educated person; but
that if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter,--that is
to say, with real accuracy,--you are forevermore in some measure an
educated person. The entire difference between education and
non-education (as regards the merely intellectual part of it) consists
in this accuracy. A well-educated gentleman may not know many
languages,--may not be able to speak any but his own,--may have read
very few books. But whatever language he knows, he knows precisely;
whatever word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly; above all, he is
learned in the _peerage_ of words; knows the words of true descent and
ancient blood at a glance, from words of modern canaille; remembers all
their ancestry, their inter-marriages, distant relationships, and the
extent to which they were admitted, and offices they held, among the
national noblesse of words at any time, and in any country. But an
uneducated person may know, by memory, many languages, and talk them
all, and yet truly know not a word of any,--not a word even of his own.
An ordinarily clever and sensible seaman will be able to make his way
ashore at most ports; yet he has only to speak a sentence of any
language to be known for an illiterate person: so also the accent, or
turn of expression of a single sentence, will at once mark a scholar.
And this is so strongly felt, so conclusively admitted by educated
persons, that a false accent or a mistaken syllable is enough, in the
parliament of any civilized nation, to assign to a man a certain degree
of inferior standing forever.

16. And this is right; but it is a pity that the accuracy insisted on
is not greater, and required to a serious purpose. It is right that a
false Latin quantity should excite a smile in the House of Commons: but
it is wrong that a false English _meaning_ should _not_ excite a frown
there. Let the accent of words be watched; and closely: let their
meaning be watched more closely still, and fewer will do the work. A
few words well chosen and distinguished, will do work that a thousand
cannot, when every one is acting, equivocally, in the function of
another. Yes; and words, if they are not watched, will do deadly work
sometimes. There are masked words droning and skulking about us in
Europe just now,--(there never were so many, owing to the spread of a
shallow, blotching, blundering, infectious "information," or rather
deformation, everywhere, and to the teaching of catechisms a