He is only imitating another fool, who was imitating another, who was
imitating another,--who, through a score of such imitations, got the idea
of this burlesque exaggeration from some of Mr. Dickens's earlier writings
of thirty years ago. It was very funny when Mr. Dickens originated it. And
almost always, when he used it, it was very funny. But it is not in the
least funny when these other people use it, to whom it is not natural, and
to whom it does not come easily. Just as this boy says "sobriquet,"
without knowing at all what the word means, merely because he has read it
in another newspaper, everybody, in this vein, gets entrapped into using
words with the wrong senses, in the wrong places, and making himself
ridiculous.

Now it happens, by good luck, that I have, on the table here, a pretty
file of eleven compositions, which Miss Winstanley has sent me, which the
girls in her first class wrote, on the subject I have already named. The
whole subject, as she gave it out, was, "Duty performed is a Rainbow in
the Soul." I think, myself, that the subject was a hard one, and that Miss
Winstanley would have done better had she given them a choice from two
familiar subjects, of which they had lately seen something or read
something. When young people have to do a thing, it always helps them to
give them a choice between two ways of doing it. However, Miss Winstanley
gave them this subject. It made a good deal of growling in the school,
but, when the time came, of course the girls buckled down to the work,
and, as I said before, the three pages wrote themselves, or were written
somehow or other.

Now I am not going to inflict on you all these eleven compositions. But
there are three of them which, as it happens, illustrate quite distinctly
the three errors against which I have been warning you. I will copy a
little scrap from each of them. First, here is Pauline's. She wrote