Notices to Correspondents. 319
Advertisements. 320

* * * * *


NOTES.

A NOTE ON "SMALL WORDS."

"And ten small words creep on in one dull line."

Most ingenious! most felicitous! but let no man despise little words,
despite of the little man of Twickenham. He himself knew better, but
there was no resisting the temptation of such a line as that. Small
words he says, in plain prosaic criticism, are generally "stiff and
languishing, but they may be beautiful to express melancholy."

The English language is a language of small words. It is, says Swift,
"overstocked with monosyllables." It cuts down all its words to the
shortest possible dimensions: a sort of half-Procrustes, which lops but
never stretches. In one of the most magnificent passages in Holy Writ,
that, namely, which describes the death of Sisera:--

"At her feet he bowed, he fell: at her feet he bowed, he fell,
he lay down: where he bowed, there he fell down dead."

There are twenty-two monosyllables to three of greater length, or rather
to the same dissyllable thrice repeated; and that too in common parlance
proncounced as a monosyllable. The passage in the Book of Ezekiel, which