en printed in any
grammar. Their application will strike out some letters which are often
written, and retain some which are often omitted; but, if they err on
either hand, I am confident they err less than any other set of rules ever
yet formed for the same purpose. Walker, from whom Murray borrowed his
rules for spelling, declares for an expulsion of the second _l_ from
_traveller, gambolled, grovelling, equalling, cavilling_, and all similar
words; seems more willing to drop an _l_ from _illness, stillness,
shrillness, fellness_, and _drollness_, than to retain both in _smallness,
tallness, chillness, dullness_, and _fullness_; makes it one of his
orthographical aphorisms, that, "Words taken into composition often drop
those letters which were superfluous in their simples; as, _Christmas,
dunghil, handful_;" and, at the same time, chooses rather to restore the
silent _e_ to the ten derivatives from _move_ and _prove_, from which
Johnson dropped it, than to drop it from the ten similar words in which
that author retained it! And not only so, he argues against the principle
of his own aphorism; and says, "It is certainly to be feared that, if this
pruning of our words of all the superfluous letters, as they are called,
should be much farther indulged, we shall quickly antiquate our most
respectable authors, and irreparably maim our language."--_Walker's Rhyming
Dict._, p. xvii.

OBS. 27.--No attempt to subject our orthography to a system of phonetics,
seems likely to meet with general favour, or to be free from objection, if
it should. For words are not mere sounds, and in their _orthography_ more
is implied than in _phonetics_, or _phonography_. Ideographic forms have,
in general, the advantage of preserving the identity, history, and lineage
of words; and these are important matters in respect to which phonetic
writing is very liable to be deficient. Dr. Johnson, about a century ago,
observed, "There have been many schemes offered for the emendation and
settlement of our orthography, which, like that of other nations, being
formed by chance, or according to the fancy of the earliest writers in rude
ages, was at first very various and uncertain, and [is] as yet sufficiently
irregular. Of these reformers some have endeavoured to accommodate
orthography better to the pronunciation, without considering that this is
to measure by a shadow, to take that for a model or standard which is
changing while they apply it. Others,