pursuing, not self-expression, the prize of letters, but unanimity and self-obliteration, the marks of good breeding.  Like those famous modern poets who are censured by the author of Paradise Lost, the talkers of slang are “carried away by custom, to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have exprest them.”  The poverty of their vocabulary makes appeal to the brotherly sympathy of a partial and like-minded auditor, who can fill out their paltry conventional sketches from his own experience of the same events.  Within the limits of a single school, or workshop, or social circle, slang may serve; just as, between friends, silence may do the work of talk.  There are few families, or groups of familiars, that have not some small coinage of this token-money, issued and accepted by affection, passing current only within those narrow and privileged boundaries.  This wealth is of no avail to the travelling mind, save as a memorial of home, nor is its material such “as, buried once, men want dug up again.”  A few happy words and phrases, promoted, for some accidental fitness, to the wider world of letters, are all that reach posterity; the rest pass into oblivion with the other perishables of the age.

A profusion of words used in an ephemeral slang sense is evidence, then, that the writer addresses himself merely to the uneducated and thoughtless of his own day; the revival of bygone meanings, on the other hand, and an archaic turn given to language is the mark rather of authors who are ambitious of a hearing from more than one age.  The accretions of time bring round a word many reputable meanings, of which the oldest is like to be the deepest in grain.  It is a counsel of perfection—­some will say, of vainglorious pedantry—­but that shaft flies furthest which is drawn to the head, and he who desires to be understood in the twenty-fourth century will not be careless of the meanings that his words inherit from the fourteenth.  To know them is of service, if only for the piquancy of avoiding them.  But many times they cannot wisely be avoided, and the auspices under which a word began its career when first it was imported from the French or Latin overshadow it and haunt it to the end.

Popular modern usage will often rob common words, like “nice,” “quaint,” or “silly,” of all flavour of their origin, as if it were of no moment to remember that these three words, at the outset of their history, bore the older senses of “ignorant,” “noted,” and “blessed.”  It may be granted that any attempt to return to these older senses, regardless of later implications, is stark pedantry; but a delicate writer will play shyly with the primitive significance in passing, approaching it and circling it, taking it as a point of reference or departure.  The early faith of Christianity, its beautiful cult of childhood, and its appeal to unlearned simplicity, have left their mark on the meaning of “silly”;