For it is as in “Sibyl.”  That novel showed us the peer’s descendants at the workman’s forge, while the manufacturer’s grandchildren were wearing the ermine and the strawberry-leaves.  There is the constant passing to and fro across the one border-line which never changes.  Dandy Mick and Devilsdust save a little money and become “respectable.”  We can follow out their history after Mr. Disraeli leaves them.  They marry Harriet and Caroline, and contrive to educate a sharp boy or two, who will rise to become superintendents in the mills and to speculate in cotton-spinning.  They in turn send into trade, with far greater advantages, their sons.  The new generation, still educating, and, faithful to the original impulse, putting forth its fresh and aspiring tendrils, gets one boy into the church, another at the bar, and keeps a third at the great Rouge-et-Noir table of commerce.  Some one of their stakes has a run of luck.  Either it is my Lord Eldon who sits on the wool-sack, or the young curate bids his Oxford laurels against a head-mastership of a public school and covers his baldness with a mitre, or Jones Lloyd steps from his back parlor into the carriage which is to take Lord Overstone to the House of Peers.  From the day when young Osborne, the bold London ’prentice, leaped into the Thames to fish up thence his master’s daughter, and brought back, not only the little lady, but the ducal coronet of Leeds in prospective, to that when Thomas Newcome the elder walked up to the same London that he might earn the “bloody hand” for Sir Brian and Sir Barnes, English life has been full of such gallant achievements.

So it has been with the words these speak.  The phrases of the noble Canon Chaucer have fallen to the lips of peasants and grooms, while many a pert Cockney saying has elbowed its sturdy way into her Majesty’s High Court of Parliament.  Yet still there are two tongues flowing through our daily talk and writing, like the Missouri and Mississippi, with distinct and contrasted currents.

And this appears the more strikingly in this country, where other distinctions are lost.  We have an aristocracy of language, whose phrases, like the West-End men of “Sibyl,” are effeminate, extravagant, conventional, and prematurely worn-out.  These words represent ideas which are theirs only by courtesy and conservatism, like the law-terms of the courts, or the “cant” of certain religious books.  We have also a plebeian tongue, whose words are racy, vigorous, and healthy, but which men look askance at, when met in polite usage, in solemn literature, and in sermons.  Norman and Saxon are their relative positions, as in the old time when “Ox” was for the serf who drove a-field the living animal, and “Beef” for the baron who ate him; but their lineage is counter-crossed by a hundred, nay, a thousand vicissitudes.