of night, our teeth chattering, and our hair on end. Everything is
_aweful_--awefully good or awefully bad.

Only last week I handed a plate to a young lady at luncheon, and,
looking sweetly upon me, as though I had brought a reprieve from the
gallows, she sighed, "Oh thanks! how _awfully_ kind!"

And years ago, I went with John Leech to admire Robson in _The Porter's
Knot_, and when that pathetic little drama was over, and the actor had
stirred our souls with pity, an undergraduate in the stalls before us
turned to his companion, as the curtain fell, and said, tremulously,
with an emotion which did him honour, although his diction was queer,
"Awefully jolly! awefully jolly!"

Yes, it amuses, but it pains us more, this reckless abuse and confusion
of words, because it tends to lower the dignity and to pervert the
meaning of our language; it dishonours the best member that we have. If
we use the most startling and impressive words which we can find, when
we do not really require them, when the crisis comes in which they are
appropriate, they seem feeble and commonplace. We are as persons who,
wearing their best clothes daily, are but dingy guests at a feast.

Then comes retribution. They who cry "Wolf!" whenever they see a leveret
are not believed when Lupus comes. They who suffer "excruciating agony"
whenever a thorn pricks, can say no more under exquisite pain, and their
familiar words are powerless to evoke the sympathy which they have
repelled so long. They are more likely to receive the severe rebuke
administered by a gruff old gentleman to his maudlin, moribund
neighbour, who was ever exaggerating his ailments, and who, upon his
doleful declaration that "between three and four o'clock that morning he
had been at Death's door!" was abruptly but anxiously asked--"Oh, why
didn't you go in?"

I protest, in the next place, against the use of long, large words for
the gratification of that conceit or covetousness which seeks to obtain,
from mere grandiloquence, reputations and rewards to which it is not
entitled. Being a gardener, I like to call a spade as spelt; and if any
one terms it an horticultural implement, or a mattock, I do not expect
him to dig much. I have used the monosyllable "shop," and I will not
recall it, though a thousand pairs of gleaming scissors were pointed at
my breast, and I was told by an angry army of apprentices to talk shop
no more--the word was vulgar, or rather obsolete, superseded by th