demand; it is indebted not only to great authors, but to all whom any special skill or taste has qualified to handle it.  The good writer may be one who disclaims all literary pretension, but there he is, at work among words,—­binding the vagabond or liberating the prisoner, exalting the humble or abashing the presumptuous, incessantly alert to amend their implications, break their lazy habits, and help them to refinement or scope or decision.  He educates words, for he knows that they are alive.

Compare now the case of the ruder multitude.  In the regard of literature, as a great critic long ago remarked, “all are the multitude; only they differ in clothes, not in judgment or understanding,” and the poorest talkers do not inhabit the slums.  Wherever thought and taste have fallen to be menials, there the vulgar dwell.  How should they gain mastery over language?  They are introduced to a vocabulary of some hundred thousand words, which quiver through a million of meanings; the wealth is theirs for the taking, and they are encouraged to be spendthrift by the very excess of what they inherit.  The resources of the tongue they speak are subtler and more various than ever their ideas can put to use.  So begins the process of assimilation, the edge put upon words by the craftsman is blunted by the rough treatment of the confident booby, who is well pleased when out of many highly-tempered swords he has manufactured a single clumsy coulter.  A dozen expressions to serve one slovenly meaning inflate him with the sense of luxury and pomp.  “Vast,” “huge,” “immense,” “gigantic,” “enormous,” “tremendous,” “portentous,” and such-like groups of words, lose all their variety of sense in a barren uniformity of low employ.  The reign of this democracy annuls differences of status, and insults over differences of ability or disposition.  Thus do synonyms, or many words ill applied to one purpose, begin to flourish, and, for a last indignity, dictionaries of synonyms.

Let the truth be said outright:  there are no synonyms, and the same statement can never be repeated in a changed form of words.  Where the ignorance of one writer has introduced an unnecessary word into the language, to fill a place already occupied, the quicker apprehension of others will fasten upon it, drag it apart from its fellows, and find new work for it to do.  Where a dull eye sees nothing but sameness, the trained faculty of observation will discern a hundred differences worthy of scrupulous expression.  The old foresters had different names for a buck during each successive year of its life, distinguishing the fawn from the pricket, the pricket from the sore, and so forth, as its age increased.  Thus it is also in that illimitable but not trackless forest of moral distinctions.  Language halts far behind the truth of things, and only a drowsy perception can fail to devise a use for some new implement of description.  Every strange word that makes its way into a language spins for itself a web of