horror vanishes when we alter the conditions; and a regiment which has taken part in a hard-fought battle, and comes off the field only decimated,—that is to say, with nine living and unscathed for each man left on the field,—might be accounted rather fortunate than the reverse.” Why, again, should “donate” be preferred to “give”? Does it show a larger soul, a more magnificent liberality, to “donate” than to give? Must we “donate the devil his due,” when we would be unusually charitable? Why should “elect” be preferred to “choose,” when there is no election whatever; or why is “balance” preferable to “remainder”? As a writer has well said: “Would any man in his senses dare to quote King David as saying: ‘They are full of children, and leave the balance of their substance unto their babes’? or read, ‘Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee: the balance of wrath thou shalt restrain,’ where the translators of our Bible wrote ‘the remainder’? And if any one went into the nursery, and telling that tale of perennial interest of the little boys that ‘a-sliding went, a-sliding went, a-sliding went, all on a summer’s day,’ should, after recounting how ‘they all fell in, they all fell in, they all fell in,’ add ‘the balance ran away,’ would there not go up a chorus of tiny but indignant protests against this mutilation, which would enlist a far wider sympathy than some of the proposed changes in the texts of classic authors, which have set editors and commentators at loggerheads?”

Again, why should one say “rendition” for performance, “enactment” for acting, or “nude” for naked? In the seventeenth century, certain fanatics in England ran about without clothes, crying: “We are the naked Truth.” Had they lived in this age of refinement, instead of shocking their countrymen with such indelicate expressions, they would have said, “We are Verity in a nude condition”; and had any person clothed them, he would have been said to have “rehabilitated” them. More offensive than any of these grandiose words is “intoxicated” in place of “drunk,” which it has nearly banished. A man can be intoxicated only when he has lost his wits, not by quantity, but by quality,—by drinking liquor that has been drugged. “Intoxicated,” however, has five syllables; drunk has but one; so the former carries the day by five to one. No doubt nine-tenths of those who drink to excess in this country, are, in fact, intoxicated, or poisoned; still, the two words should not be confounded. “Ovation” is a word often used incorrectly, as when an emperor, empress, king or queen, on making a triumphal entry into the capital of a state amid great popular enthusiasm, is said to receive an “ovation,” though such an honor is distinctively reserved for meritorious subjects of the ruler. Sometimes we find a word of Latin origin used in a sense precisely opposite to the true one, as when “culminate,” which can be applied only to something which has reached the limit of its possible height, is used regarding the career of some wrong-doer, which is said to “culminate” in the lowest depths of degradation.

Solomon tells us that there is nothing new under the sun; and this itching for pompous forms of expression, this contempt for plainness and simplicity of style, is as old as Aristotle. In the third book of his “Rhetoric,” discussing the causes of frigidity of style, he speaks of one Alcidamas, a writer of that time, as “employing ornaments, not as seasonings to discourse, but as if they were the only food to live upon. He does not say ‘sweat,’ but ‘the humid sweat’; a man goes not to the Isthmian games, but to ‘the collected assembly of the Isthmian solemnity’; laws are ‘the legitimate kings of commonwealths’; and a race, ‘the incursive impulse of the soul.’ A rich man is not bountiful, but the ‘artificer of universal largess.’” Is it not curious that our modern Quicklys and Malaprops, who often pride themselves upon their taste for swelling words and phrases, and their skill in using them, should have been anticipated by Alcidamas two thousand years ago?

The abuse of the queen’s English, to which we have called attention, did not begin with Americans. It began with our transatlantic cousins, who employed “ink-horn” terms and outlandish phrases at a very early period. In “Harrison’s Chronicle” we are told that after the Norman conquest “the English tongue grew into such contempt at court that most men thought it no small dishonor to speak any English there; which bravery took his hold at the last likewise in the country with every ploughman, that even the very carters began to wax weary of their mother tongue, and labored to speak French, which was then counted no small token of gentility.”

