merce. Some one of their stakes has a run of
luck. Either it is my Lord Eldon who sits on the wool-sack, or the young
curate bids his Oxford laurels against a head-mastership of a public
school and covers his baldness with a mitre, or Jones Lloyd steps from
his back parlor into the carriage which is to take Lord Overstone to the
House of Peers. From the day when young Osborne, the bold London
'prentice, leaped into the Thames to fish up thence his master's
daughter, and brought back, not only the little lady, but the ducal
coronet of Leeds in prospective, to that when Thomas Newcome the elder
walked up to the same London that he might earn the "bloody hand" for
Sir Brian and Sir Barnes, English life has been full of such gallant
achievements.

So it has been with the words these speak. The phrases of the noble
Canon Chaucer have fallen to the lips of peasants and grooms, while many
a pert Cockney saying has elbowed its sturdy way into her Majesty's High
Court of Parliament. Yet still there are two tongues flowing through our
daily talk and writing, like the Missouri and Mississippi, with distinct
and contrasted currents.

And this appears the more strikingly in this country, where other
distinctions are lost. We have an aristocracy of language, whose
phrases, like the West-End men of "Sibyl," are effeminate, extravagant,
conventional, and prematurely worn-out. These words represent ideas
which are theirs only by courtesy and conservatism, like the law-terms
of the courts, or the "cant" of certain religious books. We have also a
plebeian tongue, whose words are racy, vigorous, and healthy, but which
men look askance at, when met in polite usage, in solemn literature, and
in sermons. Norman and Saxon are their relative positions, as in the old
time when "Ox" was for the serf who drove a-field the living animal, and
"Beef" for the baron who ate him; but their lineage is counter-crossed
by a hundred, nay, a thousand vicissitudes.

With this aristocracy of speech we are all familiar. We do not mean with
the speech of our aristocracy, which is quite another thing, but that
which is held appropriate for "great occasions," for public parade, and
for pen, ink, and types. It is cherished where all aristocracies
flourish best,--in the "rural districts." There is a style and a class
of words and phrases belonging to country newspapers, and to the city
weeklies which have the largest bucolic circulation, which you detect in
the C