ongressional eloquence of the honorable member for the Fifteenth
District, Mass., and in the Common-School Reports of Boston Corner,--a
style and words that remind us of the country gentry whose titles date
back to the Plantagenets. They look so strangely beside the brisk,
dapper curtnesses in which metropolitan journals transact their daily
squabbles! We never write one of them out without an involuntary
addition of quotation-marks, as a New-Yorker puts to his introduction of
his verdant cousin the supplementary, "From the Jerseys." Their
etymological Herald's Office is kept by schoolmasters, and especially
schoolma'ams, or, in the true heraldic tongue, "Preceptresses of
Educational Seminaries." You may find them in Mr. Hobbs, Jr.'s,
celebrated tale of "The Bun-Baker of Cos-Cob," or in Bowline's thrilling
novelette of "Beauty and Booty, or The Black Buccaneer of the Bermudas."
They glitter in the train of "Napoleon and his Marshals," and look down
upon us from the heights of "The Sacred Mountains."

Occasionally you will find them degraded from their high estate and
fallen among the riff-raff of slang. They become "seedy" words, stripped
of their old meaning, mere _chevaliers d'industrie_, yet with something
of the air noble about them which distinguishes them from the born
"cad." The word "convey" once suffered such eclipse, (we are glad to say
it has come up again,) and consorted, unless Falstaff be mistaken, with
such low blackguards as "nim" and "cog" and "prig" and similar
"flash" terms.

But we do not propose to linger among the "upper-ten" of the
dictionaries. The wont of such is to follow the law of hereditary
aristocracies: the old blood gets thin, there is no sparkle to the
_sangre azul_, the language dies out in poverty. The strong, new,
popular word forces its way up, is heard at the bar, gets quoted in the
pulpit, slips into the outer ring of good society. King Irving or King
Emerson lays his pen across its shoulder and it rises up ennobled, till
finally it is accepted of the "Atlantic Monthly," and its
court-presentation is complete.

We have thus indicated the nature of the great contest in language
between the conventional and the idiomatic. Idioms are just what their
name implies. They are the commonalty of language,--private, proletarian
words, who do the work, "_dum alteri tulerunt honores_." They come to us
from all handiworks and callings, where you will always find them at
their posts. Sharp, e