ish writers of
to-day. But their aesthetic mastery has come from loving study of the
forms that conscious artistry had perfected, and through a constant
practice in their harmonious adaptation.

Finally, it may be worth while to raise the question how it can be
that a man of Mr. Jones' extreme competence in his science should
commit himself to a position that appears so false and mischievous.

[Sidenote: Reason of present discredit of phonetics.]

The unpopularity of phonetics is not wholly undeserved: from its early
elements, the comfortably broad distinctions of convincing importance,
it has progressed to a stage of almost infinite differentiations
and subtleties; and when machinery was called in to dispose of
controversy, a new and unsuspected mass of baffling detail was
revealed.

The subject cannot be treated parenthetically, nor am I capable of
summarizing it; but it seems clear that the complexity of the science
has driven off public sympathy and dashed the confidence of scholars,
withdrawing thereby some of the wholesome checks that common sense
might else have imposed on its practical exponents. The experts thus
left to themselves in despair of any satisfactory solution, are likely
enough to adopt the simplifications most agreeable to their present
ideas, and measure the utility of such simplifications by the
accidental conveniences of their own science, independently of other
considerations.

[Sidenote: The practical difficulty.]

The main practical difficulty which they have to meet in providing
a reasonably satisfactory phonetic script or type for the English
language is this, that the symbols of their alphabet must not greatly
exceed in number those of the literary alphabet, whereas the sounds
that they have to indicate do greatly exceed.

This discrepancy might be overcome by the use of what are called
'diacritical' marks, but here the universal prejudice against accents
in English is forbidding, and it is true that even if printers did not
rebel against them, they are yet distasteful and deterrent to readers
out of all proportion to their complexity.

[Sidenote: The result of Mr. Jones' solution.]

[Sidenote: The true condition of modified vowels, &c.]

Mr. Jones no doubt allowed himself as much liberty as he could venture
on, but to what has this paucity and choice of symbols led him? It
has led him to assert and teach that an unaccented vowel in English
retains no trace of its proper qualit