stands high in the estimation of the writer in the New Monthly Magazine. A certain most respectable literary journal for the months of January and April, 1819, spoke of forty families resident, we believe, in the neighbourhood of Southwark, on whom to transfer their allegiance and their affections to another government, sits as lightly, as to remove, in the fashionable season, from the ward of Farringdon without, to Margate or Rotting Dean.' And this worthy community, continues the same document, selected and sent out Mr Henry Fearon to the United States, to explore the way before them, and to prepare for their own emigration.* Now we profess our little familiarity with the topography of London. We are so uninformed in this department, as not to know even the bearings of Farringdon within, far less of that, which is without; and as for Rotting Dean, it is terra incognita to us. By the time our country has sent to England a few such travellers as England is daily sending to us, we doubt not we shall be made better acquainted with these points of geography. Though, however, we know little of them, there is a certain sound in their names, and a lurking sneer in the air, with which our brethren of the Quarterly pronounce them, which lead us mainly to fear that they are not-to speak safely-the central abodes of British gentility. If we may trust a kind of instinct in such things, there is a misgiving in our minds that Farringdon without is not the first region, in which a countess in her own right would fix her abode, and that Rotting Dean after all, even in the fashionable season, is one thing, and Brighton another. And yet these are the seats of the forty families, whose ambassador is before us, in the person of Mr Fearon. What, says Pope, must be the priest where a monkey is the god?' If such were the principals, what must have been the agent? That nothing moreover might be wanting to establish us in this, we had Mr Cobbett's testimony in confirmation of that of the Quarterly Review; and he must be a surly skeptic indeed who would doubt the only proposition, in which we suppose these two authorities ever concurred. 6 The next topic, which offers itself to us, is suggested in the following sentence. Surely a moment's reflection might have shown them that, on such occasions, silence and good humour are the only effectual weapons of defence, and that no wise and sober American should feel serious alarm for the charac Quarterly Review, vol. xxi, p. 125. ter and dignit pect us of feelin ter and dignity of his nation, even though a Scotch critic should make unreasonably light of Mr Joel Barlow's inspiration, or because Mr Sydney Smith's pen, in an hour of thoughtless gaiety, addressed some words of friendly admonition to the United States of America, under the homely appellation of Jonathan.' Now the objections we make to this insinuation, trifling as it is in itself, are, that it betrays a total ignorance of the real state of facts, on an important subject, which it professes to explain. Nothing is more notorious than that the Columbiad of Barlow, or of Mr Joel Barlow, for we perceive that this unlucky Old Testament name is no small part of the joke to our brethren abroad, nothing is more notorious, than that Barlow's Columbiad has ever been regarded by the judicious public of the United States, as a total failure; that it has been little read and less liked; and that on its appearance the critical journals of this country handled it quite as severely, if not as wittily, as those on the banks of the Thames or of the Forth. Had those, who accuse us or suspect us of feeling sore on the subject of the Columbiad, done us the favor to ascertain the real feeling of the intelligent portion of the American community, they would have found that no annoyance could ever be felt, but at the suspicion of being champions and patrons of the work; and that every American, solicitous for the repute in which the taste of his country would be held abroad, was afflicted that so unhappy a specimen of it should have appeared, with such typographical splendor, and with the air of a national work. So too of the multitude of new and worthless words, which were fabricated by the author of that poem. We can safely challenge all the critics and purists in England to produce criticisms more unsparing upon them, than those which teemed from the presses of this country. Nor do we confine our remarks to the coinage of Mr Barlow. The persecution of Americanisms at large has no where in Great Britain been pursued with as much keenness, as in this neighbourhood. We have in our view now a most learned individual of our Commonwealth, whose life has been devoted to the study of the English language in its sources, and whose success in these researches we believe to admit of honorable comparison with those of his most respectable colleagues abroad, who from his indiscreet haste of innovation and his patronage of sundry provincial terms, has found no favour, we had almost said no mercy among those of his countrymen best able to do justice to his acquisitions. And yet American scholars are charged with patronising the innovations of Barlow. The best written part of the essay before us is upon the state of the English language in America. We explained our views on this subject in our review of Mr Walsh's work, and the writer in question suggests nothing, which calls on us to correct them. We stated then, and we repeat now, that, on the whole, the English language is better spoken here than in England. We do not wish to be misunderstood; though we shall doubtless be misrepresented. We did not affect to say, that the English language was better spoken by well educated individuals in America than by well educated individuals in England; but we sufficiently explained ourselves as maintaining that the corruption of the language has gone so far in no part of America, as in the heart of the English counties. As to the specimens of the pretended American dialect found in such writers as Mr Fearon, we doubt not the populace of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia may speak basely enough, and we cheerfully concede to Mr Fearon a degree of intimacy in the porter-houses and oyster-boats of those cities, which enables him to speak to this point, with far more confidence than ourselves. We pity, however, any fair minded Englishman, who can suppose for a moment that there is any truth in all his dialogues and conversations; and whose knowledge of human nature, if nothing else, does not