me
at least decent. Dictionaries began. The crowning glory of Hanoverian
literature was a Great Lexicographer.

In those days it was believed that the spelling of every English word
had been settled for all time. Thence to the present day, though the
severities then inaugurated, so far as metre and artistic composition
are concerned, been generously relaxed--though we have had a Whistler, a
Walt Whitman, and a Wagner--the rigours of spelling have continued
unabated. There is just one right way of spelling, and all others are
held to be not simply inelegant or undesirable, but wrong; and
unorthodox spelling, like original morality, goes hand in hand with
shame.

Yet even at the risk of shocking the religious convictions of some, may
not one ask whether spelling is in truth a matter of right and wrong at
all? Might it not rather be an art? It is too much to advocate the
indiscriminate sacking of the alphabet, but yet it seems plausible that
there is a happy medium between a reckless debauch of errant letters and
our present dead rigidity. For some words at anyrate may there not be
sometimes one way of spelling a little happier, sometimes another? We do
something of this sort even now with our "phantasy" and "fantasie," and
we might do more. How one would spell this word or that would become, if
this latitude were conceded, a subtle anxiety of the literary exquisite.
People are scarcely prepared to realise what shades of meaning may be
got by such a simple device. Let us take a simple instance. You write,
let us say, to all your cousins, many of your friends, and even, it may
be, to this indifferent intimate and that familiar enemy, "My dear
So-and-so." But at times you feel even as you write, sometimes, that
there is something too much and sometimes something lacking. You may
even get so far in the right way occasionally as to write, "My dr.
So-and-so," when your heart is chill. And people versed in the arts of
social intercourse know the subtle insult of misspelling a person's
name, or flicking it off flippantly with a mere waggling wipe of the
pen. But these are mere beginnings.

Let the reader take a pen in hand and sit down and write, "My very dear
wife." Clean, cold, and correct this is, speaking of orderly affection,
settled and stereotyped long ago. In such letters is butcher's meat also
"very dear." Try now, "Migh verrie deare Wyfe." Is it not immediately
infinitely more soft and tender? Is there not something