they still use "ponies,"-if they "group," and get, as we did, "parietals" and "publics" for the same.

The police courts contribute their quota.

Baggage-smashing, dog-smudging, ring-dropping, watch-stuffing, the patentsafe men, the confidence men, garroters, shysters, policy-dealers, mock-auction Peter Funks, bogus-ticket swindlers, are all terms which have more or less outgrown the bounds of their Alsatia of Thieves' Latin and are known of men.

Even the pulpit, with its staid decorums, has its idioms, which it cannot quite keep to itself. We hear in the religious world of "professors," and "monthly concerts," (which mean praying, and not psalmody,) of "sensation-preaching," (which takes the place of the "painful" preaching of old times,) of "platform-speakers," of "revival-preachers," of "broad pulpits," and "Churches of the Future," of the

Eclipse of Faith" and the "Suspense of Faith," of "liberal" Christians, (with no reference to the contribution-plates,) of "subjective" and "objective" sermons, "Spurgeonisms," and "businessmen's meetings." And we can never think without a smile of that gifted genius, whoever he was, who described a certain public exercise as "the most eloquent prayer ever addressed to a Boston audience." He surely created a new and striking idiom.

The boys do, as Young America should, their share. And the sayings of street urchins endure with singular tenacity. Like their sports, which follow laws of their own, uninfluenced by meteorological considerations, tending to the sedentary games of marbles in the cold, chilly spring, and bursting into base- and football in the midsummer solstice, strict tradition hands down from boy to boy the well-worn talk. There are still 46 busters," as in our young days, and the ardent youth upon floating cakes of ice "run bendolas" or "kittly-benders," or simply "benders." In different latitudes the phrase varies,-one-half of it going to Plymouth Colony, and the other abiding in Massachusetts Bay. And this ten

dency to dismember a word is curiously shown in that savory fish which the Indian christened "scup-paug." Eastward he swims as "scup," while at the Manhattan end of the Sound he is fried as "porgie." And apropos of him, let us note a curious instance of the tenacity of associated ideas. The street boys of our day and early home were wont to term the hetairai of the public walks "scup." The young Athenians applied to the classic courtesans the epithet of σαπέρδιον, the name of a small fish very abundant in the Black Sea. Here now is a bit of slang which may fairly be warranted to keep fresh in any climate.

But boy-talk is always lively and pointed; not at all precise, but very prone to prosopopeia; ever breaking out of the bounds of legitimate speech to invent new terms of its own. Dr. Busby addresses Brown, Jr., as Brown Secundus, and speaks to him of his "young companions." Brown himself talks of "the chaps," or "the fellows," who in turn know Brown only as Tom Thumb. The power of nicknaming is a school-boy gift, which no discouragement of parents and guardians can crush out, and which displays thoroughly the idiomatic faculty. For a man's name was once his, the distinctive mark by which the world got at his identity. Long, Short, White, Black, Greathead, Longshanks, etc., told what a person in the eyes of men the owner presented. The hereditary or aristocratic process has killed this entirely. Men no longer make their names; even the poor foundlings, like Oliver Twist, are christened alphabetically by some Bumble the Beadle. But the nickname restores his lost rights, and takes the man at once out of the ignobile vulgus to give him identity. We recognize this gift and are proud of our nicknames, when we can get them to suit us. Only the sharp judgment of our peers reverses our own heraldry and sticks a surname like a burr upon us. The nickname is the idiom of nomenclature. The sponsorial appellation is generally meaningless, fished piously out of Scripture or profanely out

of plays and novels, or given with an eye to future legacies, or for some equally insufficient reason apart from the name itself. So that the gentleman who named his children One, Two, and Three, was only reducing to its lowest term the prevailing practice. But the nickname abides. It has its hold in affection. When the "old boys" come together in Gore Hall at their semi-centennial Commencement, or the "Puds" or "Porcs" get together after long absence, it is not to inquire what has become of the Rev. Dr. Heavysterne or his Honor Littleton Coke, but it is, "Who knows where Hockey Jones is?" and "Did Dandy Glover really die in India?" and "Let us go and call upon Old Sykes" or "Old Roots" or "Old Conic-Sections," thus meaning to designate Professor

