P1NGU1CULA. 201 



the first sentence I read is " Solomon with all his acuteness 

 was not wise enough to ... etc., etc., etc." (' give the Jews 

 the British constitution/ I believe the man means.) He is 

 not a whit more conceited than Mr. Herbert Spencer, or Mr. 

 Goldwin Smith, or Professor Tyndall, or any lively London 

 apprentice out on a Sunday ; but this general superciliousness 

 ^svith respect to Solomon, his Proverbs, and his politics, char- 

 acteristic of the modern Cockney, Yankee, and Anglicised 

 Scot, is a difficult thing to deal with for us of the old school, 

 who were well whipped when we were young ; and have been 

 in the habit of occasionally ascertaining our own levels as we 

 grew older, and of recognizing that, here and there, some- 

 body stood higher, and struck harder. 



9. A difficult thing to deal with, I feel more and more, 

 hourly, even to the point of almost ceasing to write ; not only 

 every feeling I have, but, of late, even every word I use, being 

 alike inconceivable to the insolence, and. unintelligible amidst 

 the slang, of the modern London writers. Only in the last 

 magazine I took up, I found an article by Mr. Goldwin Smith 

 on the Jews (of which the gist as far as it had any was that 

 we had better give up reading the Bible), and in the text of 

 which I found the word * tribal ' repeated about ten times in 

 every page. Now, if ' tribe ' makes tribal/ tube must make 

 tubal, cube, cubal, and, gibe, gibal ; and I suppose we shall 

 next hear of tubal music, cubal minerals, and gibal conversa- 

 tion ! And observe how all this bad English leads instantly 

 to blunder in thought, prolonged indefinitely. The Jewish 

 Tribes are not separate races, but the descendants of 

 brothers. The Roman Tribes, political divisions ; essentially 

 Trine : and the whole force of the word Tribune vanishes, as 

 soon as the ear is wrung into acceptance of his lazy innovation 

 by the modern writer. Similarly, in the last elements of 

 mineralogy I took up, the first order of crystals was called 

 f tesseral ' ; the writer being much too fine to call them ' four-al/ 

 and too much bent on distinguishing himself from all previous 

 writers to call them cubic. 



10. What simple schoolchildren, and sensible school- 

 masters, are to do in this atmosphere of Egyptian marsh. 



