pass back into their wider meanings enhanced by a new element of
graphic association. Language never suffers by answering to an
intelligent demand; it is indebted not only to great authors, but
to all whom any special skill or taste has qualified to handle it.
The good writer may be one who disclaims all literary pretension,
but there he is, at work among words,--binding the vagabond or
liberating the prisoner, exalting the humble or abashing the
presumptuous, incessantly alert to amend their implications, break
their lazy habits, and help them to refinement or scope or
decision. He educates words, for he knows that they are alive.

Compare now the case of the ruder multitude. In the regard of
literature, as a great critic long ago remarked, "all are the
multitude; only they differ in clothes, not in judgment or
understanding," and the poorest talkers do not inhabit the slums.
Wherever thought and taste have fallen to be menials, there the
vulgar dwell. How should they gain mastery over language? They
are introduced to a vocabulary of some hundred thousand words,
which quiver through a million of meanings; the wealth is theirs
for the taking, and they are encouraged to be spendthrift by the
very excess of what they inherit. The resources of the tongue they
speak are subtler and more various than ever their ideas can put to
use. So begins the process of assimilation, the edge put upon
words by the craftsman is blunted by the rough treatment of the
confident booby, who is well pleased when out of many highly-
tempered swords he has manufactured a single clumsy coulter. A
dozen expressions to serve one slovenly meaning inflate him with
the sense of luxury and pomp. "Vast," "huge," "immense,"
"gigantic," "enormous," "tremendous," "portentous," and such-like
groups of words, lose all their variety of sense in a barren