fault ends in stiffness, the other in slang. Some one told the Emperor
Tiberius that he might give citizenship to men, but not to words. To be
sure, Louis XIV. in childhood, wishing for a carriage, called for _mon
carrosse_, and made the former feminine a masculine to all future
Frenchmen. But do not undertake to exercise these prerogatives of
royalty until you are quite sure of being crowned. The only thing I
remember of our college text-book of Rhetoric is one admirable verse of
caution which it quoted:--

"In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold,
Alike fantastic, if too new or old;
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."

Especially do not indulge any fantastic preference for either Latin or
Anglo-Saxon, the two great wings on which our magnificent English soars
and sings; we can spare neither. The combination gives an affluence of
synonymes and a delicacy of discrimination such as no unmixed idiom can
show.

While you utterly shun slang, whether native-or foreign-born,--(at
present, by the way, our popular writers use far less slang than the
English,)--yet do not shrink from Americanisms, so they be good ones.
American literature is now thoroughly out of leading-strings; and the
nation which supplied the first appreciative audience for Carlyle,
Tennyson, and the Brownings, can certainly trust its own literary
instincts to create the new words it needs. To be sure, the inelegancies
with which we are chiefly reproached are not distinctively American:
Burke uses "pretty considerable"; Miss Burney says, "I trembled a
few"; the English Bible says "reckon," Locke has "guess," and Southey