-, LL.D.,

A. A. S., F. R. S., etc. A college president who had no nickname would prove himself, ipso facto, unfit for his post. It is only dreadfully affected people who talk of "Tully"; the sensible all cling to the familiar "Chick-Pea" or Cicero, by which the wart-faced orator was distinguished. For it is not the boys only, but all American men, who love nicknames, the idioms of nomenclature. The first thing which is done, after a nominating convention has made its platform and balloted for its candidates, is to discover or invent a nickname: Old Hickory, Tippecanoe, The Little Giant, The Little Magician, The Mill-Boy of the Slashes, Honest John, Harry of the West, Black Dan, Old Buck, Old Rough and Ready. A "good name" is a tower of strength and many votes.

And not only with candidates for office, the spots on whose "white garments" are eagerly sought for and labelled, but in the names of places and classes the principle prevails, the democratic or Saxon tongue gets the advantage. Thus, we have for our states, cities, and ships-of-war the title of fondness which drives out the legal title of ceremony. Are we not "Yankees" to the world, though to the diplomatists "citizens of the United States of America"? We

have a Union made up upon the map of Maine, New Hampshire, etc., to California; we have another in the newspapers, composed of the Lumber State, the Granite State, the Green-Mountain State, the Nutmeg State, the Empire State, the Keystone State, the Blue Hen, the Old Dominion, of Hoosiers, Crackers, Suckers, Badgers, Wolverines, the Palmetto State, and Eldorado. We have the Crescent City, the Quaker City, the Empire City, the Forest City, the Monumental City, the City of Magnificent Distances. We hear of Old Ironsides sent to the Mediterranean to relieve the Old Tea-Wagon, ordered home. Everywhere there obtains the Papal principle of taking a new title upon succeeding to any primacy. The Norman imposed his laws upon England; the courts, the parish-registers, the Acts of Parliament were all his; but to this day there are districts of the Saxon Island where the postman and censustaker inquire in vain for Adam Smith and Benjamin Brown, but must perforce seek out Bullhead and Bandyshins. So indomitable is the Saxon.

We have not done yet with our national idioms. In the seaboard towns nautical phrases make tarry the talk of the people. "Where be you a-cruising to?" asks one Nantucket matron of her gossip. "Sniver-dinner, I'm going to Egypt; Seth B. has brought a letter from Turkeywowner to Old Nancy." "Dressed-todeath-and-drawers-empty, don't you see we're goin' to have a squall? You had better take in your stu'n'-sails." The good woman was dressed up, intending, "as soon as ever dinner was over," to go, not to the land of the Pharaohs, but to the negro-quarter of the town, with a letter which "Seth B." (her son, thus identified by his middle letter) had brought home from Talcahuana.

For the rural idioms we refer the reader to the late Sylvester Judd's "Margaret" and "Richard Edney," and to the Jack Downing Letters.

The town is not behind the country. For, whatever is the current fancy, pugilism, fire-companies, racing, railway-build

ing, or the opera, its idioms invade the talk. The Almighty Dollar of our worship has more synonymes than the Roman Pantheon had divinities. We are not "well-informed," but "posted" or "posted up." We are not "hospitably entreated" any more, but "put through." We do not "meet with misadventure," but "see the elephant," which we often do through the Hibernian process of "fighting the tiger."

Purists deplore this, but it is inevitable; and if one searches beneath the surface, there is often a curious deposit of meaning, sometimes auriferous enough to repay our use of cradle and rocker. We "panned out," the other day, a phrase which gave us great delight, and which illustrated a fact in New England history worth noting. We were puzzling over the word "socdollager," which Bartlett, we think, defines as " Anything very large and striking,"-Anglicé, a "whopper," "also a peculiar fish-hook." The word first occurs in print, we believe, in Mr. Cooper's "Home as Found," applied to a patriarch among the white bass of Otsego Lake, which could never be captured. We assumed at once that there was a latent reason for the term, and all at once it flashed upon us that it was a rough fisherman's random-shot at the word "doxology." This, in New England congregations, as all know, was wont to be sung, or "j'ined in," by the whole assembly, and given with particular emphasis, both because its words were familiar to all without book, and because it served instead of the chanted creed of their Anglican forefathers. The last thing, after which nothing could properly follow, the most important and most conspicuous of all, it represented to our Yankee Walton the crowning hope of his life,- the big bass, after taking which he might put hook-andline on the shelf. By a slight transposition, natural enough to untrained organs, "doxology" became "socdollager."

