ive powers, although invisible and imperceptible in its
operation; and an element modifying, by its changes and qualities, the
growth and complexion of the faculties which it feeds."

Our enumeration of _errata_ being made alphabetically, the first to be
cited is one of the chief of sinners--the particle.

As. The misuse of _as_ for _so_ is, in certain cases, almost
universal. If authority could justify error and convert the faulty
into the faultless, it were idle to expose a misuse in justification
of which can be cited most of the best names in recent English
literature.

"_As_ far as doth concern my single self,"

is a line in Wordsworth ("Prelude," p. 70) which, by a change
of the first _as_ into _so_, would gain not only in sound (which is
not our affair at present), but, likewise in grammar. The seventh line
of the twenty-first stanza in that most tender of elegies and most
beautiful of poems, Shelley's "Adonais," begins, "_As_ long as skies
are blue," where also there would be a double gain by writing "_So_
long as skies are blue." On page 242 of the first volume of De
Quincey's "Literary Remains" occurs this sentence; "Even by _as_
philosophic a politician _as_ Edmund Burke," in which the critical
blunder of calling Burke a philosophic politician furnishes no excuse
for the grammatical blunder. The rule (derived, like all good rules,
from principle) which determines the use of this small particle is, I
conceive, that the double _as_ should only be employed when there is
direct comparison. In the first part of the following sentence there
is no direct comparative relation--in the second, the negative
destroys it; "_So_ far as geographical measurement goes, Philadelphia
is not _so_ far from New York as from Baltimore." Five writers out of
six would commit the error of using _as_ in both members of the
sentence. The most prevalent misuse of _as_ is in connection with
_soon_; and this general misuse, having moreover the countenance of
good writers, is so inwoven into our speech that it will be hard to
unravel it. But principle is higher than the authority derived from
custom. Judges are bound to give sentence according to the statute;
and if the highest writers, whose influence is deservedly judicial,
violate the laws of language, their decisions ought to be, and will
be, reversed, or language will be undermined, and, slipping into
shallow, illogical habits, into anarchical conditions, will forfeit
much of it