The English people of to-day are quite as much addicted to the grandiose style as the Americans. Gough, in one of his lectures, speaks of a card which he saw in London, in which a man called himself “Illuminating Artist to Her Majesty,” the fact being that he lighted the gas lamps near the palace. Mr. E. A. Freeman, the English historian, complained in a recent lecture that our language had few friends and many foes, its only friends being ploughboys and a few scholars. The pleasant old “inns” of England, he said, had disappeared, their places being supplied by “hotels,” or “establishments”; while the landlord had made way for the “lessee of the establishment.” A gentleman going into a shop in Regent street to buy half-mourning goods was referred by the shopman to “the mitigated affliction department.” The besetting sin of some of the ablest British writers of this century is their lack of simplicity of language. Sydney Smith said of Sir James Mackintosh, that if he were asked for a definition of “pepper,” he would reply thus: “Pepper may philosophically be described as a dusty and highly pulverized seed of an oriental fruit; an article rather of condiment than diet, which, dispersed lightly over the surface of food, with no other rule than the caprice of the consumer, communicates pleasure, rather than affords nutrition; and by adding a tropical flavor to the gross and succulent viands of the North, approximates the different regions of the earth, explains the objects of commerce, and justifies the industry of man.”

Francis Jeffrey, the celebrated critic, had, even in conversation, an artificial style and language, which were fit only for books and a small circle of learned friends. His diction and pronunciation, it is said, were unintelligible to the mass of his countrymen, and in the House of Commons offensive and ridiculous. An anecdote told in illustration of this peculiarity strikingly shows the superiority of simple to high-flown language in the practical business of life. In a trial, which turned upon the intellectual competency of a testator, Jeffrey asked a witness, a plain countryman, whether the testator was “a man of intellectual capacity,”—“an intelligent, shrewd man,”—“a man of capacity?” “Had he ordinary mental endowments?” “What d’ye mean, sir?” asked the witness. “I mean,” replied Jeffrey, testily, “was the man of sufficient ordinary intelligence to qualify him to manage his own affairs?” “I dinna ken,” replied the chafed and mystified witness,—“Wad ye say the question ower again, sir?” Jeffrey being baffled, Cockburn took up the examination. He said: “Ye kenned Tammas ——?” “Ou, ay; I kenned Tammas weel; me and him herded together when we were laddies [boys].” “Was there onything in the cretur?” “De’il a thing but what the spune [spoon] put into him.” “Would you have trusted him to sell a cow for you?” “A cow! I wadna lippened [trusted] him to sell a calf.” Had Jeffrey devoted a review article to the subject, he could not have given a more vivid idea of the testator’s incapacity to manage his own affairs.

Our readers need not be told how much Carlyle has done to teutonize our language with his “yardlongtailed” German compounds. It was a just stroke of criticism when a New York auctioneer introduced a miscellaneous lot of books to a crowd with the remark: “Gentlemen, of this lot I need only say, six volumes are by Thomas Carlyle; the seventh is written in the English language.” Some years ago, a learned doctor of divinity and university professor in Canada wrote a work in which, wishing to state the simple fact that the “rude Indian” had learned the use of firing, he delivered himself as follows: “He had made slave of the heaven-born element, the brother of the lightning, the grand alchemist and artificer of all times, though as yet he knew not all the worth or magical power that was in him. By his means the sturdy oak, which flung abroad its stalwart arms and waved its leafy honors defiant in the forest, was made to bow to the behest of the simple aborigines.” As the plain Scotchwoman said of De Quincey, “the bodie has an awfu’ sicht o’ words!” This style of speaking and writing has become so common that it can no longer be considered wholly vulgar. It is gradually working upward; it is making its way into official writings and grave octavos; and is even spoken with unction in pulpits and senates. Metaphysicians are wont to define words as the signs of ideas; but with many persons, they appear to be, not so much the signs of their thought, as the signs of the signs of their thought. Such, doubtless, was the case with the Scotch clergyman, whom a bonneted abhorrer of legal preaching was overheard eulogizing: “Man, John, wasna yon preachin’!—yon’s something for a body to come awa wi’. The way that he smashed down his text into so mony heads and particulars, just a’ to flinders! Nine heads and twenty particulars in ilka head—and sic mouthfu’s o’ grand words!—an’ every ane o’ them fu’ o’ meaning, if we but kent them. We hae ill improved our opportunities; man, if we could just mind onything he said, it would do us guid.”

