Americanisms

III.

ALREADY I begin to see that The Atlantic is a kind of Oneida Community in the republic of letters. At least it is so in the use of mutual criticism as a mode of discipline for its contributors. If one of us makes a slip, or is supposed by another to have made one,—which comes to much the same thing,—he is pretty sure to hear of it next month in the Club, where he finds himself subjected to a form of castigation which is in use not only under the government of Father Noyes, but in the estimable Society of Friends. I remember having seen in my boyhood one of my companions, whose family belonged to that social order, dealt with in this way. He had been guilty of some outrageous piece of mischief, and the maternal magistrate arraigned him in this fashion: “Now. Robert, thee has been a very bad boy; thee ought to be ” — I winced for my playmate; for I expected the conclusion common under such circumstances among the world’s people. But no; the threatened punishment was of another kind. The judgment pronounced was, “ Thee ought to be talked to.” I discovered afterwards that this was a common mode of correction among the Quakers; a kind of family pillory, in which a culprit was set up to have his ears bored with sharp sayings, and to be pelted with dead mysteries and moralities, and rotten proverbs. Perhaps it was a figurative memorial of the persecution to which the sect had been subjected in its early days, both in the Old England and in the New. I am not quite sure that it was not a more dreadful punishment than the veritable whipping-post. Certainly it was more effectual, if we may judge by the sober and discreet carriage of the people who put it in practice. However this may be, it is manifest that some of my collaborators think that I too ought to be talked to. I am quite willing to submit myself to this chastening: first, because I believe that the discipline is good; and next, because I have the right, which the poor Quaker boy did not have, of talking back. Of this, however, I shall not avail myself, unless it seems to me that I can do so for the benefit of my readers.

As to words and phrases peculiarly American, I am asked how I would regard cases where a partial variation in the form of things has led to a variation in words between the two nations. The answer is plain enough. A variation which is not merely in fashion and style, but which is sufficient to produce a really new thing, justifies a new name; and this is not an Americanism. Indeed, among the few real Americanisms in language, no small proportion is composed of words which are improperly applied to things which we do not possess. For example, we, that is the Episcopalians among us, speak of the rector of a parish; and our boys, and I am sorry to say some of our men, shoot what they call robins. Now there is not a rector or a robin in America. A rector is a clergyman who has certain legal relations to a legally constituted community known as a parish, and who has rights there even against his parishioners. We have no such religious officers. Our socalled rectors are merely the ministers of Episcopalian churches or congregations; and their parishes have a purely conventional existence; their not very easily determinable limits being set by the Episcopal church for its own purposes. Our robin is a tawny-breasted thrush; a bird of a family quite different from that of the robin. An Englishman will shoot almost anything that flies or that runs, except a fox; but he would about as soon shoot his grandmother as shoot a robin. And so, I think, should we, if we had the tiny little crimson-breasted creature that haunts the house, perches upon the window-sill and peers through the pane with one - sided glance, and flies trustingly almost into the hand that brings its breakfast of crumbs. These perversions of words are, perhaps, unavoidable; but they are to be deplored, for they are the occasion of misapprehension, and not unfrequently they are accompanied by a perversion of sentiment. We have no such associations with our so-called robin as those which pervade all England and are illustrated in all English literature in regard to the redbreast.

To come to the particulars of my querist : he asks if I should call one of our railway cars a carriage. In strict propriety it might so be called; for a carriage is anything that carries. Oddly enough, while he was putting the question I was answering it in the article that, was published in the last Atlantic, in which the nomenclature of railways had ample, although incidental, illustration, so far as I could giye it. I must, however, correct one trifling error made by my Club critic in saying that the vehicles on English railways are “ modeled on private carriages.” They are, or were originally, modeled on the old stage-coach. They are even now, as I remarked, sometimes called coaches; and a few of the old ones still retain traces of the external form of the obsolete vehicle which they have displaced. I should not call one of our cars a coach, simply because a car is not a coach. Pushing his inquiry farther, my critic asks, “ When Mr. White goes to his office by the horse-car, for instance, does he call that mode of communication a tramway? If not, does he not violate his own canon?” I certainly do not call a horse-car a tramway, nor should I do so in England. But not to be as sharply critical upon my fellow contributor as he is upon me, I should not say that I went by tramway, or even by railway. It would not be necessary to do so, or natural. Unless we are pedantic, we do not go into such particulars. We take the car to our offices and the train to Washington, or, if we are worthy of such translation, to Boston.

