t the Preface with its antics of
spelling. We are tolerably used by this time to reformed spelling, but
Webster was a pioneer, and his contemporaries must have looked with some
amazement at what they could only think of as deformed spelling. Here
they could be told soberly:--

"During the course of ten or twelv yeers I hav been laboring to correct
popular errors, and to assist my yung brethren in the road to truth and
virtue; my publications for theez purposes hav been numerous; much time
haz been spent, which I do not regret, and much censure incurred, which
my hart tells me I do not dezerv. The influence of a yung writer cannot
be so powerful or extensiv az that of an established karacter; but I hav
ever thot a man's usefulness depends more on exertion than on talents. I
am attached to America by berth, education, and habit; but abuv all, by
a philosophical view of her situation, and the superior advantages she
enjoys, for augmenting the sum of social happiness....

"The reeder will obzerv that the orthography of the volum iz not
uniform. The reezon iz, that many of the essays hav been published
before, in the common orthography, and it would hav been a laborious
task to copy the whole, for the sake of changing the spelling.

"In the essays ritten within the last yeer, a considerable change of
spelling iz introduced by way of experiment. This liberty waz taken by
the writers before the age of Queen Elizabeth, and to this we are
indeted for the preference of modern spelling over that of Gower and
Chaucer. The man who admits that the change of _housbonde_, _mynde_,
_ygone_, _moneth_ into husband, mind, gone, month, iz an improovment,
must acknowledge also the riting of helth, breth, rong, tung, munth, to
be an improovment. There iz no alternativ. Every possible reezon that
could ever be offered for altering the spelling of wurds, stil exists in
full force; and if a gradual reform should not be made in our language,
it will proov that we are less under the influence of reezon than our
ancestors."

This passage from the Preface, as well as those papers in the volume
which follow the same style of orthography or rather cacography, will
illustrate well enough the unprincipled character of the reform as it
lay in Webster's mind. He acted upon the merest empiricism apparently,
without any well-considered plan, making the spelling occasionally
conform to the sound, but allowing even the same sounds to have
different repres