Besides these difficulties, what right have a few men, however elevated their station, to change a national practice? They may say, that they consult their own ears, and endeavor to please themselves. This is their only apology, unless they can prove that the changes they make are real improvements. But what improvement is there in changing the sounds of three or four letters into others, and thus multiplying anomalies, and encreasing the difficulty of learning a language? Will not the great body of the people claim the privilege of adhering to their ancient usages, and believing their practice to be the most correct? They most undoubtedly will.
If Horace's maxim is ever just, it is only when custom is national; when the practice of a nation is uniform or general. In this case it becomes the common law of the land, and no one will dispute its propriety. But has any man a right to deviate from this practice, and attempt to establish a singular mode of his own? Have two or three eminent stage players authority to make changes at pleasure, and palm their novelties upon a nation under the idea of _custom_? The reader will pardon me for transcribing here the opinion of the celebrated Michaelis, one of the most learned philologers of the present century. "It is not," says he, "for a scholar to give laws nor proscribe established expressions: If he takes so much on himself he is ridiculed, and deservedly; it is no more than a just mortification to his ambition, and the penalty of his usurping on the rights of the people. Language is a democratical state, where all the learning in the world does not warrant a citizen to supersede a received custom, till he has convinced the whole nation that this custom is a mistake. Scholars are not so infallible that every thing is to be referred to them. Were they allowed a decisory power, the errors of language, I am sure, instead of diminishing, would be continually increasing. Learned heads teem with them no less than the vulgar; and the former are much more imperious, that we should be compelled to defer to their innovations and implicitly to receive every false opinion of theirs."[78]
Yet this right is often assumed by individuals, who dictate to a nation the rules of speaking, with the same imperiousness as a tyrant gives laws to his vassals: And, strange as it may appear, even well bred people and scholars, often surrender their right of private judgement to these literary governors. The _ipse dixit_ of a Johnson, a Garrick, or a Sheridan, has the force of law; and to contradict it, is rebellion. Ask the most of our learned men, how they would pronounce a word or compose a sentence, and they will immediately appeal to some favorite author whose decision is final. Thus distinguished eminence in a writer often becomes a passport for innumerable errors.