We are not making a dictionary of Americanisms, but merely wandering a little way into our native forests. We refer to the prevalent habit of idiomatic

speech as a fact that makes part of our literature. It cannot be ignored, nor do we see how it is to be avoided. It is well, of course, to retain the sterling classic basis of our speech as we received it from abroad, and to this all that is best and purest in our literature past and present will tend. But we hold to no Know-Nothing platform which denies a right of naturalization to the worthy. As Ruskin says of the river, that it does not make its bed, but finds it, seeking out, with infinite pains, its appointed channel, so thought will seek its expression, guided by its inner laws of association and sympathy. If the mind and heart of a nation become barbarized, no classic culture can keep its language from corruption. If its ideas are ignoble, it will turn to the ignoble and vulgar side of every word in its tongue, it will affix the mean sense it desires to utter where it had of old no place. It converts the prince's palace into a stable or an inn; it pulls down the cathedral and the abbey to use the materials for the roads on which it tramples. It is good to sanctify language by setting some of its portions apart for holy uses, - at least, by preserving intact the high religious association which rests upon it. The same silver may be moulded to the altar-chalice or the Bacchic goblet; but we touch the one with reverent and clean hands, while the other is tossed aside in the madness of the revel. Men clamor for a new version of the Sacred Scriptures, and profess to be shocked at its plain outspokenness, forgetting that to the pure all things are pure, and that to the prurient all things are foul. It was a reverent and a worshipping age that gave us that treasure, and so long as we have the temper of reverence and worship we shall not ask to change it.

And to return once more to our original illustration. We have the two nations also in us, the Norman and the Saxon, the dominant and the aspiring, the patrician and the prolétaire. The one rules only by right of rule, the other rises only by right of rising. The power of conservatism perishes, when there is no longer

anything to keep; the might of radicalism overflows into excess, when the proper check is taken away or degraded. So long as the noble is noble and "noblesse oblige," so long as Church and State are true to their guiding and governing duties, the elevation of the base is the elevation of the whole. If the standards of what is truly aristocratic in our language are standards of nobility of thought, they will endure and draw up to them, on to the episcopal thrones and into the Upper House of letters, all that is most worthy. Whatever makes the nation's life will make its speech. War was once the career of the Norman, and he set the seal

of its language upon poetry. Agriculture was the Saxon's calling, and he made literature a mirror of the life he led. We in this new land are born to new heritages, and the terms of our new life must be used to tell our story. The Herald's College gives precedence to the PatentOffice, and the shepherd's pipe to the steam-whistle. And since all literature which can live stands only upon the national speech, we must look for our hopes of coming epics and immortal dramas to the language of the land, to its idioms, in which its present soul abides and breathes, and not to its classicalities, which are the empty shells upon its barren sea-shore.

II.

WHEN Miss Kent, the maternal greataunt of Mr. Raleigh, devised her property, the will might possibly have been set aside as that of a monomaniac, but for the fact that he cared too little about any thing to go to law for it, and for the still more important fact that the heirs-at-law were sufficiently numerous to ingulf the whole property and leave no ripple to attest its submerged existence, had he done so; and on deserting it, he was better pleased to enrich the playfellow of his childhood than a host of unknown and unloved individuals. I cannot say that he did not more than once regret what he had lost: he was not of a selfdenying nature, as we know ; on the contrary, luxurious and accustomed to all those delights of life generally to be procured only through wealth. But, for all that, there had been intervals, ere his thirteen years' exile ended, in which, so far from regret, he experienced a certain joy at remembrance of this rough and