But, to touch a point of much more importance, suppose Mr. W. did violate his own canon ? What of that? Is the canon therefore any the less binding? I cannot see that it is. The culprit in question is human, although he is permitted, and has in past years been permitted, to write for The Atlantic. Ho is but a. poor mortal creature, and fallible, although he has often been to Cambridge. Having had these privileges, is it at all strange that he should know what is right, that he should be able to see and to say what is the correct thing? And on the other hand, being, as lie confesses, an erring man, born in the city and county of New York, can he be expected always to live up to his knowledge? I trow not. He would not presume to take such a position for himself. Indeed, I doubt that he would do so even if he had played on Boston Common, graduated at Harvard, and lived in Beacon Street. But would his falling from grace invalidate the doctrines that he preached? Far from it. There must be grace, or he could not fall.

Seriously, the argumentum ad hominem, ever a poor resort, is conspicuously feeble when it is used against a doctrine because he who advocates it does not practice what he preaches. In language, above all things, evil communications corrupt good manners. From the very nature of language a man will, a man must, be influenced in his speech by what he hears day by day; and he may thoughtlessly, or even consciously, use words and phrases which are offensive to his taste and condemned by his judgment. I have had occasion, in connection with this subject, to say before that there was never a sillier mandatory maxim than “ Physician, heal thyself.” Considering it even in regard to the function of the medical man, it is so. A physician may be dying of a disease for which neither he nor any one of his professional brethren can give him a remedy; and yet he may from his death-bed prescribe a course of life or a medicine which may relieve others. Proverbs are often the folly of one man perpetuated by the lazy thoughtlessness of many. As to what I say or write about language, let it be judged upon its own merits, and not by my manner of speaking or writing. I make no pretense about the latter, and, to tell the truth, take little thought of it; and I may be like the tipsy lecturer upon temperance who furnished in his own person his dreadful example. Let no man think to frighten me by showing, if he can, that I have violated my own canon, or seek to shield himself under the cloak of my errors. My pages may be spotted with faults, and they are none the less faults, but rather the more, if I should know better than to commit them; nor because of them is anything the less true that I may declare. I hope that none of my readers are of that sort that will not even serve God if the devil bids them; if so, they are less wise than I should like those to be for whom I write,

So, truly and finely, Mr. Trowbridge sings.

One critic kindly and privately points out to me an error which he thinks that he has found in my assertion that a certain meaning of conclude is not given in any English dictionary from Bailey downward; and he cites this definition as given by Bailey: “ Conclude, to resolve upon, to determine.” He is quite right as to the existence of the definition ; and he might have gone back farther than Bailey and found the same definition, “to resolve upon,” in Kersey’s English Dictionary, 1721; and going back yet farther, more than a century, he would find the very same definition of conclure in Cotgrave’s French and English Dictionary, 1611. But “ resolve upon” does not here mean to intend, to resolve to do. My correspondent evidently referred to Bailey of 1735, or some earlier edition; had he turned to the folio edition of 1755, he would have found the following passage from Addison given as illustrative of the use of conclude in the sense of to resolve upon:—

So Dryden says of Ben Jonson: “ To conclude of him; as he has given us the most correct plays, so in the precepts which he has laid down in his discoveries we have as many and as profitable rules for the perfecting the stage as any which the French can furnish.” Conclude here means to resolve upon the problem of a man’s life or professional career; to pass a final (conclusive) judgment upon it.

