person of a contrary party, who is willing to get into one.'

'Whereas A. B. next door to the Pestle and Mortar, being about thirty years old, of a spare make, with dark-coloured hair, bright eye, and a long nose, has occasion for a goodhumoured, tall, fair, young woman, of about 30007. fortune; these are to give notice, that if any such young woman has a mind to dispose of herself in marriage to such a person as the above-mentioned, she may be provided with a husband, a coach and horses, and proportion- | able settlement.'

'C. D. designing to quit his place, has great quantities of paper, parchment, ink, wax, and wafers, to dispose of, which will be sold at very reasonable rates.'

E. F. a person of good behaviour, six feet high, of a black complexion, and sound principles, wants an employ. He is an excellent penman and accountant, and speaks French.'

No. 229.] Tuesday, September 26, 1710.
Quæsitam meritis sume superbiam.
Hor. 3 Od. xxx. 13.

With conscions pride

Francis.

Assume the honours justly thine. From my own Apartment, September 25. THE whole creation preys upon itself. Every living creature is inhabited. A flea has a thousand invisible insects that teaze him as he jumps from place to place, and revenge our quarrels upon him. A very ordinary microscope shows us, that a louse is itself a very lousy_creature. A whale, besides those seas and oceans in the several vessels of his body, which are filled with innumerable shoals of little animals, carries about him a whole world of inhabitants; insomuch that, if we believe the calculations some have made, there are more living creatures, which are too small for the naked eye to behold, about the leviathan, than there are of visible creatures upon the face of the whole earth. Thus every nobler creature is, as it were, the basis and support of multitudes that are his inferiors.

This consideration very much comforts me, when I think on those numberless vermin that feed upon this paper, and find their sustenance out of it; I mean the small wits and scribblers, that every day turn a penny by nibbling at my lucubrations. This has been so advantageous to this little species of writers, that, if they do me justice, I may expect to have my statue erected in Grub-street, as being a common benefactor to that quarter.

They say, when a fox is very much troubled with fleas, he goes into the next pool with a little lock of wool in his mouth, and keeps his body under water until the vermin get into it; after which he quits the wool, and diving, leaves his tormentors to shift for themselves, and get their livelihood where they can.

would have these gentlemen take care that I do not serve them after the same manner; for though I have hitherto kept my temper pretty well, it is not impossible but I may some time or other disappear; and what will then become of them? Should I lay down my paper, what a famine would there be among the bawkers, printers, booksellers, and authors! It would be like Dr. Burgess's* dropping his cloak,with the whole congregation hanging upon the skirts of it. To enumerate some of these my doughty antagonists; I was threatened to be answered weekly Tit for Tat; I was undermined by the Whisperer; haunted by Tom Brown's Ghost; scolded by a Female Tatler ; and slandered by another of the same character, under the title of Atalantis. I have been annotated, retattled, examined, and condoled; but it being my standing maxim never to speak ill of the dead, I shall let these authors rest in peace; and take great pleasure in thinking, that I have sometimes been the means of their getting a belly-full. When I see myself thus surrounded by such formidable enemies, I often think of the Knight of the Red Cross in Spenser's 'Den of Error,' who, after he has cut off the dragon's head, and left it wallowing in a flood of ink, sees a thousand monstrous reptiles making their attempts upon him, one with many heads, another with none, and all of them without eyes.

The same so sore annoyed has the knight, That, well nigh choked with the deadly stink, His forces fail, he can no longer fight; Whose courage when the fiend perceiv'd to shrink, She poured forth out of her hellish sink Her fruitful cursed spawn of serpents small, Deformed monsters, foul, and black as ink; Which swarming all about his legs did crawl, And him encumbred sore, but could not hurt at all. As gentle shepherd in sweet even tide, When ruddy Phoebus gins to welk in west, High on a hill, his flock to viewen wide, Marks which do bite their hasty supper best; A cloud of cumbrous gnats do him molest All striving to infix their feeble stings, That from their noyance he no where can rest; But with his clownish hands their tender wings He brusheth oft, and oft doth mar their murmurings. Spenser's Fairy Queen.'

If ever I should want such a fry of little authors to attend me, I shall think my paper in a very decaying condition. They are like ivy about an oak, which adorns the tree at the same time that it eats into it; or like a great man's equipage, that do honour to the person on whom they feed. For my part, when I see myself thus attacked, I do not consider my antagonists as malicious, but hungry; and therefore am resolved never to take any notice of them.

