With this aristocracy of speech we are all familiar.  We do not mean with the speech of our aristocracy, which is quite another thing, but that which is held appropriate for “great occasions,” for public parade, and for pen, ink, and types.  It is cherished where all aristocracies flourish best,—­in the “rural districts.”  There is a style and a class of words and phrases belonging to country newspapers, and to the city weeklies which have the largest bucolic circulation, which you detect in the Congressional eloquence of the honorable member for the Fifteenth District, Mass., and in the Common-School Reports of Boston Corner,—­a style and words that remind us of the country gentry whose titles date back to the Plantagenets.  They look so strangely beside the brisk, dapper curtnesses in which metropolitan journals transact their daily squabbles!  We never write one of them out without an involuntary addition of quotation-marks, as a New-Yorker puts to his introduction of his verdant cousin the supplementary, “From the Jerseys.”  Their etymological Herald’s Office is kept by schoolmasters, and especially schoolma’ams, or, in the true heraldic tongue, “Preceptresses of Educational Seminaries.”  You may find them in Mr. Hobbs, Jr.’s, celebrated tale of “The Bun-Baker of Cos-Cob,” or in Bowline’s thrilling novelette of “Beauty and Booty, or The Black Buccaneer of the Bermudas.”  They glitter in the train of “Napoleon and his Marshals,” and look down upon us from the heights of “The Sacred Mountains.”

Occasionally you will find them degraded from their high estate and fallen among the riff-raff of slang.  They become “seedy” words, stripped of their old meaning, mere chevaliers d’industrie, yet with something of the air noble about them which distinguishes them from the born “cad.”  The word “convey” once suffered such eclipse, (we are glad to say it has come up again,) and consorted, unless Falstaff be mistaken, with such low blackguards as “nim” and “cog” and “prig” and similar “flash” terms.

But we do not propose to linger among the “upper-ten” of the dictionaries.  The wont of such is to follow the law of hereditary aristocracies:  the old blood gets thin, there is no sparkle to the sangre azul, the language dies out in poverty.  The strong, new, popular word forces its way up, is heard at the bar, gets quoted in the pulpit, slips into the outer ring of good society.  King Irving or King Emerson lays his pen across its shoulder and it rises up ennobled, till finally it is accepted of the “Atlantic Monthly,” and its court-presentation is complete.

We have thus indicated the nature of the great contest in language between the conventional and the idiomatic.  Idioms are just what their name implies.  They are the commonalty of language,—­private, proletarian words, who do the work, “dum alteri tulerunt honores.”  They come to us from all handiworks and callings, where you will always find them at their posts.  Sharp, energetic, incisive, they do the hard labor of speech,—­that of carrying heavy loads of thought and shaping new ideas.