The whole literature of notices, handbills, and advertisements, in our day, has apparently declared “war to the knife” against every trace of the Angles, Jutes and Saxons. We have no schoolmasters now; they are all “principals of collegiate institutes”; no copy-books, but “specimens of caligraphy”; no ink, but “writing fluid”; no physical exercise, but “calisthenics” or “gymnastics.” A man who opens a groggery at some corner for the gratification of drunkards, instead of announcing his enterprise by its real name, modestly proclaims through the daily papers that his “saloon” has been fitted up for the reception of customers. Even the learned architects of log cabins and pioneer cottages can find names for them only in the sonorous dialects of oriental climes. Time was when a farmhouse was a farmhouse and a porch a porch; but now the one is a “villa” or “hacienda,” and the other nothing less than a “veranda.” In short, this genteel slang pursues us from the cradle to the grave. In old times, when our fathers and mothers died, they were placed in coffins, and buried in the graveyard or burying ground; now, when an unfortunate “party” or “individual” “deceases” or “becomes defunct,” he is deposited in a “burial casket” and “interred in a cemetery.” It matters not that the good old words “grave” and “graveyard” have been set in the pure amber of the English classics,—that the Bible says, “There is no wisdom in the grave,” “Cruel as the grave,” etc. How much more pompous and magniloquent the Greek: “There is no wisdom in the cemetery,” “Cruel as the cemetery!”

Seriously, let us eschew all these vulgar fineries of style, as we would eschew the fineries of a dandy. Their legitimate effect is to barbarize our language, and to destroy all the peculiar power, distinctiveness, and appropriateness of its terms. Words that are rarely used will at last inevitably disappear; and thus, if not speedily checked, this grandiloquence of expression will do an irreparable injury to our dear old English tongue. Poetry may for a while escape the effects of this vulgar coxcombry, because it is the farthest out of the reach of such contagion; but, as prose sinks, so must poetry, too, be ultimately dragged down into the general gulf of feebleness and inanition.

It was a saying of John Foster that “eloquence resides in the thought, and no words, therefore, can make that eloquent which will not be so in the plainest that could possibly express the same.” Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than the notion that the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of pompous and sonorous language are necessary to the expression of the sublime and powerful in eloquence and poetry. So far is this from being true, that the finest, noblest, and most spirit-stirring sentiments ever uttered, have been couched, not in sounding polysyllables from the Greek or Latin, but in the simplest Saxon,—in the language we hear hourly in the streets and by our firesides. Dr. Johnson once said that “big thinkers require big words.” He did not think so at the time of the great Methodist movement in the last century, when “the ice period” of the establishment was breaking up. He attributed the Wesleys’ success to their plain, familiar way of preaching, “which,” he says, “clergymen of genius and learning ought to do from a principle of duty.” Arthur Helps tells a story of an illiterate soldier at the chapel of Lord Morpeth’s castle in Ireland. Whenever Archbishop Whately came to preach, it was observed that this rough private was always in his place, mouth open, as if in sympathy with his ears. Some of the gentlemen playfully took him to task for it, supposing it was due to the usual vulgar admiration of a celebrated man. But the man had a better reason, and was able to give it. He said, “That isn’t it at all. The Archbishop is easy to understand. There are no fine words in him. A fellow like me, now, can follow along and take every bit of it in.” “Whately’s simplicity,” observes a writer to whom we are indebted for this illustration, “meant no lack of pith or power. The whole momentum of his large and healthy brain went into those homely sentences, rousing and feeding the rude and the cultured hearer’s hunger alike, as sweet bread and juicy meat satisfy a natural appetite.”

Emerson observes that as any orator at the bar or the senate rises in his thought, he descends in his language; that is, when he rises to any height of thought or of passion, he comes down to a level with the ear of all his audience. “It is the oratory of John Brown and of Abraham Lincoln, the one at Charleston, the other at Gettysburg, in the two best specimens of oratory we have had in this country.” Daniel Webster, in his youth, was a little bombastic in his speeches; but he very soon discovered that the force of a sentence depends chiefly on its meaning, and that great writing is that in which much is said in few words, and those the simplest that will answer the purpose. Having made this discovery, he became “a great eraser of adjectives”; and whether convincing juries, or thundering in the senate,—whether demolishing Hayne, or measuring swords with Calhoun,—on all occasions used the plainest words. “You will find,” said he to a friend, “in my speeches to juries, no hard words, no Latin phrases, no fieri facias; and that is the secret of my style, if I have any.”

