aloud. The listeners, who heard while they looked into
the wide chimney-place, saw there pass in stately procession the events
and the grand persons of history, were kindled with the delights of
travel, touched by the romance of true love, or made restless by tales
of adventure;--the hearth became a sort of magic stone that could
transport those who sat by it to the most distant places and times, as
soon as the book was opened and the reader began, of a winter's night.
Perhaps the Puritan reader read through his nose, and all the little
Puritans made the most dreadful nasal inquiries as the entertainment
went on. The prominent nose of the intellectual New-Englander
is evidence of the constant linguistic exercise of the organ for
generations. It grew by talking through. But I have no doubt that
practice made good readers in those days. Good reading aloud is almost
a lost accomplishment now. It is little thought of in the schools. It is
disused at home. It is rare to find any one who can read, even from the
newspaper, well. Reading is so universal, even with the uncultivated,
that it is common to hear people mispronounce words that you did not
suppose they had ever seen. In reading to themselves they glide over
these words, in reading aloud they stumble over them. Besides, our
every-day books and newspapers are so larded with French that the
ordinary reader is obliged marcher a pas de loup,--for instance.

The newspaper is probably responsible for making current many words with
which the general reader is familiar, but which he rises to in the
flow of conversation, and strikes at with a splash and an unsuccessful
attempt at appropriation; the word, which he perfectly knows, hooks him
in the gills, and he cannot master it. The newspaper is thus widening
the language in use, and vastly increasing the number of words which
enter into common talk. The Americans of the lowest intellectual class
probably use more words to express their ideas than the similar class
of any other people; but this prodigality is partially balanced by the
parsimony of words in some higher regions, in which a few phrases of
current slang are made to do the whole duty of exchange of ideas; if
that can be called exchange of ideas when one intellect flashes forth
to another the remark, concerning some report, that "you know how it is
yourself," and is met by the response of "that's what's the matter," and
rejoins with the perfectly conclusive "that's so.