A humble freeman of the guild of scholars would here use his privilege to call attention to some abuses in words and phrases,—­abuses which are not only prevalent in the spoken and written speech of the many, but which disfigure, occasionally, the pages, even of good writers.  These are not errors that betoken or lead to general final corruption, and the great Anglo-Saxo-Norman race is many centuries distant from the period when it may be expected to show signs of that decadence which, visible at first in the waning moral and intellectual energies of a people, soon spots its speech.

Nevertheless, as inaccuracies, laxities, vulgarisms—­transgressions more or less superficial—­such errors take from the correctness, from the efficacy, from the force as well as the grace, of written or spoken speech.

The high level of strength, suppleness and beauty occupied by our English tongue has been reached, and can only be maintained, by strenuous, varied, and continuous mental action.  Offenses against the laws and proprieties of language—­like so many other of our lapses—­are in most cases effects of the tendency in human nature to relax its tone.  None save the most resolute and rigorous but have their moods of unwatchfulness, of indolence.  Moreover, men are prone to resist mental refinement and intellectual subdivisions.  Discrimination requires close attention and sustained effort; and without habitual discrimination there can be no linguistic precision or excellence.  In this, as in other provinces, people like to take things easily.  Now, every capable man of business knows that to take things easily is an easy way to ruin.  Language is in a certain sense every one’s business; but it is especially the business, as their appellation denotes, of men of letters; and a primary duty of their high vocation is to be jealous of any careless or impertinent meddling with, or mishandling of, those little glistening, marvelous tools wherewith such amazing structures and temples have been built and are ever a-building.  Culture, demanding and creating diversity and subtlety of mental processes, is at once a cause and an effect of infinite multiplication in the relations the mind is capable of establishing between itself and the objects of its action, and between its own processes; and language, being a chief instrument of culture, has to follow and subserve these multiplied and diversified demands, Any fall, therefore, on its part from the obedient fineness of its modes and modulations back into barbaric singleness and crudeness, any slide into looseness or vagueness, any unweaving of the complex tissue, psychical and metaphysical, into which it has been wrought by the exquisite wants of the mind, will have a relaxing, debilitating influence on thought itself.  To use the clear, wise words of Mr. Whewell; “Language is often called an instrument of thought, but it is also the nutriment of thought; or, rather, it is the atmosphere on which thought lives—­a medium essential to the activity of our speculative powers, although invisible and imperceptible in its operation; and an element modifying, by its changes and qualities, the growth and complexion of the faculties which it feeds.”