and so we go. kingdom, and

But if you own an acre of land it is your your cabin is your castle; you are a sovereign, and you will feel it in every throbbing of your pulse, and every day of your life will assure me of your thanks for having thus advised you."

AMERICANISMS.

There is a purism which, while it seeks to maintain the integrity of language, in effect stifles its growth.-W. D. WHITNEY.

WHEN a colony is established in a distant land, its

language begins at once to diverge from that of the mother country in various ways. Not only do certain words cease to be used by the one people, and certain other words by the other, but the same word is applied differently by the two peoples; words are compounded differently by them; and the pronunciation and orthography of words will vary, especially through the use of convertible consonants. We have a striking illustration of this in the ancient Scandinavian language, or Old Norse, which a thousand years ago was the common speech of Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, but now exists entire in no one of those countries. When in 1825 the Duke of Saxe Weimar traveled in the United States, and visited a colony of Germans in Pennsylvania who had been settled there only a quarter of a century, he was surprised to find that, owing to the European wars, which had cut off all intercourse with the Fatherland, the people were speaking a dialect which at home had become obsolete. So when our forefathers left England, and began to form a new nation three thousand miles away from the mother country, it was inevitable that the differences of climate, natural productions, and national customs, should insensibly lead,

in the course of two hundred and fifty years, to some striking differences in the speech of the two countries. These differences, however, thanks to our close connection with the mother country, the community of culture we have kept up with her, and our admission of her superior authority in matters of learning and literature, have been far fewer and less glaring than might reasonably have been feared. Though sundered from our British cousins by a vast ocean, we have been, and still are, bound with them by invisible ties into one community. The divergence of what Sydney Smith calls "the American language" from the English is not a tithe so great as the differences in the dialects of England. Still British purism, not to say hypercriticism, finds fault with even our higher styles of discourse, as disfigured by "Americanisms," and in both the tone and material of colloquial talk the discrepancies are, of course, much more marked. Retaining not a few older words, phrases, and meanings which their use rejects, we have failed at the same time to adopt certain others which have sprung up in England since the separation, and have coined yet others of which they have not approved. "Upon all these points," as an able American philologist remarks, “we are, in the abstract, precisely as much in the right as they; but the practical question is, which of the two is the higher authority, whose approved usage shall be the norm of correct English speaking.”

It is said that when Melville, Queen Elizabeth's ambassador, told her that the Queen of Scots was an inch taller than her majesty, she replied, "Then she is an inch too tall"; and in much the same spirit British purists have assumed their own customs and usages, linguistic or otherwise, to be the sole absolute standard of taste and

propriety. Notwithstanding the fact that our mother tongue came from nowhere in particular, but may be said to have been "at a feast of languages, and stolen the scraps," and though, never for a moment fixed or stationary, it still continues to beg, borrow, steal and assimilate words wherever it can find them, provided only they express new ideas, or render an old one more tersely than before, yet every new term coined on this side of the Atlantic has been branded and pilloried, whether it originated in circumstances out of the reach of English experience, and met a clamorous necessity of our situation, or not. Too often the growls of the British lion have been echoed by his American imitators, who have not taken the trouble even to ask themselves, "What is an Americanism?" and thus get a clear meaning of the term. Before joining in the hue-and-cry against any words thus stigmatized, would it not be well to pause and ask what is meant by the epithet? Is it any chance misuse of English of which an American writer may be guilty, or the vulgarism of any clique or locality? Is it just to term all the anomalies and provincialisms which can be raked and scraped together from the slang of the backwoods and the bar-rooms, the dialects of the Mississippi boatmen, the southern sand-hillers, the Bowery boys, Yankee peddlers, the frequenters of pot-houses, as well as from the rubbish and scum of our raw-head-and-bloody-bones literature of the Cobb and Ingraham school, and, cramming them into a thick volume, label them " Americanisms?" As justly might we collect all the slang of London thieves, the “exasperated haitches" of the cockneys, the provincialisms of Yorkshire, the Northumberland "burrs," the patois of Cornwall, the uncouth verbal anomalies of the miners, and

mingling with them the comic compounds of Sydney Smith, and the monstrosities of Carlyle and his imitators, label the whole as the common speech of England.

It is absurd to pronounce every word that chances first to see the light in this country an Americanism. No term can justly be so called until it has received the sanction of general and respectable usage. Till recently we have been. willing to bow to English authority upon all questions touching English speech; but, as it has been well said, America is now out of her leading-strings, and the nation which has supplied the world with two of the best dictionaries of our tongue, may certainly trust its own judgment and instincts in inventing the new words it needs. We deny the exclusive right of John Bull to coin new expressions, or that it is a statutory offense to invent on this side of the Atlantic a felicitous, or daring, or useful, expression unauthorized by Todd or Johnson. Our language is no longer the language of England merely; and while she merits our profoundest homage as the land which nursed our tongue in its infancy, and whose scholars have done the most to enrich, refine and beautify it, we yet hold that any genuine improvement of it,—any legitimate addition to its wealth of words,- should be welcomed from any quarter of the globe where it is spoken. The peculiar circumstances in which the inhabitants of the United States are placed, the objects of nature, the productions of the earth, the employments, the modes of thought, the characteristic tastes and sensibilities, necessitate a corresponding diversity of language, not only between this and the mother country, but even between different parts of our own vast country. Hence, such words as backwoodsman, congressional, prairie, immigrants, improvements, and many others, meeting real