circle: first, those who have tickets for the garden party, and who
stroll over the lawn, decorously gowned and properly coated, conversing
with one another in the accepted social accents and employing the
recognized social adjectives; and second, the crowd outside the
gates,--curious, satirical, good-natured in the main, straightforward
of speech and quick to applaud a ready wit or a humor-loving eye or a
telling phrase spoken straight from the heart of the mob.

Will an author choose to address the selected guests or the casual
crowd? Either way lies fame, if one does it well. Your uninvited men
find themselves talking to the uninvited crowd. Before they know it
they are famous too. They are fashioning another manner of speech.
Defoe is there, with his saucy ballads selling triumphantly under his
very pillory; with his _True-Born Englishman_ puncturing forever the
fiction of the honorable ancestry of the English aristocracy; with his
_Crusoe_ and _Moll Flanders_, written, as Lamb said long afterwards,
for the servant-maid and the sailor. Swift is there, with his terrific
_Drapier's Letters_, anonymous, aimed at the uneducated, with cold fury
bludgeoning a government into obedience; with his _Gulliver's Travels_,
so transparent upon the surface that a child reads the book with
delight and remains happily ignorant that it is a satire upon humanity.
And then, into the London of Defoe and Swift, and into the very centre
of the middle-class mob, steps, in 1724, the bland Benjamin Franklin in
search of a style "smooth, clear, and short," and for half a century,
with consummate skill, shapes that style to his audience. His young
friend Thomas Paine takes the style and touches it with passion, until
he becomes the perfect pamphleteer, and his _Crisis_ is worth as much
to our Revolution--men said--as the sword of Washington. After another
generation the gaunt Lincoln, speaking that same plain prose of Defoe,
Swift, Franklin, and Paine,--Lincoln who began his first Douglas
debate, not like his cultivated opponent with the conventional "Ladies
and Gentlemen," but with the ominously intimate, "My Fellow
Citizens,"--Lincoln is saying, "I am not master of language; I have not
a fine education; I am not capable of entering into a disquisition upon
dialectics, as I believe you call it; but I do not believe the
language I employed bears any such construction as Judge Douglas puts
upon it. But I don't care about a quibble in regard to