almost every one may have something to read which has been deliberately written for him. The reader, not the English language, has been thought of. Hence often the latter is unscrupulously sacrificed to the former. Besides, it is not always the man of refined education who hits the mark. Whoever will produce what men will read is sure of encouragements to appear in print, even though he may chance to make havock of his mother tongue.

The case of our language is made worse by the haste with which a large quantity of matter for the press must of necessity be written. There is no time for correction, much less for revision; and a habit of acquiescence in indifferent composition is soon acquired, while its very faults may often constitute its chief merits in the estimation of many. To this it may be added, that the unhealthy appetite for stories, and especially for what are now called "sensation" tales, purporting to represent various phases of our social life, leads to the professed reporting of conversations rendered accurately as spoken, word for word, and therefore laden with as much of slang and vulgarity as would be heard in real life from the lips of the persons represented in the story; and so slang and vulgarity are propagated, coming out of the book into society, and disfiguring and degrading the language.

The newspapers contribute their large share to this deteri oration. Every considerable town has its one or two daily newspapers. The smaller towns have their weekly "Advertisers" or Gazettes." In London there are many newspapers whose issues are to be numbered by tens of thousands. All of these have their columns filled with matter written in haste. Most of the events recorded and written upon, either had not happened, or were not known, twenty-four hours before the paper was published. Now, only a small number even of educated men can write off-hand what will bear criticism. Something must be sacrificed to smartness and speed, and it is generally accuracy that suffers. But, besides, much of what we read is not the production of educated minds. The penny-a-liner may be excused if Dean Alford detects a fault in every sentence. His education was not such as would qualify him to write pure English. Thus the work of deteriorating the English language is carried on upon a large scale. What is read in print insensibly makes its way into conversation. Blunders are accepted as good examples to be followed. It is curious to notice how an expression may be established in use even in a single day, instead of having to make its way slowly and gradually, with occasional reverses, as would have been the case a very few years ago. An instance occurs to us in the introduction of the word "telegram." If we remember rightly, some such title as "Telegraphic Despatches," or "Telegraphic

Messages," headed that important column of the daily newspapers. One morning a new word, "Telegrams," appeared; before the week's end it had been adopted by every newspaper in the country, and the prompt remonstrances of philologists were uttered in vain.

Our literature being in the state which we have now endeavoured to describe a state upon which the lovers of our language may justly look with anxiety and even alarm-we hail with thankfulness the publication of Dean Alford's Stray Notes. First appearing in a periodical of which the circulation amounts to tens of thousands, and now collected in a small volume of moderate cost, they have set many persons thinking on the subject, and have done something to promote caution and correctness in speaking and writing. As usage is the great law of our phraseology, it is of the first importance that timely warning should be given against the incorporation into the language of cant and vulgar expressions, which usage may too soon sanction and settle into household words, beyond the risk of merited expulsion. Only think, good reader, of American English. Are we not at present enduring the introduction of a spurious compound of native manufacture? The book which sounds a note of warning, and which has already drawn out auxiliaries in the same good service, deserves a hearty welcome; and we are sure that our readers will not regret our devoting a few pages to it, in addition to the brief commendatory notice which we gave to it in March.

After a few introductory paragraphs, the first note on words brings us (p. 10) to those which, in old times, terminated in our, but from some of which the u has been withdrawn, as it is from nearly all of such words in the States of America. The Dean quotes with approval the hope expressed by the late archdeacon Hare, that "such abominations as honor and favor would henceforth be confined to the cards of the great vulgar;" himself deprecating the attempt to reduce our spelling to uniform rule, instead of complying with custom. We concur with him in these conservative tendencies.

We next alight on his remarks (p. 20) on the misuse of the apostrophe, to mark the plural of nouns. We dismiss fly's, gig's, opera's, and grotto's, as due either to the ignorance of the printer, or to an author's mistake. Who's, which's, h's, i's, t's, and the like, are as evidently wrong; and we think that the proper treatment of these, and of some other difficulties suggested by the Dean, is simply to express ourselves in some other way in manuscript or in type, and to leave the "p's" and "q's"-not to meet the eye as ps and qs, or as peas and ques, or in any other form of spelling, but as to be so described only in conversation.

He also speaks (p. 21) of the vehicle, a fly, as sometimes

it

having for its plural either flys or fly's, while it ought to be flies. As between the first and third of these, we are inclined to give the preference to the former, accepting it as now having the sanction of partially established custom. The word need not follow the insect in its plural, if, as we suppose, was intended to profess flight, rapidity of progress, and not resemblance to our little domestic foe and companion. We well remember the two carriages of this kind which were started in an old cathedral town, the one blue, the other yellow, the colours of the two political parties. On one of them was painted an owl, and to both was given the name of a "Fly-bynight," soon to be shortened into Fly. To the new word we think that custom has behaved wisely, by giving this carriage a plural different from that which belongs to a certain class of insect life, to which it bears no resemblance.

But what of the letter which follows the apostrophe when it marks the genitive case? The Dean says, referring to discussions with which we confess that we are not acquainted, that it has been proved that the 's is not an abbreviation of his. The reason he gives is that it fails to account for feminine genitives, and for plural genitives. His account of the matter is, that the 's is derived from the Latin, as, that the senator's son is senatoris filius. But still, what of the plural? The Latin throws no light upon it. We hazard a suggestion. When first the's came into use, it belonged to the masculine genitive singular only; in course of time, it served so well the purpose of marking the genitive and dispensing with the preposition of, while its origin was forgotten, that it came to be used indiscriminately, and might be plural or feminine. It had ceased to be his, and was only known by the generality as the sign of the genitive case.

