game field
was very bad at the start and was never less bad at any later time.

I wish to say that of Mrs. Eddy I am not requiring perfect English,
but only good English. No one can write perfect English and keep it
up through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done. It was
approached in the "well of English undefiled"; it has been approached
in Mrs. Eddy's Annex to that Book; it has been approached in several
English grammars; I have even approached it myself; but none of us has
made port.

Now, the English of Science and Health is good. In passages to be found
in Mrs. Eddy's Autobiography (on pages 53, 57, 101, and 113), and on
page 6 of her squalid preface to Science and Health, first revision, she
seems to me to claim the whole and sole authorship of the book. That
she wrote the Autobiography, and that preface, and the Poems, and the
Plague-spot-Bacilli, we are not permitted to doubt. Indeed, we know she
wrote them. But the very certainty that she wrote these things compels
a doubt that she wrote Science and Health. She is guilty of little
awkwardnesses of expression in the Autobiography which a practiced pen
would hardly allow to go uncorrected in even a hasty private letter,
and could not dream of passing by uncorrected in passages intended for
print. But she passes them placidly by; as placidly as if she did not
suspect that they were offenses against third-class English. I think
that that placidity was born of that very unawareness, so to speak. I
will cite a few instances from the Autobiography. The italics are mine:

"I remember reading in my childhood certain manuscripts containing
Scriptural Sonnets, besides other verses and enigmas," etc. Page 7.

[On page 27.] "Many pale cripples went into the Church leaning on
crutches who came out carrying them on their shoulders."

It is awkward, because at the first glance it seems to say that the
cripples went in leaning on crutches which went out carrying the
cripples on their shoulders. It would have cost her no trouble to
put her "who" after her "cripples." I blame her a little; I think her
proof-reader should have been shot. We may let her capital C pass, but
it is another awkwardness, for she is talking about a building, not
about a religious society.

"Marriage and Parentage" [Chapter-heading. Page 30]. You imagine that
she is going to begin a talk about her marriage and finish with
some account of her father and mother. And so you will be deceiv