Chaucer says, in praise of his Virginia, that

and if any one would write or speak well, his English should be genuine, not counterfeit. The simplest words that will convey one’s ideas are always best. What can be simpler and yet more sublime than the “Let there be light, and there was light!” of Moses, which Longinus so admired? Would it be an improvement to say, “Let there be light, and there was a solar illumination”? “I am like a child picking up pebbles on the seashore,” said Newton. Had he said he was like an awe-struck votary, lying prostrate before the stupendous majesty of the cosmical universe, and the mighty and incomprehensible Ourgos which had created all things, we might think it very fine, but should not carry in our memories such a luggage of words. The fiery eloquence of the field and the forum springs upon the vulgar idiom as a soldier leaps upon his horse. “Trust in the Lord, and keep your powder dry,” said Cromwell to his soldiers on the eve of a battle. “Silence, you thirty voices!” roars Mirabeau to a knot of opposers around the tribune. “I’d sell the shirt off my back to support the war!” cries Lord Chatham; and again, “Conquer the Americans! I might as well think of driving them before me with this crutch.” “I know,” says Kossuth, speaking of the march of intelligence, “that the light has spread, and that even the bayonets think.” “You may shake me, if you please,” said a little Yankee constable to a stout, burly culprit whom he had come to arrest, and who threatened violence, “but recollect, if you do it, you don’t shake a chap of five-feet-six; you’ve got to shake the whole State of Massachusetts!” When a Hoosier was asked by a Yankee how much he weighed,—“Well,” said he, “commonly I weigh about one hundred and eighty; but when I’m mad I weigh a ton!” “Were I to die at this moment,” wrote Nelson after the battle of the Nile, “‘more frigates’ would be found written on my heart.” The “Don’t give up the ship!” of our memorable sea-captain stirs the heart like the sound of a trumpet. Had he exhorted the men to fight to the last gasp in defence of their imperilled liberties, their altars, and the glory of America, the words might have been historic, but they would not have been quoted vernacularly, as they have been, for over threescore years and ten.

There is another phase of the popular leaning to the grandiose style, which is not less reprehensible than that which we have noticed; we mean the affectation of foreign words and phrases. As foreign travel has increased, and the study of foreign languages has become fashionable in our country, this vice has spread till society in some places, like Armado and Holofernes, seems to have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps. Many persons scarcely deign to call anything by its proper English name, but, as if they believed with Butler, that

they apply to it some German, French, or Italian word. In their dialect people are blasÉs, and passÉs, or have un air distinguÉ; in petto, dolce far niente, are among their pet phrases; and not infrequently they betray their ignorance by some ludicrous blunder, as when they use boquet for bouquet, soubriquet for sobriquet, and talk of a sous, instead of a sou, a mistake as laughable as the Frenchman’s “un pence.” Some of the modern fashionable novelists and writers of books of travel have even shown so bad a taste as to state in German, French, or Italian, whatever is supposed to have been said by Germans, Frenchmen, or Italians. In Currer Bell’s “Villette” a large proportion of the dialogue, even in pages containing the very marrow of the plot, is thus written in French, making the book, though an English book, unintelligible to an Englishman, however familiar with his native tongue, unless he has mastered a foreign one also, and that not in its purity, but “after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe.” In striking contrast to this taste for exotics is the rooted dislike which the French have to foreign words and idioms. It is only in cases of the direst necessity that they consent to borrow from their neighbors, whether in perfide Angleterre or elsewhere. Even when they deign to adopt a new word, they so disguise it that the parent language would not know it again. They strip it gradually of its foreign dress, and make it assume the costume of the country. “Beefsteak” is turned into bifteck; “plum-pudding” is metamorphosed into pouding de plomb; “partner” becomes partenaire; “riding-coat” becomes redingote; and now fashionable English tailors advertise these “redingotes,” never for a moment dreaming that they are borrowing an expression which the French stole from the English. It was their contempt for the practice of borrowing foreign words that enabled the Greeks to preserve their native tongue so long in its purity; while on the contrary, by an affectation in the Romans of Greek words and idioms, the Latin language was not only corrupted, but lost in a few centuries much of the beauty and majesty it had in the Augustan age.

It is said that the Spaniards, in all ages, have been distinguished for their love of long and high-flown names,—the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of appellative glory and honor. In looking at the long string of titles fastened like the tail of a kite to the name of some Don or other grandee, one is puzzled to tell whether it is the man that belongs to the name, or the name to the man. There is nothing odd, therefore, in the conduct of that Spaniard, who, whenever his name was mentioned, always took off his hat in token of respect to himself,—that is, as the possessor of so many appellations. A person of high diplomatic talent, with the unpretending and rather plebeian name of “Bubb,” was once nominated to represent Great Britain at Madrid. Lord Chesterfield was then a minister of state, and on seeing the newly appointed minister remarked,—“My dear fellow, your name will damn you with the Spaniards; a one-syllable patronymic will infallibly disgust the grandees of that hyperbolic nation.” “What shall I do?” said Bubb. “Oh, that is easily managed,” rejoined the peer; “get yourself dubbed, before you start on your mission, as Don Vaco y Hijo Hermoso y Toro y Sill y Bubb, and on your arrival you will have all the Spanish Court at your feet.”

