is one admirable verse of
caution which it quoted:--

"In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold,
Alike fantastic, if too new or old;
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."

Especially do not indulge any fantastic preference for either Latin or
Anglo-Saxon, the two great wings on which our magnificent English soars
and sings; we can spare neither. The combination gives an affluence of
synonymes and a delicacy of discrimination such as no unmixed idiom can
show.

While you utterly shun slang, whether native-or foreign-born,--(at
present, by the way, our popular writers use far less slang than the
English,)--yet do not shrink from Americanisms, so they be good ones.
American literature is now thoroughly out of leading-strings; and the
nation which supplied the first appreciative audience for Carlyle,
Tennyson, and the Brownings, can certainly trust its own literary
instincts to create the new words it needs. To be sure, the inelegancies
with which we are chiefly reproached are not distinctively American:
Burke uses "pretty considerable"; Miss Burney says, "I trembled a
few"; the English Bible says "reckon," Locke has "guess," and Southey
"realize," in the exact senses in which one sometimes hears them used
colloquially here. Nevertheless such improprieties are of course to be
avoided; but whatever good Americanisms exist, let us hold to them by
all means. The diction of Emerson alone is a sufficient proof, by its
unequalled range and precision, that no people in the world ever had
access to a vocabulary so rich and copious as we are acquiring. To
the previous traditions and associations of the English tongue we add
resources of contemporary life such as England cannot rival. Political
freedom makes every man an individual; a vast industrial activity makes
every man an inventor, not merely of labor-saving machines, but of
labor-saving words; universal schooling popularizes all thought and
sharpens the edge of all language. We unconsciously demand of our
writers the same dash and the same accuracy which we demand in
railroading or dry-goods-jobbing. The mixture of nationalities is
constantly coining and exchanging new felicities of dialect: Ireland,
Scotland, Germany, Africa are present everywhere with their various
contributions of wit and shrewdness, thought and geniality; in New York
and elsewhere one finds whole thoroughfares of France, Italy, Spain,
Portuga