There is at present a strong effort on the part of scholarly authors to revive some of the hearty old Saxon expressions that have passed out of current use; and this is commendable, for many of these terms are too good to die. Study of the early English from an earnest desire to enlarge and diversify the resources of expression is certainly very valuable. But fondness for old words may also be, like fondness for old china, a fashion, a craze; and when writers adopt them as a mere affectation, their style becomes artificial and fanciful, and loses its earnestness and power.

III. INTELLIGIBLE USE.

The adaptation of the word to the idea, which calls for accurate use, has its limits. The word must also be adapted to the reader; and in general the reader must be supposed not a learned man, but a man of average information and intelligence. So the only safe standard for general literature, as regards the kind of words chosen, is ordinary popular usage.

9. Do not employ in general literature words peculiar to some limited section of the country.

Under such words are included dialectic peculiarities and provincialisms.

These may of course be used with intent, as in a dialect tale, to illustrate the manner of speaking in some particular section, or to preserve the "local coloring"; but to use them through ignorance or carelessness, in a production intended for the general public, is to put too great a burden of interpretation on the reader. Provincialisms outside of their own district have the effect of slang.

EXAMPLES OF PROVINCIALISMS. - The following examples are taken from Hunt's "Principles of Written Discourse":"He is very clever" (in the sense of good-natured); "he took him to do"; "he favors (resembles) his father"; “he is a likely child”; “I reckon you will”; “I will take it kind of you"; "I set no store by it" (Compare, however, as to this last citation, the following from Principal Shairp: "In his estimate of men he (Wordsworth) set no store

by rank or station, little by those 'formalities' which have been misnamed education"). It may here be remarked that, owing to the increased facility of communication between one part of the country and another, many words once provincial are passing into good usage, while others are becoming recognized as vulgarisms.

10. Do not use technical terms where they are not likely to be understood.

Technical terms are terms peculiar to some particular department of science or thought or industry; indispensable therefore in their own sphere, but for the most part unknown outside.

In writings intended only for a particular class of readers, of course the terms peculiar to that class cannot well be dispensed with; they are both the directest and the most accurate that can be employed. To discard them in general literature, in the case of a subject to which they belong, is indeed a makeshift ; but none the less it is a necessity. Even in the case of popularizing a science, the writer should work for the smallest number of technical terms possible, and should give much care to explaining strange words.

EXAMPLE OF SCIENTIFIC TERMINOLOGY. - The following, taken from Carpenter's "Comparative Physiology," will show how little adapted is technical diction to general readers. (The author's italics are omitted.)

“The same formation contains remains of the Rhyncosaurus, which, while essentially Saurian in its general structure, had the horny mandibles, and probably many other characters, of the Chelonia. From the same or a somewhat anterior epoch, we have the remains of the Dicynodon; which seems, along with Chelonian, Crocodilian, and Saurian characters, to have possessed the peculiarly Mammalian feature of a pair of tusks growing from persistent pulps. So, again, the Ichthyosaurus, whilst essentially Saurian in its osteology, had not merely the bi-concave vertebræ of a Fish, but paddles of a Cetacean type, and a pecular sterno-acromial apparatus resembling that of the Ornithorhyncus."

A striking use of technical or semi-technical terms in general literature is found in the writings of such men as Emerson and Holmes. Employed to illustrate ideas in other departments of thought, these terms have the force of a figure of speech, and are

often very suggestive. The use of them thus is a compliment to the increasing culture of people in general, recognizing as it does that learned and scientific ideas are becoming more widely known; but, of course, to use them with true effect, the author needs to be well aware of his liberties and limits, in order to choose only such terms as can be counted on to be understood and enjoyed.

EXAMPLES. — In the following extracts the italicized words and turns of expression have their significance in the fact that they are the peculiar terminology of some science or system of ideas.

From Ralph Waldo Emerson: "The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind, of natural objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated."

From Oliver Wendell Holmes: "All uttered thought, my friend, the Professor, says, is of the nature of an excretion. Its materials have been taken in, and have acted upon the system, and been reacted on by it; it has circulated and done its office in one mind before it is given out for the benefit of others. It may be milk or venom to other minds; but, in either case, it is something which the producer has had the use of and can part with. A man instinctively tries to get rid of his thought in conversation or in print so soon as it is matured; but it is hard to get at it as it lies imbedded, a mere potentiality, the germ of a germ, in his intellect."

