CONSIDER.  Neither weight of authority nor universality of use can purify or justify a linguistic corruption, and make the intrinsically wrong in language right; and therefore such phrases as, “I consider him an honest man,” “Do you consider the dispute settled?” will ever be bad English, however generally sanctioned.  In his dedication of the “Diversions of Purley” to the University of Cambridge, Horne Tooke uses it wrongly when he says, “who always considers acts of voluntary justice toward himself as favors.”  The original signification and only proper use of consider are in phrases like these:  “If you consider the matter carefully;” “Consider the lilies of the field.”

CONDUCT.  It seems to us that it were as allowable to say of a man, “He carries well,” as “He conducts well.”  We say of a gun that it carries well, and we might say of a pipe that it conducts well.  The gun and pipe are passive instruments, not living organisms, and thence the verbs are used properly in the neuter form.  Perhaps, strictly speaking, even here its charge and water are understood.

CONTEMPLATE.  “Do you contemplate going to Washington to-morrow?” “No:  I contemplate moving into the country.”  This is more than exaggeration and inflation:  it is desecration of a noble word, born of man’s higher being; for contemplation is an exercise of the very highest faculties, a calm collecting of them for silent meditation—­an act, or rather a mood, which implies even more than concentrated reflection, and involves themes dependent on large, pure sentiment.  An able lawyer has to reflect much upon a broad, difficult case in order to master it; but when in the solitude of his study he is drawn, by the conflicts and wrongs he has witnessed during the day, to think on the purposes and destiny of human life, he more than reflects—­he is lifted into a contemplative mood.  Archbishop Trench, in his valuable volume on the “Study of Words,” opens a paragraph with this sentence:  “Let us now proceed to contemplate some of the attestations for God’s truth, and some of the playings into the hands of the devil’s falsehood, which may be found to lurk in words.”  Here we suggest that the proper word were consider; for there is activity, and a progressive activity, in the mental operation on which he enters, which disqualifies the verb contemplate.

Habitual showiness in language, as in dress and manners, denotes lack of discipline or lack of refinement.  Our American magniloquence—­the tendency to which is getting more and more subdued—­comes partly from national youthfulness, partly from license, that bastard of liberty, and partly from the geographical and the present, and still more the prospective, political grandeur of the country, which Coleridge somewhere says is to be “England in glorious magnification.”

I AM FREE TO CONFESS.  An irredeemable vulgarism.

IN THIS CONNECTION.  Another.