o the soil of life, and the more varied the strata of human
experience from which it draws its nourishment, whether of vocabulary or
idiom, the more perfect will be its potentialities as a medium of
expression. We must be careful, it is true, to keep the organism
healthy, to guard against disintegration of tissue; but to that duty
American writers are quite as keenly alive as we. It is not a source of
weakness but of power and vitality to the English language that it
should embrace a greater variety of dialects than any other civilised
tongue. A new language, says the proverb, is a new sense; but a
multiplicity of dialects means, for the possessors of the main language,
an enlargement of the pleasures of the linguistic sense without the
fatigue of learning a totally new grammar and vocabulary. So long as
there is a potent literary tradition keeping the core of the language
one and indivisible, vernacular variations can only tend, in virtue of
the survival of the fittest, to promote the abundance, suppleness, and
nicety of adaptation of the language as a literary instrument. The
English language is no mere historic monument, like Westminster Abbey,
to be religiously preserved as a relic of the past, and reverenced as
the burial-place of a bygone breed of giants. It is a living organism,
ceaselessly busied, like any other organism, in the processes of
assimilation and excretion. It has before it, we may fairly hope, a
future still greater than its glorious past. And the greatness of that
future will largely depend on the harmonious interplay of spiritual
forces throughout the American Republic and the British Empire.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote M: I do not mean that we are callous to American criticism, or
always take it in good part when it comes home to us. I think with
shame, for example, of the stupid insolence with which certain English
journalists used for years to treat Mr. W.D. Howells, merely because he
had expressed certain literary judgments from which they dissented. What
I do mean, and believe to be true, is that we are _habitually
unconscious_ of American criticism, while Americans may rather be said
to be _habitually over-conscious_ that the eyes of England and of the
world are on them. The existence of this habit of mind seems to me no
less evident than the fact that it is rapidly correcting itself.]

[Footnote N: I went to see Poe's grave in Baltimore, marked by a mean
and ugly monument, little more than a