will make oath before any Justice of the Peace. One was called the Forum Julium, one the Forum Augustum, a third the Forum Transitorium: what the fourth was called is best known to itself, for really I forget. But if anybody says that perhaps it was called the Forum Landorium, I am not the man to object; for few names have deserved such an honor more, whether from those that then looked forward into futurity with one face, or from our posterity that will look back into the vanishing past with another.

ORTHOGRAPHIC MUTINEERS.

WITH A SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE WORKS OF WALTEE SAVAGE LANDOR.

As we are all of us crazy when the wind sets in some particular quarter, let not Mr. Landor be angry with me for suggesting that he is outrageously crazy upon one solitary subject of spelling. It occurs to me, as a plausible solution of his fury upon this point, that perhaps in his earliest school-days, when it is understood that he was exceedingly pugnacious, he may have detested spelling, and (like Roberte the Deville) have found it more satisfactory for all parties, that when the presumptuous schoolmaster differed from him on the spelling of a word, the question between them should be settled by a stand-up fight. Both parties would have the victory at times: and if, according to Pope's expression, 'justice rul'd the ball,' the schoolmaster (who is always a villain) would be floored three times out of four; no great matter whether wrong or not upon the immediate point of spelling discussed. It is in this way, viz., from the irregular adjudications upon litigated spelling, which must have arisen under such a mode of investigating the matter, that we account for Mr. Landor's being sometimes in the right, but too often (with regard to

long words) egregiously in the wrong. As he grew stronger and taller, he would be coming more and more amongst polysyllables, and more and more would be getting the upper hand of the schoolmaster; so that at length he would have it all his own way, one round would decide the turn-up; and thenceforwards his spelling would become frightful. Now, I myself detested spelling as much as all people ought to do, except Continental compositors, who have extra fees for doctoring the lame spelling of ladies and gentlemen. But, unhappily, I had no power to thump the schoolmaster into a conviction of his own absurdities; which, however, I greatly desired to do. Still, my nature, powerless at that time for any active recusancy, was strong for passive resistance; and that is the hardest to conquer. I took one lesson of this infernal art, and then declined ever to take a second; and in fact, I never did. Well I remember that unique morning's experience. It was the first page of Entick's Dictionary that I had to get by heart; a sweet sentimental task; and not, as may be fancied, the spelling only, but the horrid attempts of this depraved Entick to explain the supposed meaning of words that probably had none; many of these, it is my belief, Entick himself forged. Among the strange, grim-looking words, to whose acquaintance I was introduced on that unhappy morning, were abalienate and ablaqueation –— most respectable words, I am fully persuaded, but so exceedingly retired in their habits, that I never once had the honor of meeting either of them in any book, pamphlet, journal, whether in prose or numerous verse, though haunting such society myself all my life. I also formed the acquaintance, at that time, of

6

the word abacus, which, as a Latin word, I have often used, but, as an English one, I really never had occasion to spell, until this very moment. Yet, after all, what harm comes of such obstinate recusancy against orthography? I was an occasional conformist;' I conformed for one morning, and never more. But, for all that, I spell as well as my neighbors; and I can spell ablaqueation besides, which I suspect that some of them can not.

My own spelling, therefore, went right, because I was left to nature, with strict neutrality on the part of the authorities. Mr. Landor's too often went wrong, because he was thrown into a perverse channel by his continued triumphs over the prostrate schoolmaster. To toss up, as it were, for the spelling of a word, by the best of nine rounds, inevitably left the impression that chance governed all; and this accounts for the extreme capriciousness of Landor.

It is a work for a separate dictionary in quarto to record all the proposed revolutions in spelling through which our English blood, either at home or in America, has thrown off, at times, the surplus energy that consumed it. I conceive this to be a sort of cutaneous affection, like nettle-rash, or ringworm, through which the patient gains relief for his own nervous distraction, whilst, in fact, he does no harm to anybody: for usually he forgets his own reforms, and if he should not, everybody else does. Not to travel back into the seventeenth century, and the noble army of short-hand writers who have all made war upon orthography, for secret purposes of their own, even in the last century, and in the present, what a list of eminent rebels against the spelling-book might be called up to answer for

their wickedness at the bar of the Old Bailey, if anybody would be kind enough to make it a felony Cowper, for instance, too modest and too pensive to raise upon any subject an open standard of rebellion, yet, in quiet Olney, made a small émeute as to the word Grecian.' Everybody else was content with one e;' but he recollecting the cornucopia of e's, which Providence had thought fit to empty upon the mother word Greece, deemed it shocking to disinherit the poor child of its hereditary wealth, and wrote it, therefore, Greecian throughout his Homer. Such a modest reform the sternest old Tory could not find in his heart to denounce. But some contagion must have collected about this word Greece; for the next man, who had much occasion to use it—viz., Mitford – who wrote that History of Greece' so eccentric, and so eccentrically praised by Lord Byron, absolutely took to spelling like a heathen, slashed right and left against decent old English words, until, in fact, the whole of Entick's Dictionary (ablaqueation and all) was ready to swear the peace against him. Mitford, in course of time, slept with his fathers; his grave, I trust, not haunted by the injured words whom he had tomahawked; and, at this present moment, the Bishop of St. David's reigneth in his stead. His Lordship, bound over to episcopal decorum, has hitherto been sparing in his assaults upon pure old English words: but one may trace the insurrectionary taint, passing down from Cowper through the word Grecian, in many of his Anglo-Hellenic forms. For instance, he insists on our saying not Heracleida and Pelopida, as we all used to do - but Heracleids and Pelopids. A list of my Lord's barbarities, in many other cases,