When you hear one lady informing another that she had just seen simply the most exquisite, the most lovely, the most perfect thing in existence, is she referring to something wonderful in nature, or to something beautiful in art, or can it be only a bonnet?  Has she just come home from the glaciers of Switzerland, the lakes of Italy, the mountains of Connemara, or the castles of the Rhine, or can it be that she has been no farther than Marshall and Snelgrove’s shop?

Then there’s that awful “awful!” Why, if a thousandth part of things which are commonly affirmed to be aweful were aweful, we should go about with our faces blanched, like his who drew Priam’s curtain in the dead of night, our teeth chattering, and our hair on end.  Everything is aweful—­awefully good or awefully bad.

Only last week I handed a plate to a young lady at luncheon, and, looking sweetly upon me, as though I had brought a reprieve from the gallows, she sighed, “Oh thanks! how awfully kind!”

And years ago, I went with John Leech to admire Robson in The Porter’s Knot, and when that pathetic little drama was over, and the actor had stirred our souls with pity, an undergraduate in the stalls before us turned to his companion, as the curtain fell, and said, tremulously, with an emotion which did him honour, although his diction was queer, “Awefully jolly! awefully jolly!”

Yes, it amuses, but it pains us more, this reckless abuse and confusion of words, because it tends to lower the dignity and to pervert the meaning of our language; it dishonours the best member that we have.  If we use the most startling and impressive words which we can find, when we do not really require them, when the crisis comes in which they are appropriate, they seem feeble and commonplace.  We are as persons who, wearing their best clothes daily, are but dingy guests at a feast.

Then comes retribution.  They who cry “Wolf!” whenever they see a leveret are not believed when Lupus comes.  They who suffer “excruciating agony” whenever a thorn pricks, can say no more under exquisite pain, and their familiar words are powerless to evoke the sympathy which they have repelled so long.  They are more likely to receive the severe rebuke administered by a gruff old gentleman to his maudlin, moribund neighbour, who was ever exaggerating his ailments, and who, upon his doleful declaration that “between three and four o’clock that morning he had been at Death’s door!” was abruptly but anxiously asked—­“Oh, why didn’t you go in?”

I protest, in the next place, against the use of long, large words for the gratification of that conceit or covetousness which seeks to obtain, from mere grandiloquence, reputations and rewards to which it is not entitled.  Being a gardener, I like to call a spade as spelt; and if any one terms it an horticultural implement, or a mattock, I do not expect him to dig much.  I have used the monosyllable “shop,” and I will not recall it, though a thousand pairs of gleaming scissors were pointed at my breast, and I was told by an angry army of apprentices to talk shop no more—­the word was vulgar, or rather obsolete, superseded by the more graceful terms of mart, emporium, warehouse, repository, bazaar, and lounge.