people who love English know to be one of its most subtile charms. The worst of the mischief is that they cannot do it without knowing it. Neither, as a general rule, can any prudent person, who knows a language well enough to talk it fluently, be guilty of a serious Barbarism.

A curious proof of this was an experience I had a little while ago. Touching this subject in some lectures at college, I took up a package of undergraduate themes, some sixty in number, and looked through them for examples of Barbarism. In half an hour or so I found only three; and none of them was flagrant. I then looked through the same package for examples of Impropriety; in less time I had found something near a hundred. "Harvard," for example, wrote one youth, who wished to be superlatively loyal, “ is the peer of all American colleges," which means of course only that Harvard is as good a college as any other.

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Improprieties, then, - the misuse of words which are actually in the language, are by far the commonest and most insidious offences against good use in words. It is convenient to study anything in a somewhat exaggerated form. Crude Impropriety is a perennial form of humor; it is what makes us laugh at the speeches of Mrs. Quickly, of Dogberry, of Mrs. Malaprop; at the spelling of Hosea Biglow or of Josh Billings. And two speeches of Dogberry's will perhaps afford as good examples as we need. When one of his prisoners calls him an ass, he exclaims,

"Dost thou not suspect my place?" and a little later, in regret that the contempt of court is unrecorded, "O that he were here to write me down an ass!" By asking why Dogberry falls into these two errors, we may discover the chief reasons why anybody ever falls into Impropriety. The reasons for the two are distinct: when he says, "Dost thou not suspect my place?" — meaning respect he deliberately uses a bigger word than he can understand; when he says, "O that I had been writ down an ass!" he has lost his head, and so in excitement utters a phrase which in cooler moments he would understand to mean something very different from what he intends. One or the other of these reasons I have found to underlie nearly all the Improprieties I have come across.

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In point of fact, the charm of novelty and mystery which surrounds any unfamiliar phrase is profoundly fascinating. I have always sympathized with the man in one of George Eliot's novels who finds much comfort in repeating to himself the words, "Sihon, King of the Amorites, for His mercy endureth forever. And Og, King of Bashan, for His mercy endureth forever." So too with the converted African, in some less notable fiction, who found in an old Book of Common Prayer no words quite so pregnant with spiritual meaning as "Augusta, Princess-Dowager of Wales." Even reasonably educated people, I am afraid, are not proof against the charms of the unfamiliar. Not long ago I found in the work of an admirably but modernly trained American an elaborate figure about

the fate of Phaeton, whom a classical dictionary confirmed my fear that he had confused with Icarus. But a glance at a classical dictionary would have saved him; so would a single question as to whether he really knew whom he was talking about. In brief, this kind of Impropriety is very closely akin to the barbarous use of foreign or of new words, which we found to be easily avoidable. And most of the Improprieties I found in the package of themes I mentioned a moment ago fall under the other head.

For one reason or another, most of us generally speak or write hastily, without leisure to consider details of style. We use the first phrase that occurs to us. This is particularly true of journalists, far and away the most prolific and the most widely read of modern men of letters. An Impropriety of frequent occurrence is a typical example of the trouble that follows. In hasty manuscript the words house and home look almost exactly alike. What is more, they really mean things that have points in common; most homes are in houses, and many houses contain homes. I venture to guess that the first blunder was a printer's; it was not enough of a blunder to be seriously corrected. And nowadays, in newspapers, in college themes, and even in books, you will find the words house and home hereabout used synonymously, usually to signify a square wooden structure, in excellent order, with a little grass about it, and all the modern improvements. One who falls

into this error, as most of us manage to fall; one who constantly uses words with inaccuracy enough to confuse them, though not enough to amount to obscurity or even to palpable grotesqueness, gets at last into very serious trouble. Instead of having at his service a definite vocabulary, he finds himself in possession only of a jumbled collection of ill-defined synonyms.

I have said enough, I think, to show clearly what Barbarisms and Improprieties are. Under one head or the other must fall all offences against good use in the choice of words. Our next business must be to consider various effects which may be secured by the choice of various kinds of words, all in themselves admissible; and finally to draw from these considerations certain conclusions, worth keeping well in mind, concerning the ultimate relation of words and ideas.

Before proceeding to discuss specific kinds of words, however, I may perhaps say a word about vocabularies in general. By a vocabulary I mean the total number of words at the disposal of a given individual. No experience in travel is more surprising than the speed with which a man of ordinary intelligence can pick up words enough to get along in a country which he enters ignorant of its language. The linguistic accomplishment of couriers and Swiss waiters ceases to be marvellous as soon as you try to imitate them. In point of fact, the number of words absolutely required for the necessary purposes of human inter

course is astonishingly small. In the region of Puget Sound there has grown up a curious jargon called Chinook, by means of which the native Indians and the European or American traders conduct their negotiations. The jargon is said to be equally unlike the native dialects and any tongue known to the civilized world,—a pure hybrid; and I am informed that less than a thousand words abundantly suffice for all purposes of trade. For travel, for every-day life, a hundred or two prove more than enough. Italian opera, it is said, expresses all the notions that verbally underlie its extremely pretty music by seven or eight hundred. In short, the vocabulary which anybody absolutely needs is very small indeed. The vocabulary at the disposal of a master of such a language as English, on the other hand, is comparatively enormous. A modern dictionary contains something like a hundred thousand separate titles, all sanctioned by more or less usage. Nobody would ever think of using all these words. The total number used by Shakspere, an extremely copious writer, is, I believe, not above fifteen thousand. But anybody who is anxious for the power of easily expressing many and various shades of thought and feeling will do well to keep at his disposal as large a vocabulary as he can manage. The way to increase a Vocabulary is very like the way to increase your personal acquaintance. Put yourself in the way of meeting as many different phases of expression as you can, —read widely, talk with clever people,—and whenever