prepositions, syntax and definitions, may better change his pen for a hoe and his inkstand for a watering-pot, and give his days and nights to market-gardening; an occupation equally honorable with literature, and, I can assure him, far more profitable, no less to the world at large than to the individual. With which counsel I bid my readers farewell.

TO JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

MY DEAR SIR:

When your forefather met mine, as he probably did, some two hundred and thirty or forty years ago, in the newly laid out street of Cambridge (and there is reason for believing that the meeting was likely to be about where Gore Hall now stands), yours might have been somewhat more grimly courteous than he doubtless was, had he known that he saw the man one of whose children in the eighth generation was to pay one of his, at the same remove, even this small tribute of mere words; and mine might have lost some of his reputation for inflexibility had he known that he was keeping on his steeple-crown before him without whom there would be no "Legend of Brittany," no "Sir Launfal," no "Commemoration Ode," no "Cathedral," no "Biglow Papers," without whom our idea of the New England these men helped to found would lack, in these latter days, some of the strength and the beauty which make it worthy of our respect, our admiration, and our love, — and without whom the great school that was soon set up where they were standing, to be the first and ever the brightest light of learning in the land, would miss one of its most shining ornaments.

We may be sure that both these honored men spoke English in the strong and simple manner of their time, of which you have well said that it was "a diction which we should be glad to buy back from desuetude at almost any cost," and which

you have done so much to illustrate, to perpetuate, and to enrich. I have as little faith as I believe you have in the worth of a school-bred language. Strong, clear, healthy, living speech springs, like most strong, living things, from the soil, and grows according to the law of life within its seed. But pruning and training may do something for a nursery-bred weakling, and even for that which springs up unbidden, and grows with native vigor into sturdy shapeliness. It is because you have shown this in a manner which makes all men of New England stock your debtors, and proud of their indebtedness, that at the beginning of a book which seeks to do in the weakness of precept what you have done by the strength of example, I acknowledge, in so far as I may presume to do so, what is owing to you by all your countrymen, and also record the high respect and warm regard with which I am, and hope ever to be,

Faithfully your friend,

RICHARD GRANT WHITE.

New York, August 3, 1870.

(a)

PREFACE.

THE

HE following pages contain the substance of the articles which appeared in The Galaxy in the years 1867, 1868, and 1869, under the title now borne by this volume. Some changes in the arrangement of the subjects of those articles, some excisions, and a few additions, have been made; but after reading, with a willingness to learn, nearly all the criticisms with which I was favored, I have found reason for abandoning or modifying very few of my previously expressed opinions.

The purpose of the book is the consideration of the right use and the abuse of words and idioms, with an occasional examination of their origin and their history. It is occupied almost exclusively with the correctness and fitness of verbal expression, and any excursion into higher walks of philology is transient and incidental.

Soon after taking up this subject I heard a story of a professor at Oxford, who, being about to address a miscellaneous audience at that seat of learning, illustrated some of his positions by quotations in the original from Arabic writers. A friend venturing to hint that this