May I here venture to say that it is generally safe to assume that a man of ordinary intelligence and of honest purpose may be trusted as to an assertion of fact which he makes upon a subject to which he has given special attention; unless, indeed, he is unwise enough to make a negative assertion of exclusive force upon a subject of which bis knowledge, however wide, is not complete. I know the value of accuracy, of which George Eliot, somewhere in that greatest of her books, Romola, makes old Bardi say that it “is the soul of scholarship;” an aphorism the truth and the importance of which no one capable of appreciating scholarship would for a moment question. But on the other hand, a great scholar, Monier Williams, says in the preface to his Sanskrit Dictionary — his second — that his confidence in the accuracy of human beings in general has been painfully shaken in the course of his great work; and this also presents a truth in literature, as every attentive student must know. How then are these two sayings to be reconciled? If accuracy is the soul of scholarship, and no scholar is accurate, scholarship is soulless, dead; it is deprived of the very conditions of its being.

It is thus that both these sayings are true. Almost every intelligent and honest man who gives himself to study, and lays before the world the fruit of his reading and his thought, is accurate in essential things. In that which is nonessential, incidental, accidental, unimportant to his purpose, he may be more or less accurate or inaccurate, according to his temper and the circumstances under which he works; but as to the point to which he gives his attention and asks the attention of others, it is very rarely indeed that an intelligent and honest writer is not accurate. Indeed, it will be manifest, on a moment’s reflection, that if it were not so literary criticism would be effectually checked; it would stand still; it could hardly exist. But a man who is thus accurate may in minor matters be inaccurate, merely because he has not the time or the inclination to look closely after unessential matters of detail. He may call a man James whose name was John, may give the date of his birth as 1700 when it was 1701, may assign a quotation to the wrong page or the wrong volume, and may not quote a passage with literal accuracy in all its parts. Now, if the question is, what was the year of a certain man’s birth, or what his name, or on what page a passage maybe found, accuracy upon these points is of essential importance and will be sought by an earnest writer with the utmost diligence; but otherwise it seems to me, although desirable, not to be a matter to vex one’s soul or to waste much of one’s time about. And if in a passage quoted the essential word or phrase is right, positively and relatively, the rest must be left to the ordinary chances of memory, of copying, and of proof-reading. This, at least, my readers may assume as my way of working, such all the accuracy that I strive for,—perhaps because I can make but the humblest pretensions to the title of scholar.

To turn more closely to our subject: a British critic, who does not wish his name to be known, and who, although he informs me that he is in no way connected with literature, writes with a clearness and an idiomatic soundness to which many of its professors do not attain, as well as with a courtesy which some of them neglect, sends me some observations upon language in this country which have intrinsic interest, and a few of them, at this stage of this series of articles, some value. He says, “ Some years ago I visited America for the first time; but neither then nor subsequently had I the pleasure of acquainting myself with New England and New Englanders, my destination being the plains of Kansas and the newly settled districts there. The people I came in contact with were for the most part Northerners, and either natives of New England or the sons or grandsons of New Englanders. I was surprised to find that many words and phrases obsolete in this country were in daily use among them, and that these so-called Americanisms belonged to the English of Shakespeare, Bunyan, and the Bible.” He then goes on to mention some of the words and phrases which are “ obsolete ” in England. Before remarking upon these, let me say that this notion that the English of Shakespeare, Banyan, and the Bible bas been preserved here, but has passed out of use in England, though it bas some foundation, — a very little, —has not enough to bear all that has been built upon it. Misled by my elders and superiors, I yielded too much to it when I wrote Shakespeare’s Scholar and edited Shakespeare’s works. Studying more, and thinking more for myself afterwards, I found reason to change the opinion which I had taken up partly because it was made to my hand.¹ Not less erroneous, as I shall show hereafter, is the opinion, which has been recently broached, that the English of America is about a century behind that of the mother country; that is, that we speak and write the language of the grandfathers or the great-grandfathers of the Englishmen of to-day. The difference between the speech of the two is very slight, hardly perceptible to the notnicely-critical reader of Richardson, or even of Fielding; and the speech of the grandfather is not more in vogue here than it is in England.

