CatWH.] ***& [Marcb 15, 



freeing himself from the monster which held him in its 

 huge coils. But that was probably a lying fable. What 

 Dr. llaldeman did is a fixed tact; and this learned pioneer 

 in the spelling reform claims, and with justice, to be 

 the first English scholar who can honestly use the ex- 

 ultant line of Bryant, "I broke the spell that bound me." 

 Certainly, he and his learned coadjutors — for I do not know 

 of an eminent philologist who is not enlisted to some extent 

 in this spelling reform — have brought the brightest hopes 

 of Franklin and Jefferson to the point of realization. 

 This I concede heartily — but also sorrowfully, for at my 

 time of life it is horrible to think of learning to spell over 

 again. There was a time, I confess, when my zeal to under- 

 go this personal tribulation for the benefit of posterity 

 which (it has been forcibly said) has never conferred any 

 benefits upon us, was not strong enough to keep me from 

 devoutly wishing that a kind Providence would confound 

 the counsels of these conspirators against the established 

 disorder, at least until I was out of the reach of their new 

 spelling books. Even now, I cannot help expressing the be- 

 nevolent wish — benevolent to myself and my contempora- 

 ries — that this every-way desirable and even necessary 

 reform had come earlier. I wish that Franklin had 

 finished up the matter, and that our patriotic forefathers 

 under his wise and practical leadership had succeeded in 

 driving the bad spelling out of the country with the dis- 

 comfited British. It really seems as if those long years 

 that tried men's souls, would have been just the very hot 

 opportunity to dispose of this vexed question. There was so 

 much turmoil and confusion during the war, such pecuniary 

 distress, such afflictive social and political antagonisms that 

 the misery, inevitable to the generation that reforms the 

 English spelling, would hardly have been noticed; and the 



