d, by their sound studies and logical habits of mind, from any of
those faults into which men fall who write loosely because they think
loosely. The pedantry of one class and the colloquial vulgarity of
another had their day; the faults of each were strongly contrasted, and
better writers kept the mean between them. More lasting effect was
produced by translators, who in later times have corrupted our idiom as
much as, in early ones, they enriched our vocabulary; and to this injury
the Scotch have greatly contributed; for composing in a language which is
not their mother tongue, they necessarily acquired an artificial and
formal style, which, not so much through the merit of a few as owing to
the perseverance of others, who for half a century seated themselves on
the bench of criticism, has almost superseded the vernacular English of
Addison and Swift. Our journals, indeed, have been the great corrupters
of our style, and continue to be so, and not for this reason only. Men
who write in newspapers, and magazines, and reviews, write for present
effect; in most cases this is as much their natural and proper aim as it
would be in public speaking; but when it is so they consider, like public
speakers, not so much what is accurate or just, either in matter or
manner, as what will be acceptable to those whom they address. Writing
also under the excitement of emulation and rivalry, they seek, by all the
artifices and efforts of an ambitious style, to dazzle their readers; and
they are wise in their generation, experience having shown that common
minds are taken by glittering faults, both in prose and verse, as larks
are with looking-glasses.

In this school it is that most writers are now trained; and after such
training anything like an easy and natural movement is as little to be
looked for in their compositions as in the step of a dancing master. To
the vices of style which are thus generated there must be added the
inaccuracies inevitably arising from haste, when a certain quantity of
matter is to be supplied for a daily or weekly publication which allows
of no delay--the slovenliness that confidence, as well as fatigue and
inattention, will produce--and the barbarisms, which are the effect of
ignorance, or that smattering of knowledge which serves only to render
ignorance presumptuous. These are the causes of corruption in our
current style; and when these are considered there would be ground for
apprehending that t