11. Do not use an unnaturalized foreign word unless you are sure it expresses an idea for which there is no fitting term in English.

EXAMPLES.-"A keen observer might have seen about him some signs of a jeunesse orageuse, but his manner was frank and pleasing." 'Every one was on the qui vive." "He enjoyed his otium cum dignitate."

The most reprehensible affectation, which needs only a mention, is to interlard one's writing with foreign words and phrases just to show off one's familiarity with the languages thus borrowed from. Such affectation is simply vulgarity. Scarcely less vulgar it is, to parade well-worn classical quotations with the air of scholarliness, as if they represented extensive research on the part of the writer.

A close student of a foreign language, however, who knows its literature and can feel its spirit, often finds ideas more closely fitted with terms in that language than in his own. The different medium of expression seems to develop—or to accompany - a different range of thought. The temptation to borrow, therefore, for the sake of exactness, is often great, and the occasion real; but let the writer study his own language more deeply, and he will find that most of his ideas may find somewhere in English an approximately close expression. Besides, if his skill can transfer a new and valuable meaning to his own vernacular, he is enriching its stores of thought, both for himself and for others.

Words used in travel, or citations of foreign literary expressions, may sometimes be fittingly used in works obviously intended for readers to whom such terms will be familiar and suggestive. The writer thus pays a compliment to the culture of his reader. Mr. Lowell may be mentioned as one who carries this usage to the verge, perhaps sometimes a little beyond the verge, of admissibility.

NOTE.-A specimen paragraph may be cited from Lowell's "Fireside Travels": "You are in Rome, of course; the sbirro said so, the doganiere bowed it, and the postilion swore it; but it is a Rome of modern houses, muddy streets, dingy caffès, cigar-smokers, and French soldiers, the manifest junior of Florence. And yet full of anachronisms, for in a little while you pass the column of Antoninus, find the Dogana in an ancient temple whose furrowed pillars show through the recent plaster, and feel as if you saw the statue of Minerva in a Paris bonnet. You are driven to a hotel where all the barbarian languages are spoken in one wild conglomerate by the Commissionaire, have your dinner wholly in French, and wake the next morning dreaming of the Tenth Legion, to see a regiment of Chasseurs de Vincennes trotting by."

Above the requirements of accuracy, age, and plainness, there is a use of words which evinces the writer's culture: his intimate and delicate knowledge of his resources, his disciplined and educated taste, and his independent choice of what he intelligently recognizes as best. Such may be called scholarly use, and may be observed in the following four rules.

12. Seek to use both Saxon and Classical derivatives for what they are worth, and be not anxious to discard either.

From a comparison of passages containing different proportions of words derived from the two main sources of our language, the Saxon and the Classical, it will be seen that the words of different origin suit themselves naturally to different kinds of thought, and produce dissimilar effects in the tone and movement of the passage.

NOTE.—This fact may be illustrated by comparing a passage whose words are predominantly Saxon with one that freely uses words of Classical derivation.

1. In the first, from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the almost pure Saxon character is like the natural, unstudied, conversational language of common intercourse : —

"Now they had not gone far, but a great mist and a darkness fell upon them all, so that they could scarce for a great while see the one the other. Wherefore they were forced for some time to feel for one another by words, for they walked not by sight. But any one must think that here was but sorry going for the best of them all, but how much worse for the women and children, who both of feet and heart were but tender. Yet so it was, that through the encouraging words of him that led in the front, and of him that brought them up behind, they made a pretty good shift to wag along. The way also was here very wearisome through dirt and slabbiness. Nor was there on all this ground so much as one inn or victualling-house, therein to refresh the feebler sort. Here therefore was grunting and puffing and sighing. While one tumbleth over a bush, another sticks fast in the dirt; and the children, some of them, lost their shoes in the mire. While one cries out, I am down; and another, Ho, where are you? and a third, The bushes have got such fast hold on me, I think I cannot get away from them."

2. In the second, from De Quincey, while the body of the passage must still be Saxon, words of Latin and Greek origin are freely chosen for the sake of precision, and these give to the style, whether designedly or not, a certain formal and learned air:

'Every process in Nature unfolds itself through a succession of phenomena. Now, if it be granted of the artist generally, that of all this moving series he can arrest as it were but so much as fills one instant of time, and with regard to the painter in particular, that even this insulated moment he can exhibit only under one single aspect or phasis, it then becomes evident that, in the selection of this single instant and of this single aspect, too much care cannot