exquisitely
pleasant in lingering over those redundant letters, leaving each word,
as it were, with a reluctant caress? Such spelling is a soft, domestic,
lovingly wasteful use of material. Or, again, if you have no wife, or
object to an old-fashioned conjugal tenderness, try "Mye owne sweete
dearrest Marrie." There is the tremble of a tenderness no mere
arrangement of trim everyday letters can express in those double
_r's_. "Sweete" my ladie must be; sweet! why pump-water and inferior
champagne, spirits of nitrous ether and pancreatic juice are "sweet."
For my own part I always spell so, with lots of f's and g's and such
like tailey, twirley, loopey things, when my heart is in the tender
vein. And I hold that a man who will not do so, now he has been shown
how to do it, is, in plain English, neither more nor less than a prig.
The advantages of a varied spelling of names are very great.
Industrious, rather than intelligent, people have given not a little
time, and such minds as they have, to the discussion of the right
spelling of our great poet's name. But he himself never dreamt of tying
himself down to one presentation of himself, and was--we have his hand
for it--Shakespeare, Shakspear, Shakespear, Shakspeare, and so forth, as
the mood might be. It would be almost as reasonable to debate whether
Shakespeare smiled or frowned. My dear friend Simmongues is the same.
He is "Sims," a mere slash of the pen, to those he scorns, Simmonds or
Simmongs to his familiars, and Simmons, A.T. Simmons, Esq., to all
Europe.

From such mere introductory departures from precision, such petty
escapades as these, we would we might seduce the reader into an utter
debauch of spelling. But a sudden Maenad dance of the letters on the
page, gleeful and iridescent spelling, a wild rush and procession of
howling vowels and clattering consonants, might startle the half-won
reader back into orthodoxy. Besides, there is another reader--the
printer's reader--to consider. For if an author let his wit run to these
matters, he must write elaborate marginal exhortations to this
authority, begging his mercy, to let the little flowers of spelling
alone. Else the plough of that Philistine's uniformity will utterly root
them out.

Such high art of spelling as is thus hinted at is an art that has still
to gather confidence and brave the light of publicity. A few, indeed,
practise it secretly for love--in letters and on spare bits of paper.
But, for the