And now as to some of the words which my kind and intelligent British critic found to be Americanisms only because they were obsolete English. They will surprise many British as well as some American readers.

“ Slough,” he says, “which is very common in the West, I have never heard used colloquially here; and the first time I heard it, it reminded me of the Slough of Despond, showing that in conversation it was a total stranger to my ears, though I was born and bred in this country.” Now I was not born and bred in England, but I have heard slough used there colloquially by educated people again and again. And it appears frequently— just as frequently as there is necessity for its use—in all English literature, modern, that of this very day, as well as that of the past. See: in a book which I happened to be reading just when this letter came to me, The Seven Curses of London, by James Greenwood, the “ Amateur Casual-Pauper,” I met

with these instances: “ It is terribly hard to struggle out of a slough of laziness in which a man has lain for a length of time with nothing to do but to open his mouth and permit other people to feed him.” (Page 258.) “Is there one who, blessed with means, can find delight in raiding from the slough of despond a poor wretch stranded on the bank of the black river of despair? ” (Page 268.)

“Pshaw,” he says, is “a common Western expression, but met by me only in the tales of thirty or forty years ago.” This is amazing. The word is as common in daily English speech as “rubbish ” or “ nonsense,” and even more so than the horrid slang “ rot.” And in the very book to which I have just referred I find the following passage quoted from A Thousand Temperance Facts and Anecdotes, a book than which there could hardly be one more adapted to popular apprehension: “‘Pa, does wine make a beast of a man? ’ ‘ Pshaw, child, only

once in a while,’ ” (Seven Curses, etc., page 370.) And I asked (not because I felt, any need of so doing) an English gentleman very lately arrived here, whose general culture and whose knowledge of such subjects would give great weight to his opinion upon a matter of this kind, even were it one of doubt, delicacy, and importance — I do not know why I should not mention the name of my friend, Mr. Charles Welford — about it; and his reply was that there was no limitation to the use of the word in England; it was neither obsolete nor provincial, neither vulgar nor fine, and it was upon the lips of all classes in all parts of the country. And such is the testimony of all English literature of the day.

“ I ’ll build me a stable, I ’ll get me a horse. This use of me after a verb,” my British correspondent says, “ is quite common in the West; and when I first heard it it sounded almost ludicrous, reminding me, as it did, of Solomon’s ‘ I gat me men singers and women singers.’ ” If the last example was amazing, this is astounding. For this use of me, her, him, us, with a dative sense, after a verb is a peculiar English idiom; these words have been so used for centuries, and are now so used in all kinds of English speech and writing, from the prattle of the nursery and the talk of peasants up to the rhapsodies of poets and the debates of peers. It is as common now as it was three hundred years ago; so common that there is not a single idiom that, occurs to me as commoner. As I turned the leaves of the book mentioned, looking for matter quite other than the trivialities of verbal criticism. I happened to light, on the very phrase that seemed to my correspondent so ridiculous. “ ‘ if I entrust a builder with so much timber, so much stone, and so many bricks to build me a house, and I afterwards discover that by clever dodging he has contrived to make me believe,’ ” etc. (Seven Curses, etc., page 170.) But this idiom is so common, so essentially English, so pervasive of the whole body of English speech and literature now as well as heretofore, that to support or even to illustrate it by examples would be childish.

