e upshot of which
comes to a matter of twenty-two million words. So that, if the English
language contains (as some curious people say it does) forty thousand
words, he will have used it up not less than five hundred and fifty
times. Poor old battered language! One really pities it. Think of any
language in its old age being forced to work at that rate; kneaded, as
if it were so much dough, every hour of the day into millions of
fantastic shapes by millions of capricious bakers! Being old, however,
and superannuated, you will say that our English language must have got
used to it: as the sea, that once (according to Camoens) was indignant
at having his surface scratched, and his feelings harrowed, by keels, is
now wrinkled and smiling.

Blessed is the man that is dumb, when speech would have betrayed his
ignorance; and the man that has neither pens nor ink nor crayons, when a
record of his thought would have delivered him over to the derision of
posterity. This, however, the reader will say, is to embroider a large
moral upon a trivial occasion. Possibly the moral may be
disproportionately large; and yet, after all, the occasion may not be so
trivial as it seems. One of the many revolutions worked by the railway
system is, to force men into a much ampler publicity; to throw them at a
distance from home amongst strangers; and at their own homes to throw
strangers amongst _them_. Now, exactly in such situations it is, where
all other gauges of appreciation are wanting, that the two great
external indications of a man's rank, viz., the quality of his manners
and the quality of his pronunciation, come into play for assigning his
place and rating amongst strangers. Not merely pride, but a just and
reasonable self-respect, irritates a man's aspiring sensibilities in
such a case: not only he _is_, but always he _ought_ to be, jealous of
suffering in the estimation of strangers by defects which it is in his
own choice to supply, or by mistakes which a little trouble might
correct. And by the way we British act in this spirit, whether we ought
to do or not, it is noticed as a broad characteristic of us Islanders,
viz., both of the English and the Scotch, that we are morbidly alive to
jealousy under such circumstances, and in a degree to which there is
nothing amongst the two leading peoples of the Continent at all
corresponding.[52] A Scotchman or an Englishman of low rank is anxious
on a Sunday to dress in a style which may mis