rugged point of time where he had escaped from the chrysalid state to one of action and freedom and real life. He had been happy in reaching India before his uncle's death, in applying his own clear understanding to the intricate entanglements of the affairs before him, in rescuing his uncle's commercial good name, and in securing thus for himself a foothold on the ladder of life, although that step had not occurred to him till thrust there by the pressure of circumstances. For the rest, I am not sure that Mr. Raleigh did not find his path suiting him well enough. There was no longer any charm in home; he was forbidden to think of it. That strange summer, that had flashed into his life like the gleam of a carnival-torch into quiet rooms, must be forgotten; the forms that had peopled it, in his determination, should become shadows. Valiant vows! Yet there must have come moments, in that long lapse of days and years, when the whole season gathered up its garments and swept imperiously through his memory: nights,

when, under the shadow of the Himmaleh, the old passion rose at spring-tide and flooded his heart and drowned out forgetfulness, and a longing asserted itself, that, if checked as instantly by honor as despair, was none the less insufferable and full of pain, -warm, wide, Southern nights, when all the stars, great and gold en, leaned out of heaven to meet him, and all ripe perfumes, wafted by their own principle of motion, floated in the rich dusk and laden air about him, and the phantom of snow on topmost heights sought vainly to lend him its calm. Days also must have showered their fervid sunshine on him, as he journeyed through plains of rice, where all the broad reaches whitening to harvest filled him with intense and bitterest loneliness. What region of spice did not recall the noons when they two had trampled the sweetfern on wide, high New England pastures, and breathed its intoxicating fragrance? and what forest of the tropics, what palms, what blooms, what gorgeous affluence of color and of growth, equalled the wood on the lake-shores, with its stately hemlocks, its joyous birches, its pale-blue, shadow-blanched violets? Nor was this regret, that had at last become a part of the man's identity, entirely a selfish one. He had no authority whatever for his belief, yet believe he did, that, firmly and tenderly as he loved, he was loved, and of the two fates his was not the harder. But a man, a man, too, in the stir of the world, has not the time for brooding over the untoward events of his destiny that a woman has; his tender memories are forever jostled by cent. per cent.; he meets too many faces to keep the one in constant and unchanging perpetuity sacredly before his thought. And so it happened that Mr. Raleigh became at last a silent, keen-eyed man, with the shadow of old and enduring melancholy on his life, but with no certain sorrow there.

In the course of time his business-connections extended themselves; he was associated with other men more intent than he upon their aim; although not wealthy, years might make him so; his

of his old indifference lingered about him; it was seldom that he was in earnest; he drifted with the tide, and, except to maintain a clear integrity before God and men and his own soul, exerted scarcely an effort. It was not an easy thing for him to break up any manner of life; and when it became necessary for one of the firm to visit America, and he as the most suitable was selected, he assented to the proposition with not a heart-beat. America was as flat a wilderness to him as the Desert of Sahara. On landing in India, he had felt like a semi-conscious sleeper in his dream, the country seemed one of phantasms: the Lascars swarming in the port,

the merchants wrapped in snowy muslins, who moved like white-robed bronzes faintly animate,-the strange faces, modes, and manners, the stranger beasts, immense, and alien to his remembrance; all objects that crossed his vision had seemed like a series of fantastic shows; he could have imagined them to be the creations of a heated fancy or the weird deceits of some subtle draught of magic. But now they had become more his life than the scenes which he had left; this land with its heats and its languors had slowly and passively endeared itself to him; these perpetual summers, the balms and blisses of the South, had unconsciously become a need of his nature. One day all was ready for his departure; and in the clipper ship Osprey, with a cargo for Day, Knight, and Company, Mr. Raleigh bade farewell to India.

The Osprey was a swift sailer and handled with consummate skill, so that I shall not venture to say in how few days she had weathered the Cape, and, ploughing up the Atlantic, had passed the Windward Islands, and off the latter had encountered one of the severest gales in Captain Tarbell's remembrance, although he was not new to shipwreck. If Mr. Raleigh had found no time for reflection in the busy current of affairs, when, ceasing to stand aside, he had mingled in the turmoil and become a part of the generations of men, he could not fail to find it