rger proportion of the people. In the days when nearly all the
members of educated society--we are speaking of the men only, for they
only counted in those days--had been to one or other of the same "seven
great public schools" (which not one public school man in a hundred can
name correctly to-day) and to one or other of the same two universities,
they kept for use among themselves all through their after life the
forms of speech, the catchwords, the classical references which passed
current in their school and undergraduate days. It was a free-masonry of
speech on which the outsider could not intrude. To-day, when not a
quarter of the members of the same circles have been to one of those
same seven schools nor a half to the same universities, when at least a
quarter have been to no recognised classical school at all, it is
impossible that the same free-masonry should prevail. There were a
hundred trite classical quotations (no great evidence of scholarship,
but made jestingly familiar by the old school curricula) which our
fathers could use with safety in any chance company of the society to
which they were accustomed; but even the most familiar of them would be
a parlous experiment in small talk to-day. They have vanished from
common conversation even more completely than they have disappeared from
the debates of the House of Commons. And this is only a type of the
change which has come over the educated speech of England, which we may
regret or we may welcome. It may be sad that the English gentleman
should speak in less literary form than he did thirty years ago, but the
loss may be outweighed many times by the fact that so much larger a
proportion of the people speak the same speech as he--not so refined as
his used to be, but materially better than the majority of those who use
it to-day could then have shaped their lips to frame. Few Englishmen at
least would acquiesce in the opinion that it showed a decay of culture
in England--that the people were more ignorant or less educated. It may
not be safe to draw an analogous conclusion in the case of the American
people.

A story well-known to most Englishmen has to do with the man who,
arriving at Waterloo station to take a train, went into the refreshment
room for a cup of coffee. In his haste he spilled the coffee over his
shirt front and thereupon fell to incontinent cursing of "this d----d
London and South-Western Railway."

An American variant of, or pendant t