and that the practice in the miscellaneous, outside, small-game field was
very bad at the start and was never less bad at any later time.

I wish to say that of Mrs. Eddy I am not requiring perfect English, but
only good English. No one can write perfect English and keep it up
through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done. It was
approached in the "well of English undefiled"; it has been approached in
Mrs. Eddy's Annex to that Book; it has been approached in several English
grammars; I have even approached it myself; but none of us has made port.

Now, the English of Science and Health is good. In passages to be found
in Mrs. Eddy's Autobiography (on pages 53, 57, 101, and 113), and on page
6 of her squalid preface to Science and Health, first revision, she seems
to me to claim the whole and sole authorship of the book. That she
wrote the Autobiography, and that preface, and the Poems, and the
Plague-spot-Bacilli, we are not permitted to doubt. Indeed, we know she
wrote them. But the very certainty that she wrote these things compels a
doubt that she wrote Science and Health. She is guilty of little
awkwardnesses of expression in the Autobiography which a practiced pen
would hardly allow to go uncorrected in even a hasty private letter, and
could not dream of passing by uncorrected in passages intended for print.
But she passes them placidly by; as placidly as if she did not suspect
that they were offenses against third-class English. I think that that
placidity was born of that very unawareness, so to speak. I will cite a
few instances from the Autobiography. The italics are mine:

"I remember reading in my childhood certain manuscripts containing
Scriptural Sonnets, besides other verses and enigmas," etc. Page 7.

[On page 27.] "Many pale cripples went into the Church leaning on