l; on our Western railways there are placards printed in Swedish;
even China is creeping in. The colonies of England are too far and too
provincial to have had much reflex influence on her literature, but
how our phraseology is already amplified by our relations with
Spanish-America! The life-blood of Mexico flowed into our newspapers
while the war was in progress; and the gold of California glitters in
our primer: Many foreign cities may show a greater variety of mere
national costumes, but the representative value of our immigrant tribes
is far greater from the very fact that they merge their mental costume
in ours. Thus the American writer finds himself among his phrases like
an American sea-captain amid his crew: a medley of all nations, waiting
for the strong organizing New-England mind to mould them into a unit of
force.

There are certain minor matters, subsidiary to elegance, if not
elegancies, and therefore worth attention. Do not habitually prop your
sentences on crutches, such as Italics and exclamation-points, but make
them stand without aid; if they cannot emphasize themselves, these
devices are commonly but a confession of helplessness. Do not leave
loose ends as you go on, straggling things, to be caught up and dragged
along uneasily in foot-notes, but work them all in neatly, as Biddy at
her bread-pan gradually kneads in all the outlying bits of dough, till
she has one round and comely mass.

Reduce yourself to short allowance of parentheses and dashes; if you
employ them merely from clumsiness, they will lose all their proper
power in your hands. Economize quotation-marks also, clear that dust
from your pages, assume your readers to be acquainted with the current
jokes and the stock epithets: all persons like the compliment of having
it presumed that they know something, and prefer to discover the wit or
beauty of your allusion without a guide-board.

The same principle applies to learned citations and the results of
study. Knead these thoroughly in, supplying the maximum of desired
information with a minimum of visible schoolmaster. It requires no
pedantic mention of Euclid to indicate a mathematical mind, but only the
habitual use of clear terms and close connections. To employ in argument
the forms of Whately's Logic would render it probable that you are
juvenile and certain that you are tedious; wreathe the chain with roses.
The more you have studied foreign languages, the more you will be
dispos