OBS. 22.—­The American editor of the Red Book, to whom all these apparent inconsistencies seemed real blunders, has greatly exaggerated this difficulty in our orthography, and charged Johnson and Walker with having written all these words and many more, in this contradictory manner, “without any apparent reason!” He boldly avers, that, “The perpetual contradictions of the same or like words, in all the books, show that the authors had no distinct ideas of what is right, and what is wrong;” and ignorantly imagines, that, “The use of ible rather than able, in any case, originated in the necessity of keeping the soft sound of c and g, in the derivatives; and if ible was confined to that use, it would be an easy and simple rule.”—­Red Book, p. 170.  Hence, he proposes to write peacible for peaceable, tracible for traceable, changible for changeable, managible for manageable; and so for all the rest that come from words ending in ce or ge.  But, whatever advantage there might be in this, his “easy and simple rule” would work a revolution for which the world is not yet prepared.  It would make audible audable, fallible fallable, feasible feasable, terrible terrable, horrible horrable, &c.  No tyro can spell in a worse manner than this, even if he have no rule at all.  And those who do not know enough of Latin grammar to profit by what I have said in the preceding observation, may console themselves with the reflection, that, in spelling these difficult words entirely by guess, they will not miss the way more than some have done who pretended to be critics.  The rule given by John Burn, for able and ible, is less objectionable; but it is rendered useless by the great number of its exceptions.

OBS. 23.—­As most of the rules for spelling refer to the final letters of our primitive words, it may be proper for the learner to know and remember, that not all the letters of the alphabet can assume that situation, and that some of them terminate words much more frequently than others.  Thus, in Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary, the letter a ends about 220 words; b, 160; c, 450; d, 1550; e, 7000; f, 140; g, 280; h, 400; i, 29; j, none; k, 550; l, 1900; m, 550; n, 3300; o, 200; p, 450; q, none; r, 2750; s, 3250; t, 3100; u, 14; v, none; w, 200; x, 100; y, 5000; z, 5.  We have, then, three consonants, j, q, and v, which never end a word.  And why not?  With respect to j and v, the reason is plain from their history.  These letters were formerly identified with i and u, which are not terminational letters.  The vowel i ends no pure English word, except that which is formed of its own capital I;