This writer is not alone, however, among intelligent and cultivated men in such misapprehension of the facts of language, as is shown by some Shakespearean fumbling and blundering over the word sheer, and by a little experience of mine in regard to it. In the Taming of the Shrew, Sly the tinker says that, he is “ fourteen pence on the score for sheer ale; ” and from the middle of the last century until the publication of Shakespeare’s Scholar there was discussion over so simple a phrase as sheer ale. It was conjectured by various commentators, from Malone to Collier and Singer, to mean shearing ale, and shire ale (as, Warwickshire ale), and ale drunk on sheer Tuesday, and also to be the name of a pure and potent liquor otherwise known as stark beer. In Shakespeare’s Scholar, for the discomfiture of the Collier emendator, I showed, what it seemed to me should need no showing, that sheer ale was merely ale alone, ale only. Temporarily misled by the apparent significance of the failure of the British critics to apprehend its meaning, I referred to it as one of those English expressions which had survived here, although they seem to have died out in the mother country. But the word is as common in English speech and writing of the present day and of the immediate past as any other required to express an idea of its kind. It is inherent in the colloquial and literary phraseology of the present day, as of that of the fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers of this generation of Englishmen; so common that the following examples are at once at my hand without seeking: “ These and such as these may truly ascribe their pauperism to neglect on somebody’s part; but by far the greater number are what they are through sheer misfortune. (Seven Curses of London, page 2.) “ Victory of sheer brain over circumstance pleases us, even in an adversary.” (London Spectator, April 13, 1878, page 563.) However, such being the position of this word in the English language as it is spoken in England, when, on the publication of Shakespeare’s Scholar, the Earl of Ellesmere, then president of the Shakespeare Society, wrote me a kind letter about the book, one of the passages which he selected for commendation was this very one upon sheer, and he thanked me for clearing up the obscurity about it. But the passage deserved no commendation and I no thanks for it; a school-boy in either country should not have blundered over Sly’s “ fourteen pence for sheer ale.” And yet it is well known that Lord Ellesmere owed his position as president of the Shakespeare Society not to his rank alone, or even to his taste, but to his very considerable literary culture and accomplishment.

From what has gone before it is manifest how unsafe it is, even for persons of intelligence and education, to assert that words and phrases are obsolete or uncommon in England, or peculiar in any way to America. No one should venture to do this without having a far wider and more minute acquaintance with the English of the day, as it is spoken and written in England, than has been exhibited by any person who has yet written upon the subject. It would seem safe to assume that the testimony of such a person as my correspondent, before referred to, a man of intelligence and education who has lived in both countries, in regard to the language of his contemporaries was to be relied upon, and all the more so because he is plainly acquainted with the English of the past as well as that of the present. But we have seen that he declares certain words obsolete, and so strange as to be almost ludicrous in their effect, when in fact they are of the commonest occurrence in the daily speech and writing of Englishmen. The same incongruity between opinion and fact is manifested in the comments of the Shakespearean commentators and Lord Ellesmere upon the word sheer. The case seems to be that many persons hear and read certain words without remarking them, until they are suddenly brought to their attention in the writings of an old author, or the speech of a new community; and then, as they happen not to have used those words themselves (and such limitations of the vocabularies of individuals are very common), they seem strange, and are assumed at once to be obsolete or provincial. Only by some such supposition can such mistakes as those which I have noticed be accounted for.

Upon darn the same correspondent remarks: “ In your quotation of English authorities for darn will you allow me to take exception to Anthony Trollope? I think that any educated Englishman of the present day would use the word as an Americanism, — American slang being rather in vogue just now. Among the English peasantry I believe darn is common.” Just so. But neither do educated Americans use darn, except very rarely and jocosely as rustic slang. The word has, therefore, according to the testimony of this intelligent British critic, precisely the same position in both countries. The educated Englishman, however, when he uses the word, does so with the mental protest and reservation that it is an Americanism, when in fact it is a part of rustic speech in his own country just as it is here. He thus makes the very mistake and commits the very injustice against which I am combating.