As for those who detract from my labours, without being prompted to it by an empty stomach; in return to their censures, I shall

Daniel Burgess, the doctor here alluded to, resided, it seems, in the year 1714 at the court of Hanover as secre tary and reader to the princess Sophia.

Give me leave to conclude, like an old man, and a moralist, with a fable.

The owls, bats, and several other birds of night, were one day got together in a thick shade, where they abused their neighbours in a very sociable manner. Their satire at last fell upon the sun, whom they all agreed to be very troublesome, impertinent, and inquisitive. Upon which, the sun, who overheard them, spoke to them after this manner : Gentlemen, I wonder how you dare abuse one that, you know, could in an instant scorch you up, and burn every mother's son of you: but the only answer I shall give you, or the revenge I shall take of you, is, to shine on.'

·

No. 231] Thursday, September 28, 1710.

From my own Apartment, September 28. THE following letter has laid before me many great and manifest evils in the world of letters, which I had overlooked; but they open to me a very busy scene, and it will require no small care and application to amend errors which are become so universal. The affectation of politeness is exposed in this epistle with a great deal of wit and discernment; so that whatever discourses I may fall into hereafter upon the subjects the writer treats of, I shall at present lay the matter before the world, without the least alteration from the words of my correspondent.

'To Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire.

SIR,

'There are some abuses among us of great consequence, the reformation of which is properly your province; though, as far as I have been conversant in your papers, you have not yet considered them. These are, the deplorable ignorance that for some years hath reigned among our English writers, the great depravity of our taste, and the continual corruption of our style. I say nothing here of those who handle particular sciences, divinity, law, physic, and the like; I mean the traders in history, politics, and the belles lettres; together with those by whom books are not translated, but, as the common expressions are, done out of French, Latin, or other language, and made English. I cannot but observe to you, that until of late years a Grub-street book was always bound in sheep-skin, with suitable print and paper, the price never above a shilling, and taken off wholly by common tradesmen or country pedlars; but now they appear in all sizes and shapes, and in all places. They are handed about from lapfuls in every coffee.

You may see them gilt, and in royal paper of five or six hundred pages, and rated accordingly. I would engage to furnish you with a catalogue of English books, published within the compass of seven years past, which at the first hand would cost you a hundred pounds, wherein you shall not be able to find ten lines together of common grammar or common sense. These two evils, ignorance and want of taste, have produced a third; I mean the continual corruption of our English tongue, which, without some timely remedy, will suf fer more by the false refinements of twenty years past, than it hath been improved in the foregoing hundred. And this is what I design chiefly to enlarge upon, leaving the former evils to your animadversion.

'But, instead of giving you a list of the late refinements crept into our language, I here send you the copy of a letter I received, some time ago, from a most accomplished person in this way of writing; upon which I shall make some remarks. It is in these terms:

"SIR,

"I cou'd n't get the things you sent for all and then I'd h' brót 'um; but I ha'nt don't, about town--I thốt to ha come down myself, and I believe I can't do't that's pozz-Tom † begins to gimself airs, because he's going with will bamboozl us agen, which causes many the plenipo's-'Tis said the French king speculations. The Jacks and others of that kidney are very uppish and alert upon't, as you may see by their phizz's- -Will Hazard has got the hipps, having lost to the tune of five hund'rd pound, tho' he understands play very well, no body better. He has promis't me upon rep, to leave off play; but you know 'tis a weakness he's too apt to give into, tho' be has as much wit at any man, no body more. He has in ineog ever since-The mob's very quiet with us now— −I believe you thit I ban. ter'd you in my last, like a country put—I shan't leave town this month, &c."

