a Jebb and Sir George Grey.
Baron Bramwell fortunately came to the rescue, and saved it from
permanent loss of character. But still to this day the word is sometimes
used in a sense by no means complimentary. If the battue-system
continues long enough, "good sport" will become a synonym for
cold-blooded clumsy butchery, and thus all sport whatsoever will be more
or less discredited. The _faux pas_ of one member disgraces the whole
family. A few men may be the lords of language, but the great majority
are its slaves. They can no more disconnect the innocent idea from the
soiled word that accompanies it than they can see a blue landscape
through green glass. Let us hope that one of the first acts of Mr.
Bright's millennial Parliament will be the establishment of a tribunal
empowered to take a word when it arrives at this pitiable condition, and
either in mercy knock it on the head altogether, or else formally
readmit it into good society, and give it all the advantages of a fresh
start.

We take an early opportunity of inviting their special attention to the
much-injured word "Match-making." The practice which it describes is not
only harmless, but, in the present state of society, highly useful and
meritorious. Yet there can be no doubt, that there is a powerful
prejudice against it. Although all women--or rather, perhaps, as
Thackeray said, all good women--are at heart match-makers, there are
very few who own the soft impeachment. Many repudiate it with
indignation. It is on the whole about as safe to charge a lady with
Fenianism as facetiously to point out a young couple in her
drawing-room, whose flirtation has a suspicious businesslike look about
it, and to hint that she has deliberately brought them together with a
view to matrimony. It may be true that she has no selfish interest
whatever in the matter. The criminal conspiracy in which she so
strenuously repudiates any concern is, after all, nothing worse than the
attempt to make two people whom she likes, and who she thinks will suit
each other, happy for life. By any other name such an action ought, one
would think, to smell sweet in the nostrils of gods and men.

But, whatever the gods think of it, men cannot forget that the practice,
whether harmless or not, goes by the objectionable name of match-making.
So the lady replies, not, perhaps, without the energy of conscious
guilt, that "things of this sort are best left to themselves," and
piously begs you to re