teach him, that they are wretched fabrications, compiled from a few local observations among such associates, as an ordinary foreigner falls in with. Whence should we learn our bad English? We are derided and taunted with our dependence on the English press. We are scorned for the poverty of our own literature. It is well known that our children's books are English; that many of our text books at the colleges are English; that our standard professional works are English; that we reprint every English work of merit before it is dry from the English press; that our stage is supplied-miserably supplied too, in all the modern drama-from England; that the English version of the Scriptures, from which the majority of our community imbibes by far the greater part of its English, is venerated as much here as in England; that Byron, and Campbell, and Southey, and Scott, are as familiar to us as to their countrymen; that we receive the first sheets of the new novel,' before the la not have been ing that langua stantly on the they would ha a good and use and of approve this side of the and if so, whe done the langu sidered whethe longing to a b people, a sort o presidential, of, the consent of t world,-whether culiarity of our charge of corru the doctrines on holds, and will no tion, to be put or champions of an in one thing, in s any authoritative The great writers tion of Augustus at first be though duction of a few before the last are thrown off in Edinburgh: and how is it possible then that we should not speak good English? Moreover, as to the standard of the language, the writer, on whom we are remarking, very justly says, that when we speak of the period, at which a language becomes fixed, we seldom annex a very definite or accurate meaning to the expression;' and he proceeds correctly to state, that the period, in which a language is fixed, is that in which its best writers flourish; and of course not to be ascertained by contemporaries, who cannot tell that better may not arise, than any who have gone before. Had this judicious conception always regulated the English critics, who have exercised themselves on Americanisms, they would have spared themselves much trouble. They would not have been at the pains of turning over the leaves of their Johnson's Dictionary to see if a word were there, and if they found it not, of branding it as an Americanism. But considering that language is a fluctuating thing, never stable, but constantly on the improvement or decline, or at any rate changing, they would have asked, whether it were not possible that a good and useful word brought to America by its first settlers, and of approved use in their day, might not have survived on this side of the water, while it was lost on the English side; and if so, whether we or they, in respect to said word, have done the language most harm. Again, they would have considered whether a few such words as congressional, of, or belonging to a body of representatives equally chosen by the people, a sort of body, we believe, unknown in England; or presidential, of, or belonging to a chief magistrate ruling by the consent of the people, an idea also not familiar to the old world,-whether a few such terms, forced upon us by the peculiarity of our institutions, really furnish any ground for the charge of corrupting the language. Though we assent to the doctrines on the subject of language which this writer holds, and will not allow ourselves, even by his positive assertion, to be put on the other side of the question, and made the champions of any new fangled dialect whatever; yet he errs in one thing, in saying that it is only by the great writers that any authoritative and permanent innovations can be made.' The great writers like the small ones are much in the condition of Augustus, and make far fewer alterations, than might at first be thought. With some improvement, with the introduction of a few terms from a foreign or learned tongue, with a little more regularity perhaps than the common parlance observes, they must write the prevailing dialect of the day. They record the innovations, which time and political causes have produced. Who were the great writers between Homer and the Attic dramatists, that converted the language from the Ionian to the Attic dialect? Who were the great writers that translated the Latin of the Salian Songs into that of Plautus? Who were the great writers that formed that 'illustrious vulgar tongue,' of which Dante speaks, which he did not make, but found; and who were the great writers that transformed the Saxon of King Alfred into the English of Chaucer? It is a well known fact, that a written literature does not hasten, but delays these innovations, and that new languages almost spring up in barbarous tribes, among which there is no writing, in the time that it takes to produce a little change of orthography, in the language of a writing and reading community. We, it is true, have gone through great and wonderful political changes since the settlement of our country. It would have been natural that the human mind, transplanted to such new and untried scenes of action, should have moulded more to its new purposes and wants, this most flexible instrument of its will. But we have been fast anchored to the rock of English literature. There has never been a period, in which this did not constitute the far greater part of our intellectual aliment; and if any proof were wanted of the fact, it would be this, that a thousand leagues across the water as we are, the language has been going through the same changes on both sides the ocean. With the exception of some half dozen words, which have been preserved here and are obsolete there, and perhaps as many more of which the reverse holds, the sympathy kept up by means of the press has been so entire and perfect, that even down to cant words, and those indefinable shades of meaning which play on the top of social intercourse, and find their way into no book but of the most light and ephemeral cast, there is still an identity in the language. No one able to make the comparison can or will deny this. To charge us therefore with affecting a new language, we must needs repeat it, is a calumny; to charge us with actually writing or speaking a corrupt dialect is equally so. And we should be glad to know with what reason the peculiarities of individual American writers, industriously culled and exaggerated, furnish any better ground for a charge of corruption against the la rope, whom and then be for to severe exercis |