his own. It is much less easy to catch the subtle graces of Addison. At
the conclusion of the Rambler, he boasts that "he has laboured to refine
our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial
barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations."

The result of his labour is awkward stateliness and irksome uniformity.
In his dread of incongruous idioms he writes almost without any idiom at
all.

He has sometimes been considered as having innovated on our tongue by
introducing big words into it from the Latin: but he commonly does no
more than revive terms which had been employed by our old writers and
afterwards fallen into disuse; nor does he, like them, employ even these
terms in senses which scholars only would be likely to understand.

At the time of writing the Dictionary, he had a notion that our language
"for almost a century had been departing from its original Teutonic
character, and deviating towards a Gallic structure and phraseology,
from which it ought to be our endeavour to recall it by making our
ancient volumes the ground-work of style, admitting among the additions
of later times, only such as may supply real deficiencies, such as are
readily adopted by the genius of our tongue, and incorporate easily with
our native idiom." But a little reflection will shew us the vanity of
this attempt. Since the age of Chaucer, at least, that is for more than
400 years, our language has been increased by continual transfusions
from the French. To these have been added, from time to time, similar
accessions from other languages, both ancient and modern. Thus a
copiousness and a flexibility, which in the instance of the Greek seem
to have arisen out of that subtilty of intellect which gave birth to
endless subdivision and distinction, have been in some measure