say this because there is
no imputation that could be more galling to any man's self-respect than
that of being a mere jester. I endeavored, by generalising my satire, to
give it what value _I_ could beyond the passing moment and the immediate
application. How far I have succeeded I cannot tell, but I have had
better luck than I ever looked for in seeing my verses survive to pass
beyond their nonage.

In choosing the Yankee dialect, I did not act without forethought. It
had long seemed to me that the great vice of American writing and
speaking was a studied want of simplicity, that we were in danger of
coming to look on our mother-tongue as a dead language, to be sought in
the grammar and dictionary rather than in the heart, and that our only
chance of escape was by seeking it at its living sources among those who
were, as Scottowe says of Major-General Gibbons, 'divinely illiterate.'
President Lincoln, the only really great public man whom these latter
days have seen, was great also in this, that he was master--witness his
speech at Gettysburg--of a truly masculine English, classic, because it
was of no special period, and level at once to the highest and lowest of
his countrymen. I learn from the highest authority that his favorite
reading was in Shakespeare and Milton, to which, of course, the Bible
should be added. But whoever should read the debates in Congress might
fancy himself present at a meeting of the city council of some city of
Southern Gaul in the decline of the Empire, where barbarians with a
Latin varnish emulated each other in being more than Ciceronian. Whether
it be want of culture, for the highest outcome of that is simplicity, or
for whatever reason, it is certain that very few American writers or
speakers wield their native language with the directness, precision, and
force that are common as the day in the mother country. We use it like
Scotsmen, not as if it belonged to us, but as if we wished to prove that
we belonged to it, by showing our intimacy with its written rather than
with its spoken dialect. And yet all the while our popular idiom is racy
with life and vigor and originality, bucksome (as Milton used the word)
to our new occasions, and proves itself no mere graft by sending up new
suckers from the old root in spite of us. It is only from its roots in
the living generations of men that a language can be reinforced with
fresh vigor for its needs; what may be called a literate dialect grow