About the spelling of the plural of money and attorney, (p. 27,) the Dean's note says that to write monies and attornies "is of course wrong." We are prepared, on such a point, to bow to usage, and turning to an old edition of Johnson's Dictionary, printed in 1775, we find "monies" quoted from Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Swift,-but "attorneys" whenever the plural is used by the authorities quoted. This is also the spelling of Blackstone in his Commentaries. It is remarkable that Johnson admits the word "moneyed" in the sense of "rich in money," adding that it is " often used in opposition to those who are possessed of lands." He quotes Bacon and Swift for examples of the use of that word. Dean Alford objects to it as an abuse of language, though he seems to admit that it is favoured by usage.

The word replace is noticed as having two opposite meanings, the one old and natural, the other new, and inconsistent with the derivation of the word. You take down a book from

the shelf, and read it; you replace it, properly speaking, if you place it again where it was before. But according to modern practice, the book is replaced by another and different book being made to occupy its place. To use the Dean's example (p. 80), when Lord Derby went out of office and was replaced by Lord Palmerston, grammar says that Lord Derby was placed in office again by Lord Palmerston, but the reader and hearer actually understand that Lord Palmerston himself took Lord Derby's office. This is an instance of the distortions of language which are so much to be watched against. They have their beginning in ignorance, yet in a while they are established beyond remedy, a vexation to all who love their native tongue, and an additional puzzle to foreigners, who, at best, have a hard time of it when they are trying to master the difficulties of our literature.

The disjunctive "but" (p. 85) is constantly misused by inaccurate writers. "We may say that a man is old, but vigorous, because vigour united with age is something unexpected; but we have no right to say old but respectable, because respectability with old age is not something unexpected." If the scenery of Scotland is described as wild but grand, it is a mistake, wild, but not grand, would be more reasonable, though unlikely to be true.

On punctuation there are some very sensible remarks. There are few who do not need guidance on this point long after they have begun to use the pen; and even much experience does not always work out any rules that may be relied upon. The Dean has no idea of leaving punctuation to the compositors. He says sweepingly (p. 91), that "the great enemies to understanding anything printed in our language are the commas," and that these are inserted by the compositors. He amuses himself and us (p. 92) by the "very provoking case" in which two adjectives belonging to the same noun substantive, are robbed of their actual meaning by wrong punctuation. "Thus, in printing a nice young man, a comma is placed after nice, (a nice, young man,) giving, you will observe, a very different sense from that intended; bringing before us the fact that a man is both nice and young, whereas the original sentence introduced us to a young man that was nice. Thus, too, in the expression a great black dog, printed without commas, everybody knows what we mean; but this would be printed a great, black dog. Take, again, the case where the meaning is intensified by adjectives being repeated, as in the wide wide world, the deep deep sea. Such expressions you almost invariably find printed the wide, wide world, the deep, deep sea, thereby making them, if judged by any rule at all, absolute

nonsense."

This book is not the less interesting or instructive because

we do not always agree with it. We are set thinking by its criticisms, and we are stimulated by it to aim at greater correctness. It fails to convince us of the soundness of its exposition of the Collect for the second Sunday after Easter, in which we pray that we may "daily endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps" of our Lord's most holy life. The Dean maintains (p. 96) that ourselves is the accusative after endeavour, which at the time of the compiling of the PrayerBook was a reflective verb. He appears to rest this assertion on the answer in the Ordination service, "I will endeavour myself so to do.” We are more inclined to think that in both cases the pronoun is employed to add emphasis and intensity to the prayer in the one case, and to the promise in the other, and therefore that the stress often laid upon ourselves by the clergy, in using the collect, is not a mistake.

Another peculiarity of some of the clergy (noticed with disfavour pp. 108, 109,) cannot justly be attributed, we think, either to ignorance or to pedantry; we mean their giving out a lesson from one of the books of the Pentateuch, as a chapter of the book Genesis, or the book Deuteronomy, rather than the book of Genesis, of Deuteronomy, &c. The discussion is useful. It reminds us that we are to look to usage for our rule; but it shows us that usage is diverse, and far from being uniform in the treatment of such cases. We say the city of London or of Cairo; but not the river of Nile, or of Thames. It fails to give any reason for describing the first book of Moses as the book of Genesis. Now, the translators of the Bible did not so designate it, and yet they appear to have used discrimination in giving names to the several books of Holy Scripture. There is the Book of Psalms, for it consists of psalms. The Books of Kings contain the history of the kings. There is the Book of Joshua. There is the Gospel according to St. Matthew. But the first book in the Bible is the first book of Moses, called Genesis. This would justify the announcement of the lesson as a chapter "of Genesis." But it seems more respectful to describe it as "the book Genesis," meaning the book which bears that title; whereas "the book of Genesis" appears to us to convey to the ordinary hearer an erroneous meaning; and we are not entitled to presume so much on the knowledge of the community in general, as to overlook the risk of conveying to them a false impression; and therefore it is, in our judgment, better to prefer as our example "the river Thames," to "the city of London.”

In connecting the two preceding notes, because of their ecclesiastical bearing, we have passed over a notice (p. 97) of a curious change of meaning which has befallen the word "mistake," and which Dean Alford considers to have now become idiomatical. To mistake is to take amiss. But to be mistaken is not to be misunderstood, or taken amiss, but simply to