of a sneering insularity of this sort, it is small wonder that the feeling of the French towards the British is well expressed in the final line of the quatrain inscribed over the gate at Compiègne through which Joan Darc went to her capture:

"Tous ceux-là d'Albion n'ont faict le bien jamais!"
 

And we are reminded of the English lady who was taken to see Mr. Jefferson's performance of Rip Van Winkle, and who liked it very much indeed, but thought it such a pity that the actor had so strong an American accent!

"Ignorance of his neighbor is the character of the typical John Bull," says Mr. R. L. Stevenson, who also declares that "the Englishman sits apart bursting with pride and ignorance." What a Scot has written a Yankee may quote. And the quotation has pertinence here in view of the fact that in the last century the English were just as keen against Scotticisms and Hibernicisms, and just as bitter, as they have been in this century against Americanisms, and as they may be in the next against Australianisms. Macaulay asserted that there were in Marmion and in Waverley "Scotticisms at which a London apprentice would laugh;" and there are to be seen in the English newspapers now and again petty attacks on the style and vocabulary of American authors of distinction, which it is perhaps charitable to credit to London apprentices. One of these it was no doubt who began a review of Mr. Brownell's subtle and profound study of French Traits with the statement that "the language most depressing to the educated Englishman is the language of the cultured American." Probably the small sword will always be exasperating to those who cling to the boxing-glove.

When a London apprentice laughs at the Scotticisms of the North Briton, and when the London Athenæum is depressed by the language of cultured Americans, there is to be discovered behind the laugh and the scoff an assumption that any departure from the usage which obtains in London is most deplorable. The laugh and the scoff are the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual belief that the Londoner is the sole guardian and trustee of the English language. But this is a belief for which there is no foundation whatever. The English language is not bankrupt that it needs to have a receiver appointed; it is quite capable of minding its own business without the care of a committee of Englishmen. If indeed a guardian were necessary, what Englishman would it be who would best preserve our pure English—the shepherd of Dorset or the miner of Northumberland, the Yorkshire man or the cockney? If it is not the London apprentice who is to set the standard, but the Englishman of breeding, it is hard to discover the ground whereon this Englishman can claim superiority of taste or knowledge over the other educated men to whom English is the mother-tongue, whether they were born in Scotland, Ireland, or America, in Australia, India, or Canada.

The fallacy of the Englishman, be he London apprentice or contributor to the Athenæum, is that he erects a merely personal standard in the use of our language. He compares the English he finds in the novels of a Scotchman or in the essays of an American with that which he hears about him daily in London, animadverting upon every divergence from this local British usage as a departure from the strict letter of the law which governs our language. It is, of course, unfair to suggest that a parochial self-satisfaction underlies this utilization of personal experience as the sole test of linguistic propriety; but the procedure is amusingly illogical.

The cockney has no monopoly of good English if even he has his full portion. The Englishman in England is but the elder brother of the Anglo-Saxon elsewhere; and by no right of primogeniture does he control the language which is our birthright. Noah Webster, in the preface from which quotation has already been made, remarked that American authors had a tendency to write "the language in its genuine idiom," and he asserted that "in this respect Franklin and Washington, whose language is their hereditary mother-tongue, unsophisticated by modern grammar, present as pure models of genuine English as Addison or Swift." It may be doubted whether English is now more vigorously spoken or better understood in London than in New York or in Melbourne; but it is indisputable that the student detects in the ordinary speech of the Englishman many a lapse from the best usage. This contaminating of the well of English undefiled is not to be defended because it is due to Englishmen who happen to live in England. A blunder made in Great Britain is to be stigmatized as a Briticism, and it is to be avoided by those who take thought of their speech just as though the impropriety were a Scotticism or a Hibernicism, an Americanism or an Australianism. When a locution of the London apprentice is not in accord with the principles of the language, there is no prejudice in its favor because it happened to arise beside the Thames rather than on the shores of the Hudson or by the banks of the St. Lawrence.

Of Briticisms there are as many and as worthy of collection and collocation as were the most of the Americanisms the all-embracing Bartlett gathered into his dictionary. Indeed, if a Scot or a Yankee were to prepare a glossary of Briticisms on the ample scale adopted by Mr. Bartlett, and with the same generous hospitality, the result would surprise no one more than the Englishman. We should find in its pages many a word and phrase and turn of speech common enough in England and quite foreign to the best usage of those who speak English—Briticisms as worthy of reproof as the worst specimen of "the mongrel speech adopted by some humorists in America." These are to be sought rather in the written language than in oral speech, though there are Briticisms a-plenty in the talk of the Londoner, from the suppression of the initial h among the masses to the dropping of the final g among the classes. Of a truth, precision of speech is not frequent in London, and not seldom the delivery of the Englishman of education nowadays may fairly be called slovenly. As I recall the list of those whom I have heard use the English language with mingled ease and elegance, I find fewer Englishmen than either Scotchmen or Americans. Quintilian tells us that an old Athenian woman called the eloquent Theophrastus a stranger, and declared "that she had discovered him to be a foreigner only from his speaking in a manner too Attic." Something of this ultra-precision is perhaps to be observed to-day in the modern Athens, be that Edinburgh or Boston.

In the ordinary speech of Englishmen there are not a few vocables which grate on American ears. Sometimes they are ludicrous, sometimes they are hideous, sometimes they seem to us simply strange. Thus when Matthew Arnold wrote about Tolstoï, he told us that Anna Karénina "throws herself under the wheels of a goods train." To us Americans this sounds odd, as it is our habit to call the means of self-destruction chosen by the Russian heroine "a freight train." But it is simply due to the accidental evolution of railroad terminology in England and in America at the same time, whereby the same thing came to be called by a different name on either side of the Atlantic. Neither term has a right of way as against the other; and it would be interesting to foresee which will get down to our great-grandchildren. In like manner the keyless watch of Great Britain is the stem-winder of the United States; and here, again, there is little to choose, as both words are logical.

The use of like for as, not uncommon in the Southern States, has there always been regarded as an indefensible colloquialism; but in England it is heard in the conversation of literary men of high standing, and now and again it even gets itself into print in books of