'This letter is in every point an admirable pattern of the present polite way of writing; nor is it of less authority for being an epistle. You may gather every flower in it, with a thousand more of equal sweetness, from the books, pamphlets, and single papers offered us every day in the coffee houses: and these are the beauties introduced to supply the want of wit, sense, humour, and learning, which formerly were looked upon as qualifications for a writer. If a man of wit, who died forty

Swift, in one of his letters to Mrs. Johnson, desires to know, whether the English was a language or a tongue. + Mr. Thomas Harley is here alluded to,

years ago, were to rise from the grave on purpose, how would he be able to read this letter? and after he had got through that difficulty, how would he be able to understand it? The first thing that strikes your eye, is the breaks at the end of almost every sentence; of which I know not the use, only that it is a refinement, and very frequently practised. Then you will observe the abbreviations and elisions, by which consonants of most obdurate sound are joined together, without one softening vowel to intervene; and all this only to make one syllable of two, directly contrary to the example of the Greeks and Romans, altogether of the Gothic strain, and a natural tendency towards relapsing into barbarity, which delights in monosyllables, and uniting of mute consonants, as it is observable in all the northern languages. And this is still more visible in the next refinement, which consists in pronouncing the first syllable in a word that has many, and dismissing the rest, such as phizz, hipps, mob, pozz, rep, and many more, when we are already overloaded with monosyllables, which are the disgrace of our language. Thus we cram one syllable, and cut off the rest, as the owl fattened her mice after she had bit off their legs to prevent them from running away; and if ours be the same reason for maiming our words, it will certainly answer | the end; for I am sure no other nation will desire to borrow them. Some words are hitherto but fairly split, and therefore only in their way to perfection, as incog and plenipo: but in a short time, it is to be hoped, they will be further docked to inc and plen. This reflection has made me of late years very impatient for a peace, which I believe would save the lives of many brave words, as well as men. The war has introduced abundance of polysyllables, which will never be able to live many more campaigns: speculations, operations, preliminaries, ambassadors, pallisadoes, communication, circumvallution, battalions; as numerous as they are, if they attack us too frequently in our coffee-houses, we shall certainly put them to flight, and cut off the

rear.

The third refinement obvervable in the letter I send you, consists in the choice of certain words invented by some pretty fellows, such as banter, bamboozle, country put, and kidney, as it is there applied; some of which are now struggling for the vogue, and others are in possession of it. I have done my utmost for some years past to stop the progress of mob and banter, but have been plainly borne down by numbers, and betrayed by those who promised to assist me.

In the last place, you are to take notice of certain choice phrases scattered through the letter, some of them tolerable enough, until they were worn to rags by servile imitators.

You might easily find them though they were not in a different print, and therefore I need not disturb them.

'These are the false refinements in our style which you ought to correct: first, by argument and fair means; but, if those fail, I think you are to make use of your authority as Censor, and by an annual Index Expurgatorius expunge all words and phrases that are offensive to good sense, and condemn those barbarous mutilations of vowels and syllables. In this last point the usual pretence is, that they spell as they speak. A noble standard for language! to depend upon the caprice of every coxcomb, who, because words are the clothing of our thoughts, cuts them out and shapes them as he pleases, and changes them ofterer than his dress. I believe all reasonable people would be content that such refiners were more sparing in their words, and liberal in their syllables: and upon this head I should be glad you would bestow some advice upon several young readers in our churches, who, coming up from the university full fraught with admiration of our town politeness, will needs correct the style of their prayer-books. In reading the Absolution, they are very careful to say pardons and absolves; and in the prayer for the royal family, it must be endue'um, enrich'um, prosper'um, and bring'um.* Then in their sermons they use all the modern terms of art, sham, banter, mob, bubble, bully, cutting, shuffling, and palming; all which, and many more of the like stamp, as I have heard them often in the pulpit from such young sophisters, so I have read them in some of "those sermons that have made most noise of late." The design, it seems, is to avoid the dreadful imputation of pedantry; to show us that they know the town, understand men and manners, and have not been poring upon old unfashionable books in the university.

'I should be glad to see you the instrument of introducing into our style that simplicity which is the best and truest ornament of most things in life, which the politer ages always aimed at in their building and dress, simplex munditiis, as well as their productions of wit. It is manifest that all new affected modes of speech, whether borrowed from the court, the town, or the theatre, are the first perishing parts in any language; and, as I could prove by many hundred instances, have been so in ours. The writings of Hooker,† who was a country clergyman, and of Parsons the Jesuit, both in the reign of queen Elizabeth, are in a style that, with very few allowances, would

*This is probably a sneer at Dr. Ashe, bishop of Clogher, whose pupil Swift had been, as Congreve also was.

↑ Richard Hooker, the learned and worthy author of a

well-known book, entitled, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie,' and other pious tracts, was born near Exeter in 1553, and died at Bishop's Bourne in Kent, Nov. 2, 1600.