When there is so much to read, there is little time for conversation; nor is there leisure for another pastime of the ancient firesides, called reading aloud.  The listeners, who heard while they looked into the wide chimney-place, saw there pass in stately procession the events and the grand persons of history, were kindled with the delights of travel, touched by the romance of true love, or made restless by tales of adventure;—­the hearth became a sort of magic stone that could transport those who sat by it to the most distant places and times, as soon as the book was opened and the reader began, of a winter’s night.  Perhaps the Puritan reader read through his nose, and all the little Puritans made the most dreadful nasal inquiries as the entertainment went on.  The prominent nose of the intellectual New-Englander is evidence of the constant linguistic exercise of the organ for generations.  It grew by talking through.  But I have no doubt that practice made good readers in those days.  Good reading aloud is almost a lost accomplishment now.  It is little thought of in the schools.  It is disused at home.  It is rare to find any one who can read, even from the newspaper, well.  Reading is so universal, even with the uncultivated, that it is common to hear people mispronounce words that you did not suppose they had ever seen.  In reading to themselves they glide over these words, in reading aloud they stumble over them.  Besides, our every-day books and newspapers are so larded with French that the ordinary reader is obliged marcher a pas de loup,—­for instance.

The newspaper is probably responsible for making current many words with which the general reader is familiar, but which he rises to in the flow of conversation, and strikes at with a splash and an unsuccessful attempt at appropriation; the word, which he perfectly knows, hooks him in the gills, and he cannot master it.  The newspaper is thus widening the language in use, and vastly increasing the number of words which enter into common talk.  The Americans of the lowest intellectual class probably use more words to express their ideas than the similar class of any other people; but this prodigality is partially balanced by the parsimony of words in some higher regions, in which a few phrases of current slang are made to do the whole duty of exchange of ideas; if that can be called exchange of ideas when one intellect flashes forth to another the remark, concerning some report, that “you know how it is yourself,” and is met by the response of “that’s what’s the matter,” and rejoins with the perfectly conclusive “that’s so.”  It requires a high degree of culture to use slang with elegance and effect; and we are yet very far from the Greek attainment.

IV