176 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



men who are distilled into the House of Commons, and then redistilled 

 into the Ministry, we are again disappointed. Just as, in the last gen- 

 eration, royal speeches, drawn up hy those so laboriously trained in 

 the right uses of words, furnished for an English grammar examples 

 of blunders to be avoided ; so, in the present generation, a work on 

 style might fitly take, from these documents which our government 

 annually lays before all the world, warning instances of confusions, 

 and illogicalities, and pleonasms. And then on looking at the per- 

 formances of men not thus elaborately prepared, we are still more 

 struck by the seeming anomaly. How great the anomaly is, we may 

 best see by supposing some of our undisciplined authors to use expres- 

 sions like those used by the disciplined. Imagine the self-made Cob- 

 bett deliberately saying, as is said in the last royal speech, that 



" I have kept in view the double object of an equitable regard to existing cir- 

 cumstances, and of securing a general provision more permanent in its charac- 

 ter, and resting on a reciprocal and equal basis, for the commercial and mari- 

 time transactions of the two countries." ' 



Imagine the poet, who had " little Latin and less Greek," directing 

 that 



"No such address shall be delivered in any place where the assemblage of 

 persons to hear the same may cause obstruction to the use of any road or walk 

 by the public." 3 



a passage which occurs, along with half a dozen laxities and super- 

 fluities, in the eighteen lines announcing the ministerial retreat from 

 the Hyde Park contest. Imagine the ploughman Burns, like one of 

 our scholars who has been chosen to direct the education of gentle- 

 men's sons, expressing himself in print thus : 



" I should not have troubled you with this detail (which was, indeed, need- 

 less in my former letter) if it was not that I may appear to have laid a stress 

 upon the dates which the boy's accident had prevented me from being able to 

 claim to do." 3 



Imagine Bunyan the tinker publishing such a sentence as this, written 

 by one of our bishops : 



"If the 546 gentlemen who signed the protest on the subject of deaconesses 

 had thought proper to object to my having formally licensed a deaconess in the 

 parish of Dilton's Marsh, or to what they speak of when they say that ' recog- 

 nition had been made' (I presume on a report of which no part or portion was 

 adopted by resolution of the Synod) ' as to sisters living together in a more 

 conventual manner and under stricter rule,' I should not have thought it neces- 

 sary to do more than receive with silent respect the expression of their opin- 

 ion," etc., etc. 4 



Or, to cite for comparison modern self-educated writers, imagine such 

 a sentence coming from Alexander Smith, or Gerald Massey, or the 



1 Daily papers, February 7, 1873. 3 Times, November 25, 1872. 



2 Times and Post, February 11, 1873. 4 Times, November 27, 1872. 



