trouble of an exact definition, and submit to be talked to on a level of slipshod impertinent equality-and they are ruining their child's chances as a good talker. An easy mediocrity of speech will be his at best, the same to everybody and for all occasions-no felicities, no variety of key. His wit will be without refinement, his gravity will want weight, no tones will wake a response in his hearer; and probably at critical moments there will be a relapse into the old jargon as the only form at hand. We believe that respect-respect for persons and things-and self-respect, will be found an element in the character of all persons of eloquent speech. The free-and-easy and irreverent in youth fall inevitably into tricks, redundancies, repetitions, and all forms of flat mannerisms, as time gets on. Once have your diction well in hand and the habit of selection continues through life, the memory enriching its stores, and practice adding facility in the use of them. Nor ought we to omit, in speaking of respect as an intellectual trainer, to point out the importance in this relation of respectful attention. The habit of listening is not now inculcated as a duty with the same sternness as in old-fashioned days. Listening to elders and betters is not the golden opportunity it was once regarded. Interruption is easier now, and consequently listening more an exercise of mere patience, than in the days when to interrupt a speaker of weight or note on any account was simply impossible.

Respect, as a moral influence and motive, prevents this education of the powers taking a conscious form. Nothing would be worse than deliberate pains in the young to talk fine, or, indeed, to give much thought to it for talking's sake. It would not only be mischievous to the

character, but also defeat its object, if pursued with purposes of display. Of course neither moral motives. nor care can make a good talker, who is born as well as made; but together they will secure a modest success, propriety of diction as a certainty, and some characteristic grace. The words shall not only be well chosen, but flavoured with the speaker's idiosyncrasies. For the habit of choosing his words keeps a man well together. Those who talk in the popular phraseology are specimens of a period; we do not think of them as individuals. Acting in a body they are destructives, precipitating inevitable change.

After all, fashion is as omnipotent a power in the clothing of our thoughts as of our bodies: change in each is equally inevitable; nobody can es cape the fashion of his day or defy it with impunity. Why do good words go out of use when there are no better, if as good, to supply their places? How is it that writers let slip the words that suited their predecessors, and which, it would seem, must necessarily present them selves first to their use? Do men's ears get tired of a sound, and consciously crave for a change, or is the whole an unconscious process? As thought varies, must its livery vary? will not the adjectives of one period do justice to the estimates of another? Is it in a sort of interregnum that our youth accept a few arbitrary signs? There is nothing that people do not get tired of in time, and incline to discard for something fresh; or if its matter is too important or too venerable to be thrown over, that does not grow old and unfamiliar. Nothing is stationary. The very words we use are moving out of the habit of men's tongues, though it may be with the pace of a glacier. Our great-grandchildren will detect something quaint and unfamiliar in our

:

simplest utterances, for which we can imagine no substitute. A trivial word will have gone out of use, or have been voted vulgar, or be formal and pedantic, or society will have adopted another idiom. It is the part of genius to keep things stationary, and certain forms well in use, so that the ear shall never lose the sound of them; but genius tires in its turn, and sometimes sets the example of rejection. Thus Goldsmith derides the epithets "copious and ingenious" lavished in his day among the mob of authors; the one has ceased to convey flattery, the other is out of fashion so Dr Newman using the word " remarkable" says, "it, along with 'earnest' and 'thoughtful,' have been so hacked of late," that he cannot apply them without an apology. It is in the power, no doubt, of affectation or vulgarity irredeemably to degrade a word. This is, we suppose, the reason why "sweetheart has gone out of polite use, though we have no form of tenderness to supply its place, and are positively embarrassed for the want of it; and let us venture to adduce another instance-a word which De Quincey considers too shocking to write, and which he can only indicate by its Latin synonym. The reader will find it embedded in the following passage from Addison, who, as the Spectator,' joins a party of coffee-house politicians in angry discussion over the "Curious Libel" in his last number. "In his next sentence," cries one, "he gives a plain innuendo that our posterity will be in a sweet p-ckle. What does the fool mean by his pickle? why does he not write it at length if he means honestly?" "I have read over the whole sentence," says I, "but I look upon the parenthesis in the belly of it to be the most dangerous part, and as full of insinuations as it can hold."

We own we have written the word without repugnance; we have no desire to replace it by "stomach," though De Quincey does propose it as the universal substitute. Moreover, we have known the claims of hunger so forcibly expressed through its agency, that we doubt the right of cultivated humanity to recoil from it. There are times when it must occur to the inner ear as the only word adequate to the occasion. In a mother's distress we have heard it more pathetic than the most eloquent periphrasis. However, the word has never been in polite social use, and certainly we do not desire it to be taken up now. We only wish it to hold its place unashamed where our best authors have seen fit to put it. Our language would be poorer for its extinction. But there are words against which no reproach can be brought, which seem to us part of the very substance of our language, without which it would cease to be English, which are gradually slipping out of our written tongue. Have our readers observed how

commence " is elbowing "begin' out of print? We may look through whole columns of a newspaper without finding it. The weather never begins to mend, but commences to improve. By the time our revisionists have got to the Book of Numbers they may be expected to reject the present form of Moses' awful an nouncement as an archaism, and for "The plague is begun " we shall then read "The plague has commenced." Dryden, if he had lived now, would have had to write, "The lady in the spotted muff commenced," as most harmonious to modern ears. Such vital changes, we believe, generally come from below: as the murderer, in his confession, says his victim "commenced crying when I shook hands to part with her," instead of "began to cry." Cultivated

cars cling to simplicity, but the many carry the day; and with the many "commence" is genteeler than "begin," and conveys more the idea of the speaker having been brought up at an academy; till at last it is the word that occurs first to ears in which the familiar echoes should still linger; and "begin" is nowhere. As a curious instance of this, take the following passage from a writer quoted in the Times' upon the rising of the Nile :

