th, or the eccentrick
virtue of a wild hero;" and the physician of "sanguine expectations and
phlegmatick delays." Copiousness of speech will give opportunities to
capricious choice, by which some words will be preferred, and others
degraded; vicissitudes of fashion will enforce the use of new, or extend
the signification of known terms. The tropes of poetry will make hourly
encroachments, and the metaphorical will become the current sense:
pronunciation will be varied by levity or ignorance, and the pen must at
length comply with the tongue; illiterate writers will, at one time or
other, by publick infatuation, rise into renown, who, not knowing the
original import of words, will use them with colloquial licentiousness,
confound distinction, and forget propriety. As politeness increases,
some expressions will be considered as too gross and vulgar for the
delicate, others as too formal and ceremonious for the gay and airy; new
phrases are, therefore, adopted, which must, for the same reasons, be in
time dismissed. Swift, in his petty treatise on the English language,
allows that new words must sometimes be introduced, but proposes that
none should be suffered to become obsolete. But what makes a word
obsolete, more than general agreement to forbear it? and how shall it be
continued, when it conveys an offensive idea, or recalled again into the
mouths of mankind, when it has once become unfamiliar by disuse, and
unpleasing by unfamiliarity?

There is another cause of alteration more prevalent than any other,
which yet in the present state of the world cannot be obviated. A
mixture of two languages will produce a third distinct from both; and
they will always be mixed, where the chief part of education, and the
most conspicuous accomplishment, is skill in ancient or in foreign
tongues. He that has long cultivated another language, will find its
words and combinations crowd upon his memory; and haste and negligence,
refinement and affectation, will obtrude borrowed terms and exotick
expressions.

The great pest of speech is frequency of translation. No book was ever
turned from one language into another, without imparting something of
its native idiom; this is the most mischievous and comprehensive
innovation; single words may enter by thousands, and the fabrick of the
tongue continue the same; but new phraseology changes much at once; it
alters not the single stones of the building, but the order of the
columns. If an a