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a proportion which must needs control, to a great extent, the grammatical laws of the language; that is, along with the multitude of Northern words, there must be much of Northern method, and in that method, baffling, as it often does, the technical systems of grammar, we are to look for the idioms. It is a remark of one of the most nervous authors of our day, Walter Savage Landor: "Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language; and none ever entertained a fear or apprehension that strength and sublimity were to be lowered and weakened by it. . . . Nations in a state of decay lose their idiom, which loss is always precursory to that of freedom."* And Coleridge exclaimed, "If men would only say what they have to say in plain terms, how much more eloquent would they be!" But it is the simple Saxon-English words, and the Saxon way of putting them together, that people will not be content with. There is forever a pushing away from the purest English, and from the genuine idioms; and, what is noticeable, it is the half-educated who are always most ambitious of long words and highsounding combinations of them. There is not pomp enough for them in our short, often one-syllable Saxon speech. Observe what a propensity there is to substitute the word "individual," (and unfitly too) for such a clear, simple, short word as man." It seems to be employed as a sort of midway expression between "man" and "gentleman," between "woman" and "lady," as if there was not quite courtesy enough in the words "man" and woman," and a little more than was wanted in the other

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* Imaginary Conversations, First Series. Conversation xiv., vol. i p. 244.

words. It is in this way that there may be a false refinement, a mistaken delicacy, that is fatal to the primitive simplicity and nervousness of language. From being too dainty in our choice of words, we come at last to forfeit the use of some of the best of them. Again, I do verily believe, that the good word "begin," is in danger of becoming obsolete, so that, after a while, it will sound quaint and antiquated; and yet it is both as old as the language, and as fresh as to-day's talk, known in all the eras of the language, sanctioned by all possible authority, grave and formal as well as familiar and homely, and expressive of all that is needed. Really some people seem to shun it as much as if it were indelicate, or, at the least, a vulgarism. Listen almost where you will, and now-adays nobody hardly is heard of as "beginning," for everything is "commenced." But what a shock would our instinct of language and some of our best associations receive, if this change could creep on to the pages of our English version of the Bible, instead of reading "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”—“the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”—“In the beginning was the Word." Truly did Coleridge say, that "Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar in point of style."* And an eloquent living divine has asked, "Who can estimate the grandeur, the depth, the expansive power, which our language and the German have derived from the national liturgical offices, as well as from the national translation of the Scriptures?" Let those who crave a statelier word than "begin," learn that even Milton, with all his

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* Table Talk, vol. i. p. 177.

erudite diction, never, throughout all his poems, I believe, uses the words "commence" or "commencement;" and let them observe how Shakspeare perpetually makes his beautiful uses of the simple English word, and is even content to make it shorter and simpler yet, as in the touching line that tells so much of the guilt-wasted soul of Macbeth

"I'gin to grow a-weary of the sun."

Let me exemplify this tendency away from the native character of the language in the structure of sentences as well as in the choice of words. I refer to the frequent abandonment of that peculiarly characteristic arrangement which puts a preposition at the end of a sentence. This is eminently an English idiom, and nothing. but prejudice arising from misapplied analogy with the Southern languages, and the propensity to make style more formal and less idiomatic, could ever have led any one to suppose this construction to be wrong. The false fastidiousness which shuns a short particle at the end of a sentence, is fatal often to a force which belongs to the language with its primal character. The superiority of the idiom I am referring to, could be proved beyond question. by examples of the best writing in all the eras of the language. As the error is pretty wide spread, let me cite a few of these. Lord Bacon says, Lord Bacon says, "Houses are built to live in, and not to look on;" and again, "Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out." Any attempt to transpose these separable prepositions would destroy the strength and the terseness of the sentences. Even a stronger example occurs in a passage in one of the great English divines, a contemporary of Bacon's: "Hath God

a name to swear by? . . . Hath God a name to curse by? Hath God a name to blaspheme by? and hath God no name to pray by ?"* The opening sentence of one of Mr. Burke's most celebrated speeches is-"The times we live in have been distinguished by extraordinary events;" Dr. Franklin's phrase, with its twenty-five Saxon and four Latin words: ". William Coleman, then a merchant's clerk about my age, who had the coolest, clearest head, the best heart, and the exactest morals of any man I ever met with." And observe such a sentence as this of Arnold's, "Knowledge must be worked for, studied. for, thought for; and, more than all, it must be prayed for." I really think that people, in writing and speaking, might get over their fear of finding a preposition at the end of their sentences.

But it is not only the Saxon side of the language that is to be prized and cultured: its glory is, in fact, its wonderfully composite character, the Anglo-Norman element, as well as the Anglo-Saxon, contributing to its copiousness and power; and there is no more pleasing study in language, than to observe how, in all the best writers, these elements are harmoniously combined. One of the boldest instances of this has been noticed in these lines in Macbeth, in which two very long words are blended with short ones with singular effect:

"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No! this, my hand will rather
The multitudinous sea incarnardine,

Making the green-one red."‡

*Donne's Sermon on the Penitential Psalms, vol. vi. p. 380. † Arnold's Miscellaneous Works, p. 234. On the Education of the Middle Classes. Also, Hallam's Literature of Europe, vol. iv. 535. ‡ A less familiar line occurs to me where, at the end of a series of

A well-known line in the same tragedy reminds me of another antique quality which has been curiously retained, long after the formal practice of it has been disused, and now prevails peculiarly in all vigorous English prose, as well as poetry: I refer to the use of alliteration, as derived from some of the forms of early poetry in England. If you will take the pains to observe it, you will probably be surprised to find to what an extent it is employed in English literature, both now and formerly. It is a curious study of the language to trace the power that lies in the repetition of a letter in a succession of words; as when Macbeth says,

"Ay, now, I see, 'tis true:

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For the blood-boltered Banquo smiles upon me,
And points at them for his.*

In the versions attached to Retsch's Outlines in French, Italian, Spanish, and German, no one of the languages attempts this tremendous alliteration. I cannot pause upon this quality of style further than to remark, that he who studies the language, will find an interest in observing how beautiful and striking, and, indeed, how natural, this apparently artificial process becomes in the hands of a master

Saxon words, a Latin word is brought in with singular power. In the second part of Henry VI., Suffolk says to Queen Margaret,

"For where thou art, there is the world itself

With every several pleasure in the world;

And where thou art not, desolation." W. B. R.

Or in the incantation,

"the salt-sea shark;

Root of hemlock digg'd; i̇' the dark,
Finger of birth-strangled babe,

Ditch-delivered by a drab." W. B. R.

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