tant and most conspicuous of all, it represented to our Yankee
Walton the crowning hope of his life,--the big bass, after taking which
he might put hook-and-line on the shelf. By a slight transposition,
natural enough to untrained organs, "doxology" became "socdollager."

We are not making a dictionary of Americanisms, but merely wandering a
little way into our native forests. We refer to the prevalent habit of
idiomatic speech as a fact that makes part of our literature. It cannot
be ignored, nor do we see how it is to be avoided. It is well, of
course, to retain the sterling classic basis of our speech as we
received it from abroad, and to this all that is best and purest in our
literature past and present will tend. But we hold to no Know-Nothing
platform which denies a right of naturalization to the worthy. As Ruskin
says of the river, that it does not make its bed, but finds it, seeking
out, with infinite pains, its appointed channel, so thought will seek
its expression, guided by its inner laws of association and sympathy. If
the mind and heart of a nation become barbarized, no classic culture can
keep its language from corruption. If its ideas are ignoble, it will
turn to the ignoble and vulgar side of every word in its tongue, it will
affix the mean sense it desires to utter where it had of old no place.
It converts the prince's palace into a stable or an inn; it pulls down
the cathedral and the abbey to use the materials for the roads on which
it tramples. It is good to sanctify language by setting some of its
portions apart for holy uses,--at least, by preserving intact the high
religious association which rests upon it. The same silver may be
moulded to the altar-chalice or the Bacchic goblet; but we touch the one
with reverent and clean hands, while the other is tossed aside in the
madness of the revel. Men clamor for a new version of the Sacred
Scriptures, and profess to be shocked at its plain outspokenness,
forgetting that to the pure all things are pure, and that to the
prurient all things are foul. It was a reverent and a worshipping age
that gave us that treasure, and so long as we have the temper of
reverence and worship we shall not ask to change it.

And to return once more to our original illustration. We have the two
nations also in us, the Norman and the Saxon, the dominant and the
aspiring, the patrician and the _proletaire_. The one rules only by
right of rule, the other rises only by right of