The effort of the Spaniards to support their dignity by long and sounding titles is repeated daily, in a slightly different form, by many democratic Americans. Writers and speakers are constantly striving to compensate for poverty of thought by a multitude of words. Magniloquent terms, sounding sentences, unexpected and startling phrases, are dropped from pen and tongue, as gaudy and high-colored goods are displayed in shop windows, to attract attention. “Ruskin,” says an intelligent writer, “long ago cried out against the stuccoed lies which rear their unblushing fronts on so many street corners, shaming our civilization, and exerting their whole influence to make us false and pretentious. Mrs. Stowe and others have warned us against the silken lies that, frizzled, flounced, padded, compressed, lily-whitened and rouged, flit about our drawing rooms by gaslight, making us familiar with sham and shoddy, and luring us away from real and modest worth. Let there be added to these complaints the strongest denunciation of the kindred literary lies which hum about our ears and glitter before our eyes, which corrupt the language, and wrong every man and woman who speaks it by robbing it of some portion of its beauty and power.”

When shall we learn that the secret of beauty and of force, in speaking and in writing, is not to say simple things finely, but to say fine things as simply as possible? “To clothe,” says Fuller, “low creeping matter with high-flown language is not fine fancy, but flat foolery. It rather loads than raises a wren to fasten the feathers of an ostrich to her wings.” It is a significant fact that the books over which generation after generation of readers has hung with the deepest delight,—which have retained their hold, amid all the fluctuations of taste, upon all classes,—have been written in the simplest and most idiomatic English, that English for which the “fine school” of writers would substitute a verbose and affected phraseology. Such books are “Robinson Crusoe,” “Gulliver’s Travels,” and “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which Macaulay has justly characterized as treasures of pure English. Fitz-Greene Halleck tells us that some years ago a letter fell into his hands which a Scotch servant girl had written to her lover. The style charmed him, and his literary friends agreed that it was fairly inimitable. Anxious to clear up the mystery of its beauty, and even elegance, he searched for its author, who thus solved the enigma: “Sir, I came to this country four years ago. Then I did not know how to read or write. Since then I have learned to read and write, but I have not yet learned how to spell; so always when I sit down to write a letter, I choose those words which are so short and simple that I am sure to know how to spell them.” This was the whole secret. The simple-minded Scotch girl knew more of rhetoric than Blair or Campbell. As Halleck forcibly says: “Simplicity is beauty. Simplicity is power.”

It is through the arts and sciences, whose progress is so rapid, that many words of “learned length and thundering sound” force their way in these days into the language. The vocabulary of science is so repugnant to the ear and so hard to the tongue, that it is a long while before its terms become popularized. We may be sure that many years will elapse before “aristolochioid,” “megalosaurus,” “acanthopterygian,” “nothoclÆna-trichomanoides,” “monopleurobranchian,” “anonaceo-hydrocharideo-nymphÆoid,” and other such “huge verbal blocks, masses of syllabic aggregations, which both the tongue and the taste find it difficult to surmount,” will establish themselves in the language of literature and common life. Still, while the lover of Anglo-Saxon simplicity is rarely shocked by such terms, there are hundreds of others, less stupendous, such as “phenomenon,” “demonstrative,” “inverse proportion,” “transcendental,” “category,” “predicament,” “exorbitant,” which, once heard only in scientific lecture rooms or in schools, are now the common currency of the educated; and it is said that in one of our Eastern colleges, the learned mathematical professor, on whom the duty devolved one morning of making the chapel prayer, startled his hearers by asking Divine Goodness to enable them to know its length, its breadth, and its superficial contents. Should popular enlightenment go on for some ages with the prodigious strides it has lately made, a future generation may hear lovers addressing their mistresses in the terms predicted by Punch:

“I love thee, Mary, and thou lovest me.

Our mutual flame is like the affinity

That doth exist between two simple bodies.

I am Potassium to thine Oxygen.

... Sweet, thy name is Briggs,

And mine is Johnson. Wherefore should not we

Agree to form a Johnsonate of Briggs?

We will. The day, the happy day is nigh,

When Johnson shall with beauteous Briggs combine.”