Our enumeration of errata being made alphabetically, the first to be cited is one of the chief of sinners—­the particle.

As.  The misuse of as for so is, in certain cases, almost universal.  If authority could justify error and convert the faulty into the faultless, it were idle to expose a misuse in justification of which can be cited most of the best names in recent English literature.

  “As far as doth concern my single self,”

is a line in Wordsworth ("Prelude,” p. 70) which, by a change of the first as into so, would gain not only in sound (which is not our affair at present), but, likewise in grammar.  The seventh line of the twenty-first stanza in that most tender of elegies and most beautiful of poems, Shelley’s “Adonais,” begins, “As long as skies are blue,” where also there would be a double gain by writing “So long as skies are blue.”  On page 242 of the first volume of De Quincey’s “Literary Remains” occurs this sentence; “Even by as philosophic a politician as Edmund Burke,” in which the critical blunder of calling Burke a philosophic politician furnishes no excuse for the grammatical blunder.  The rule (derived, like all good rules, from principle) which determines the use of this small particle is, I conceive, that the double as should only be employed when there is direct comparison.  In the first part of the following sentence there is no direct comparative relation—­in the second, the negative destroys it; “So far as geographical measurement goes, Philadelphia is not so far from New York as from Baltimore.”  Five writers out of six would commit the error of using as in both members of the sentence.  The most prevalent misuse of as is in connection with soon; and this general misuse, having moreover the countenance of good writers, is so inwoven into our speech that it will be hard to unravel it.  But principle is higher than the authority derived from custom.  Judges are bound to give sentence according to the statute; and if the highest writers, whose influence is deservedly judicial, violate the laws of language, their decisions ought to be, and will be, reversed, or language will be undermined, and, slipping into shallow, illogical habits, into anarchical conditions, will forfeit much of its manliness, of its subtlety, of its truthfulness.  Language is a living organism, and to substitute authority, or even long usage, for its innate genius and wisdom, and the requirements and practices that result from these, were to strike at its life, and to expose it to become subject to upstart usurpation, to deadening despotism.  Worcester quotes from the Psalms the phrase, “They go astray as soon as they be born.”  We ask, Were not the translators of the Bible as liable to err in grammar as De Quincey, or Wordsworth, or Shelley?  A writer in the English “National Review” for January, 1862, in