Our British critic thus summarizes the result of his observations: “ It is undeniable, I think, that although America has developed many new words and phrases (the most of which I believe and hope are only ephemeral), there are a great many so-called Americanisms that are to be found in English writers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and that in fact America has preserved to the English language many words that England has forgotten.” The first of these suppositions is discreet as well as considerate. Of the words and phrases referred to as developed here, by far the greater number are of the most ephemeral nature, and will pass away like the Bowery boy and his vocabulary, referred to in a previous article. Many of them are not even of ephemeral prevalence, but mere productions of individuals extravagantly ingenious in vulgar speech, which are copied into and used by unimportant newspapers for the mere sake of their vulgarity and their supposed humor. They are also much fewer in number than is generally believed. The supposition that many obsolete English words are in use here we have already seen is a great exaggeration of the fact. A few such there are: but many of those which are supposed to be obsolete by insufficiently informed philological observers, such for instance as Dr. Hall, are not so, as I have shown in a previous article and in the present. The mere fact that a man does not remember to have met with a certain word, which is used in America, in his reading of English authors, or to have heard it used colloquially by educated Englishmen, does not warrant him in setting it down as an Americanism. Such mere negative testimony is likely to be set aside at any moment, as we have seen, by affirmative evidence of the use of the word by contemporary writers of repute. The fact is illustrated by our British critic before mentioned when he says, “ I was rather amused to learn from your interesting article that Mr. Bartlett considers blackberry an Americanism. . . . As far as my experience of English people goes they all speak of blackberries and blackberry bushes. ” Such positive testimony from one intelligent observer is destructive of the mere negative assertions of a whole college of philologists.

Little room is left me now for particular remark upon words erroneously regarded as peculiar to America; but it will suffice for the dispatch of those coming under letter E, which are comparatively few. Some of those which appear in Mr. Bartlett’s dictionary I shall merely mention as being thoroughly English in origin and in use: these are ear-mark, educational, eel-grass, e'enamost for almost, eend for end, to egg, to egg on, every which way, and expect for think, suppose. The last, like many words stigmatized as “ Americanisms,” is merely’ bad and slovenly English. The misuse is of quite as long standing and is quite as common among good writers in England as here. Even a writer like Dasent affords an example of it: “ But it is an old saying that a story never loses in the telling; and so we may expect it must have been with this story.” (Burnt Njal, preface, page viii.)

Elect. Mr. Bartlett is far from being alone in the supposition that a certain use of this word, as in elect to go, elect to submit, which he gives as examples, is an Americanism. He remarks, “ The Americanism consists in the construction of this verb with a following infinitive.” Let us see how American that construction is.

“ Truly a plain-spoken damsel, perfectly sure of her victim, if she elected to lead him to the altar of sacrifice.” (Wm. Russell, LL. D., Eccentric Personages, London, 1863, page 207.)

“ That fatal passion [jealousy] he [Shakespeare] now elects to paint as the natural fault of the individual.” (Heraud, Inner Life of Shakespeare, page 336.)

“ Miss Prescott, known as Di to her intimates, by reason of her god-parents having in a thoughtless hour elected to call her Dinah.” (Charles Carew, by the author of Dennis Doune, chap, i.)

“ It was no slight thing to say of himself that he had elected to give up the occupation in which he had been engaged for many years.” (Mr. Goschen, M. P., Speech at Lord Mayor’s banquet, January 15, 1866.)

“ This was not very prudent, as the young Galen had elected to establish himself in Bowchester.” (Anthony Trollope, Dr. Thorne, chap, ii.)

“Resolving to stick bravely to the side of the house to which he had elected to belong.” (Idem, chap, viii.)

“ ‘ She won’t care about my boots being dirty.’ So at last he elected to walk.” (Same author, Small House at Allington, iii. 13.)

“ When the opinion had in some sort been left to herself, she had elected to walk back with Harry.” (Same author, The American Senator, chap, vii.)

“ But a noble young lady to whom he offered himself rejected him, to his surprise and indignation, for a beggarly clergyman with a small living, on which she elected to starve.” (Thackeray, The Newcomes, ii. 34.)

“ ‘ I am sure you played very nicely,’ said good-natured Lady Dormer, whom Trafford had elected to escort.” (Mrs. Alexander, The Wooing O’t, chap, xxxi.)

“ And so society elects to be battered about, variously maltreated on a sliding scale of changes.” (Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, Letter xliv., page 184.)

“ The courtesy is misplaced; for we fear the critic will elect to be insulted.” (London Reader, July 1, 1865.)

