thorough, or even pedagogic knowledge of the engendure, growth, and affinities of the noble language about whose mesalliances they profess (like Dean Alford) to be so solicitous.  If they had their way—!  ‘Doch es sey,’ says Lessing, ’dass jene gotbische Hoeflichkeit eine unentbehrliche Tugend des heutigen Umganges ist.  Soll sie darum unsere Schriften eben so schaal und falsch machen als unsern Umgang?’ And Drayton was not far wrong in affirming that

  ’Tis possible to climb,
  To kindle, or to slake,
    Although in Skelton’s rhyme.’

Cumberland in his Memoirs tells us that when, in the midst of Admiral Rodney’s great sea-fight, Sir Charles Douglas said to him, ’Behold, Sir George, the Greeks and Trojans contending for the body of Patroclus!’ the Admiral answered, peevishly, ’Damn the Greeks and damn the Trojans!  I have other things to think of.’  After the battle was won, Rodney thus to Sir Charles, ’Now, my dear friend, I am at the service of your Greeks and Trojans, and the whole of Homer’s Iliad, or as much of it as you please!’ I had some such feeling of the impertinence of our pseudo-classicality when I chose our homely dialect to work in.  Should we be nothing, because somebody had contrived to be something (and that perhaps in a provincial dialect) ages ago? and to be nothing by our very attempt to be that something, which they had already been, and which therefore nobody could be again without being a bore?  Is there no way left, then, I thought, of being natural, of being naif, which means nothing more than native, of belonging to the age and country in which you are born?  The Yankee, at least, is a new phenomenon; let us try to be that.  It is perhaps a pis aller, but is not No Thoroughfare written up everywhere else?  In the literary world, things seemed to me very much as they were in the latter half of the last century.  Pope, skimming the cream of good sense and expression wherever he could find it, had made, not exactly poetry, but an honest, salable butter of worldly wisdom which pleasantly lubricated some of the drier morsels of life’s daily bread, and, seeing this, scores of harmlessly insane people went on for the next fifty years coaxing his buttermilk with the regular up and down of the pentameter churn.  And in our day do we not scent everywhere, and even carry away in our clothes against our will, that faint perfume of musk which Mr. Tennyson has left behind him, or worse, of Heine’s patchouli?  And might it not be possible to escape them by turning into one of our narrow New England lanes, shut in though it were by bleak stone walls on either hand, and where no better flowers were to be gathered than goldenrod and hardhack?