Yet correct spelling of English has not been traced to revelation; there was no grammatical Sinai, with a dictionary instead of tables of stone.  Indeed, we do not even know certainly when correct spelling began, which word in the language was first spelt the right way, and by whom.  Correct spelling may have been evolved, or it may be the creation of some master mind.  Its inventor, if it had an inventor, is absolutely forgotten.  Thomas Cobbett would have invented it, but that he was born more than two centuries too late, poor man.  All that we certainly know is that, contemporaneously with the rise of extreme Puritanism, the belief in orthography first spread among Elizabethan printers, and with the Hanoverian succession the new doctrine possessed the whole length and breadth of the land.  At that time the world passed through what extension lecturers call, for no particular reason, the classical epoch.  Nature—­as, indeed, all the literature manuals testify—­was in the remotest background then of human thought.  The human mind, in a mood of the severest logic, brought everything to the touchstone of an orderly reason; the conception of “correctness” dominated all mortal affairs.  For instance, one’s natural hair with its vagaries of rat’s tails, duck’s tails, errant curls, and baldness, gave place to an orderly wig, or was at least decently powdered.  The hoop remedied the deficiencies of the feminine form, and the gardener clipped his yews into respectability.  All poetry was written to one measure in those days, and a Royal Academy with a lady member was inaugurated that art might become at least decent.  Dictionaries began.  The crowning glory of Hanoverian literature was a Great Lexicographer.

In those days it was believed that the spelling of every English word had been settled for all time.  Thence to the present day, though the severities then inaugurated, so far as metre and artistic composition are concerned, been generously relaxed—­though we have had a Whistler, a Walt Whitman, and a Wagner—­the rigours of spelling have continued unabated.  There is just one right way of spelling, and all others are held to be not simply inelegant or undesirable, but wrong; and unorthodox spelling, like original morality, goes hand in hand with shame.

Yet even at the risk of shocking the religious convictions of some, may not one ask whether spelling is in truth a matter of right and wrong at all?  Might it not rather be an art?  It is too much to advocate the indiscriminate sacking of the alphabet, but yet it seems plausible that there is a happy medium between a reckless debauch of errant letters and our present dead rigidity.  For some words at anyrate may there not be sometimes one way of spelling a little happier, sometimes another?  We do something of this sort even now with our “phantasy” and “fantasie,” and we might do more.  How one would spell this word or that would become, if this latitude were conceded, a subtle anxiety of the literary exquisite.  People