are scarcely prepared to realise what shades of meaning may be got by such a simple device.  Let us take a simple instance.  You write, let us say, to all your cousins, many of your friends, and even, it may be, to this indifferent intimate and that familiar enemy, “My dear So-and-so.”  But at times you feel even as you write, sometimes, that there is something too much and sometimes something lacking.  You may even get so far in the right way occasionally as to write, “My dr.  So-and-so,” when your heart is chill.  And people versed in the arts of social intercourse know the subtle insult of misspelling a person’s name, or flicking it off flippantly with a mere waggling wipe of the pen.  But these are mere beginnings.

Let the reader take a pen in hand and sit down and write, “My very dear wife.”  Clean, cold, and correct this is, speaking of orderly affection, settled and stereotyped long ago.  In such letters is butcher’s meat also “very dear.”  Try now, “Migh verrie deare Wyfe.”  Is it not immediately infinitely more soft and tender?  Is there not something exquisitely pleasant in lingering over those redundant letters, leaving each word, as it were, with a reluctant caress?  Such spelling is a soft, domestic, lovingly wasteful use of material.  Or, again, if you have no wife, or object to an old-fashioned conjugal tenderness, try “Mye owne sweete dearrest Marrie.”  There is the tremble of a tenderness no mere arrangement of trim everyday letters can express in those double r’s.  “Sweete” my ladie must be; sweet! why pump-water and inferior champagne, spirits of nitrous ether and pancreatic juice are “sweet.”  For my own part I always spell so, with lots of f’s and g’s and such like tailey, twirley, loopey things, when my heart is in the tender vein.  And I hold that a man who will not do so, now he has been shown how to do it, is, in plain English, neither more nor less than a prig.  The advantages of a varied spelling of names are very great.  Industrious, rather than intelligent, people have given not a little time, and such minds as they have, to the discussion of the right spelling of our great poet’s name.  But he himself never dreamt of tying himself down to one presentation of himself, and was—­we have his hand for it—­Shakespeare, Shakspear, Shakespear, Shakspeare, and so forth, as the mood might be.  It would be almost as reasonable to debate whether Shakespeare smiled or frowned.  My dear friend Simmongues is the same.  He is “Sims,” a mere slash of the pen, to those he scorns, Simmonds or Simmongs to his familiars, and Simmons, A.T.  Simmons, Esq., to all Europe.

From such mere introductory departures from precision, such petty escapades as these, we would we might seduce the reader into an utter debauch of spelling.  But a sudden Maenad dance of the letters on the page, gleeful and iridescent spelling, a wild rush and procession of howling vowels and clattering consonants, might startle the half-won reader back into orthodoxy.  Besides, there is another reader—­the printer’s reader—­to consider.  For if an author let his wit run to these matters, he must write elaborate marginal exhortations to this authority, begging his mercy, to let the little flowers of spelling alone.  Else the plough of that Philistine’s uniformity will utterly root them out.