"Now, though the commencement of the rise of the Nile is anxiously looked forward to by the Egyptians, as begetting hope of good crops and abundance, yet it is not by any means a criterion of a good Nile, which alone can realise that hope. Thus the Nile of last year commenced to rise so early as the 17th of June, and rose fairly well for about twenty days, and then stopped for fifteen days, and ultimately finished off at a rise of 193 feet only on the 11th of September, and made a bad Nile. Again, the Nile is subject to make false starts; the Nile of 1869 made five such false starts, and that of 1872, three, both commencing their serious rise on the 1st of July respectively. To show the uncertain ́ and capricious nature of the Nile at the commencement of the rise, that of 1868 commenced on the 1st of July; 1869, on the 10th of June," &c. &c.

"Commence," we know, is an old word, and a good word, indispensable in its place; but "begin" for most common purposes is a better, and has a right to the first turn, to be uppermost in the writer's mind, though he may see reason to take the other for variety's or for the sound's sake. In the same way elect for "choose is coming into more general use than its awkwardness (to our ears) should have made possible. People elect what line of conduct they shall follow, what road they shall go, what dress they shall put on. Balance, long familiar to American ears, is becoming so to ours. In an account of a ship on fire we read those

saved remained the "balance" of the night watching the burning wreck. People of a certain school now state rather than say what is in their minds. And the adverb over for above has stolen into the diction of cultivated writers-over a hundred pounds, over a thousand men. There is really nothing to be said against it: the one is as correct as the other. It is a matter of taste; but on our ears over jars, and painfully diverts the attention from its use to its sound. "Outcome" is another novel introduction, we suppose called for, it has slipped into such general use. But surely no

convenience should reconcile our ears to that dreadful novelty, that Cockney-gossiping invention, "disagreeables," which is stealing into print where we should not have expected to find it.

These exits and entrances of words must be constantly going on. Those who have lived through a generation or two must have noted how many have been introduced, or have changed their ground in their own time. Allusions to their introductions and changes meet us constantly in our reading. Thus Banter, Mob, Bully, Bubble, Sham, Shuffling, and Palming were new words in the 'Tatler's' day, who writes, "I have done my utmost for some years past to stop the progress of Mobb and Banter, but have been plainly borne down by numbers, and betrayed by those who promised to assist me." Reconnoitre, and other French terms of war, are ridiculed as innovations in the Spectator.' Skate was a new word in Swift's day. "To skate, if you knew what that means," he writes to Stella. "There is a new word coined within a few months," says Fuller,

"called fanatics."

Locke was accused of affectation in using idea instead of notion. "We have been obliged," says the 'World,'

"to adopt the word police from the French." Where we read in another number, "I assisted at the birth of that most significant word flirtation, which dropped from the most beautiful mouth in the world, and which has since received the sanction of our most accurate Laureate in one of his comedies." Ignore was once sacred to grand juries. "In the interest of" has been quoted in our time as a slang phrase just coming into meaning. Bore has wormed itself into polite use within the memory of man. Wrinkle is quietly growing into use in its secondary slang sense. Muff we have read from the pen of a grave lady, writing on a grave subject, to express her serious scorn. Most of these words are received as necessities into the language. Some, like "humbug," are still struggling into respectability. In the middle of the last century it was denounced

as

"the uncouth dialect of the Huns, the jabber of Hottentots." Another writer puts it into the mouth of a party of giggling girls, who pronounce some one-whom he suspects to be himself-an odious, horrible, detestable, shocking HUMBUG. "This last new-coined expression," he observes, "sounds absurd and disagreeable whenever it is pronounced; but from the mouth of a lady it is shocking, detestable, horrible, and odious." Yet so pointedly does it hit a blot in humanity, so necessary has it become to the vituperative element in our nature, that neither mankind nor womankind can do without it. The fastidious De Quincey is eloquent in its praise: "Yet neither is it any safeground of absolute excommunication from the sanctities of literature, that a phrase is entirely the growth of the street. The word humbug, for instance, rests upon a rich and comprehensive basis; it cannot be rendered

adequately either by German or by Greek, the two richest of human languages; and without this expressive word we should all be disarmed for one great case, continually recurrent, of social enormity. A vast mass of villainy that cannot otherwise be reached by legal penalties, or brought within the rhetoric of scorn, would go at large with absolute impunity were it not through the Rhadamanthean aid of this virtuous and inexorable word."

And as words come in, so for no obvious reason they go out. Why has that excellent word "parts" become obsolete

"The rest were rebels, but to show their parts"?

Why is merry quaint, and scarcely to be used in its best genial sense of friends in cheerful con

verse? And "gust" for "taste"why did it not hold its ground? And again distaste," one of the words that has gone down. Barrow writes, "It is our duty to be continually looking inward upon ourselves, observing what it is that we love and readily embrace, what we distaste and presently reject." The latest use we know of it is by the Yorkshire Local Preacher, "There are three things that I distaästPride, Flatterosity, and Hypocriss." Why does "coarse" sound uncouth in the refined Addison's lines

"We envy not the warmer clime that lies In ten degrees of more indulgent skies; Nor at the coarseness of our heaven repine,

Though o'er our heads the frozen Pleiads shine"?

Why, on the other hand, do epithets and illustrations that to Dr Johnson's ear debase a noble passage, accommodate themselves so easily to our modern taste?" The dunnest smoke of hell," "The keen knife," "The blanket of the dark," expressions which alternately wake