and hence pungency of expression, innuendo, verbal wit, irony, banter and raillery, trifling with serious interests, are the characteristics of what we call popular literature, and our language must have a vocabulary which accommodates itself to the taste of those whom such qualities of diction alone attract. In the periodical and fugitive department, scandal and personality are eminently acceptable, and nothing gives a pamphlet or a newspaper greater currency, than the dexterity with which, not fashionable vices, but private character, is anatomized and held up to scorn or ridicule. The point of satire lies in its individuality. Its victims must have a local habitation and a name. Sly allusion, semi-equivocal expression, and pointed insinuation, too well defined to leave its personal application doubtful, therefore, form a large part of the diction of journalistic articles relating to social life, while in political warfare, the boldest libels, the most undisguised grossness of abuse, alone suit the palate of heated partisanship. Hence, the dialect of personal vituperation, the rhetoric of malice in all its modifications, the art of damning with faint praise, the sneer of contemptuous irony, the billingsgate of vulgar hate, all these have been sedulously cultivated; and, combined with a certain flippancy of expression and ready command of a tolerably extensive vocabulary, they are enough to make the fortune of any sharp, shallow, unprincipled journalist, who is content with the fame and the pelf, which the unscrupulous use of such accomplishments can hardly fail to secure.

The periodical press is unquestionably the channel, through which the art of printing puts forth its most powerful influence on language, and it seems remarkable, that periodicals, which have existed in England since the reign of James I., should scarcely have produced an appreciable effect upon

the English tongue, until they had been a hundred years in operation. The establishment of daily newspapers and of literary journals was nearly contemporaneous, and dates from an early period in the eighteenth century, but though the Tattler, the Spectator and the Guardian had a comparatively large circulation, and exerted a great influence upon the dialect of their time, yet the newspaper can scarcely be said to have had a place in literature until the success of the letters of Junius, which appeared in the Morning Advertiser from 1769 to 1772, gave to that class of periodicals an ascendency which it has ever since maintained. It may now fairly be said, that there is no agency through which man acts more powerfully upon the mind of his fellow-man, and the influence of the art of printing upon language and thought has reached its acme in the daily newspaper.

The influence of the periodical press upon the purity of language must be admitted to have proved hitherto, upon the whole, a deleterious one, and countries, where, as in England and America, the press is free, and periodicals consequently numerous, are particularly exposed to this source of corruption. The newspaper press has indeed rendered some service to language, by giving to it a greater flexibility of structure, from the necessity of finding popular and intelligible forms of expression for every class of subjects, and it has now and then preserved, for the permanent vocabulary of our speech, a happy and forcible popular word or phrase, which would otherwise have been forgotten with the occasion that gave it birth. But these advantages are a very inadequate compensation for the mischiefs resulting from the slovenliness and inaccuracy inseparable from the necessity of hasty composition upon a great variety of subjects, themselves often very imperfectly understood by the writer.

Editors naturally seek to accommodate their style to the capacity and taste of the largest circle of readers, and in their estimate of their public, they are very apt to aim below the mark, and thus gradually to deprave, rather than elevate and refine the taste of those whom they address. Hence arise the inflated diction, the straining after effect, the use of cant phrases, and of such expressions as not only fall in with, but tend to aggravate the prevalent evil humors and proclivities of the time, the hyperbolical tone in which they commend their patrons or the candidates of their party, and, in short, all the vices of exaggeration of style and language. There is, however, of late years, a great improvement in the literary character of the English and American newspaper. The London Times, whatever may be thought of its moral or political tendencies, has long employed writers of surpassing ability, and its example has done much to elevate the tone of editorial journalship in both the countries which employ its language. The pet phrases of hack journalists, the euphemism that but lately characterized the American newspapers, are fast giving place to less affected and more appropriate forms of expression. It is only the lowest class of dailies that still regard woman' as not an honorable or respectful designation of the sex, and it is in their columns alone, that, in place of well-dressed or handsome women,' we read of 'elegantly attired females,' and of 'beautiful ladies.' The Anglican newspaper is now-what the French journal long has been-an intellectual organ, an authority for cultivated circles in politics, in letters, in æsthetics. Besides this, it is the popular guide and instructor for evil and for good, and it may truly be said to be the feature most characteristic of the life and literature of Anglo-Saxon humanity in the present age.

LECTURE XXI.

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AS AFFECTED BY THE ART OF PRINTING.

III.

ON a former occasion, I spoke of the diffusion of classical literature in modern Europe-the first great result of the invention of printing-as having much enlarged the English and other European vocabularies, by the introduction of new words derived from Greek and Latin roots. But the revival of learning was not unaccompanied with effects prejudicial to the cultivation of the modern languages, and their employment for the higher purposes of literature. At that period, most of them were poor in vocabulary, rude and equivocal in syntax, unsettled in orthography, distracted with variety of dialect, and unmelodious in articulation. Under such circumstances, nothing could be more natural than that scholars imbued with the elegance, the power, the majesty of the ancient tongues and of the immortal works which adorned them, should have preferred to employ, as a vehicle for their own thoughts, a language which the church had everywhere diffused, and which was already fitted to express the highest conceptions of the human intellect, the most splendid images of the human fancy. He who wrote in Latin had the civilized

world for his public; he who used a modern tongue could only count as readers the people of his province, or at most of a comparatively narrow sovereignty. Until, therefore, by a slow and gradual process, the necessity of sympathy and intellectual communication between the learned and the ignorant, had enriched the vernacular tongues with numerous words from the dialects of theology, and ethics, and law, and literature, but few scholars ventured to employ so humble a medium. To write in the vulgar speech was a humiliation, a degradation of the thought and its author, and literary works in the modern tongues were generally prefaced with an apology for appearing in so mean a dress.

The close analogy between the Latin and its Romance descendants much facilitated the enrichment of the dialects of Southern Europe, but in England and the Continental Gothic nations, the stimulus of the Reformation was necessary to furnish an adequate motive and a sufficient impulse for a corresponding improvement in the respective languages of those peoples.

Even so late as 1544, after so many great names had ennobled the speech of England, Ascham, writing on the familiar and popular subject of Archery, says, that it "would have been both more profitable for his study, and also more honest for his name, to have written in another tongue."

"As for the Latine or Greeke tongue," continues he, everye thinge is so excellentlye done in them, that none can do better. In the Englishe tongue, contrary, everye thinge in a maner so meanlye both for the matter and handelinge, that no man can do worse. For therein the least learned, for the most part, have bene alwayes most readye to write. And they which had least hope in Latine, have