Our readers need not be told how much Carlyle has done to teutonize our language with his “yardlongtailed” German compounds. It was a just stroke of criticism when a New York auctioneer introduced a miscellaneous lot of books to a crowd with the remark: “Gentlemen, of this lot I need only say, six volumes are by Thomas Carlyle; the seventh is written in the _English_ language.” Some years ago, a learned doctor of divinity and university professor in Canada wrote a work in which, wishing to state the simple fact that the “rude Indian” had learned the use of firing, he delivered himself as follows: “He had made slave of the heaven-born element, the brother of the lightning, the grand alchemist and artificer of all times, though as yet he knew not all the worth or magical power that was in him. By his means the sturdy oak, which flung abroad its stalwart arms and waved its leafy honors defiant in the forest, was made to bow to the behest of the simple aborigines.” As the plain Scotchwoman said of De Quincey, “the bodie has an awfu’ sicht o’ words!” This style of speaking and writing has become so common that it can no longer be considered wholly vulgar. It is gradually working upward; it is making its way into official writings and grave octavos; and is even spoken with unction in pulpits and senates. Metaphysicians are wont to define words as the signs of ideas; but with many persons, they appear to be, not so much the signs of their thought, as the signs of the signs of their thought. Such, doubtless, was the case with the Scotch clergyman, whom a bonneted abhorrer of legal preaching was overheard eulogizing: “Man, John, wasna yon preachin’!--yon’s something for a body to come awa wi’. The way that he smashed down his text into so mony heads and particulars, just a’ to flinders! Nine heads and twenty particulars in ilka head--and _sic mouthfu’s o’ grand words!_--an’ every ane o’ them fu’ o’ meaning, if we but kent them. We hae ill improved our opportunities; man, if we could just mind onything he said, it would do us guid.”
The whole literature of notices, handbills, and advertisements, in our day, has apparently declared “war to the knife” against every trace of the Angles, Jutes and Saxons. We have no schoolmasters now; they are all “principals of collegiate institutes”; no copy-books, but “specimens of caligraphy”; no ink, but “writing fluid”; no physical exercise, but “calisthenics” or “gymnastics.” A man who opens a groggery at some corner for the gratification of drunkards, instead of announcing his enterprise by its real name, modestly proclaims through the daily papers that his “saloon” has been fitted up for the reception of customers. Even the learned architects of log cabins and pioneer cottages can find names for them only in the sonorous dialects of oriental climes. Time was when a farmhouse was a farmhouse and a porch a porch; but now the one is a “villa” or “hacienda,” and the other nothing less than a “veranda.” In short, this genteel slang pursues us from the cradle to the grave. In old times, when our fathers and mothers died, they were placed in coffins, and buried in the graveyard or burying ground; now, when an unfortunate “party” or “individual” “deceases” or “becomes defunct,” he is deposited in a “burial casket” and “interred in a cemetery.” It matters not that the good old words “grave” and “graveyard” have been set in the pure amber of the English classics,--that the Bible says, “There is no wisdom in the grave,” “Cruel as the grave,” etc. How much more pompous and magniloquent the Greek: “There is no wisdom in the cemetery,” “Cruel as the cemetery!”