“ The winner of the queen’s prize [at Wimbledon] may elect to receive his £250 in specie, or in any other shape that he prefers.” (London Times, July 24, 1865.)

“ When he elected to be judged by the solid fruit of his legislation, he ceased to be ranked among conservatives.” (Saturday Review, June, 1873.)

Thus we see that the use of elect, with a following infinitive is so far from being an Americanism that it has the support of the best English writers of the day, including Thackeray, John Ruskin, and London journals of the highest position. Let not my readers suppose, however, that I quote these passages in support of its Englishood with approval. A usage may be undeniably general and yet be bad. Citation of evidence does not imply respect for the thing evidenced. In the treatment of the subject of these articles my own opinions are not to the purpose, and are not obtruded. The question is merely whether this word or that phrase is of peculiarly American origin and usage. But of “ elect to ” I will say that to my taste it is a vile phrase, as vile as “ most beautified.” If a man chooses to do a thing, let him say that he chooses to do it, and speak plain English. This use of elect to has not been long in vogue, and is, I suspect, of very modern origin.

Engineer. Mr. Bartlett remarks, “ The engine - driver on our railroads is thus magniloquently designated.” True, and it were better not. But English writers do not leave him alone in his verbal magnificence.

“ Regard that able-bodied individual, the leader of the gang, with his great grimy fists, the smut still on his face, and for a moment doubt that he is a deserving laboring man. He is an engineer out of work since last Christmas, and ever since so hard up that he has been unable to spare a penny to buy soap with.” (James Greenwood, The Seven Curses, etc., page 253.)

Esquire. Upon the indiscriminate and therefore unmeaning use of this title I have remarked in Words and their Uses. I shall say here only that there is no peculiar Americanism in such use. It is used in just the same inappropriate way in England; but there there is a level, somewhat indefinite, it is true, below which it does not descend, John Bull always feels that he must draw a line somewhere; and esquire with him usually stops at professional men and merchants, among whom he does not include shopkeepers.

Exercise. The use of this word with a certain moral significance is very generally, but erroneously, supposed to be an Americanism. Mr. Bartlett discreetly omits it from his catalogue. The sense in question will be apprehended from the following passages from a few English writers, past and present, all that it is necessary to bring forward: —

“ She was continually exercised with the affliction of a weak body.” (Bishop Hall, born 1574, died 1656, Autobiography, page xiv.)

“ So many days and nights as they had been exercised with such imminent danger, and had despaired of life together.” (Rev. William Jones, of Nayland, 1726-1803, Sermons, page 444.)

“ One of the greatest favorites of heaven, the patriarch Job, was exercised with these trials.” (Idem, page 467.)

“ Through the whole of that Saturday the town had been much exercised in its belief and expression as to the disposition of the property.” (Anthony Trollope, The American Senator, chap, lxiv.)

“ Within reach of a waiter to suggest beefsteaks, and a railway guard who can substitute the familiar word tickettes for some less intelligible form of demand, he is not too severely exercised in his mind.” (Saturday Review, October 31, 1868.)

Nor does this phrase seem to me altogether lovely: —

Enjoy. “ ‘ To enjoy bad health,’ ” Mr. Bartlett remarks, “is a whimsical yet by no means uncommon expression,” — in America of course. I should call it rather ridiculously absurd than whimsical; and as to its being not uncommon, that is “ thereafter as it may be.” I have never seen or heard it used by educated writers or speakers except jocosely. But that it is not American, see this evidence from one of the most admirable female writers of the day: —

“ It is not the manual workers alone who, as they say in Leicestershire, enjoy very poor health.” (English Matrons, London, 1873, page 128.)

The phrase is merely the result of a blundering misapprehension of the meaning of language by people whose mental fingers are all thumbs. It is merely nonsense and bad English; but, like much other nonsense and bad English, it ignorantly is set down as an Americanism or as provincial to some shire. I have no doubt that the estimable authoress of English Matrons might find it in use among the rustic folk of other shires than Leicester.

Richard Grant White.