s manliness, of its subtlety, of its truthfulness. Language
is a living organism, and to substitute authority, or even long usage,
for its innate genius and wisdom, and the requirements and practices
that result from these, were to strike at its life, and to expose it
to become subject to upstart usurpation, to deadening despotism.
Worcester quotes from the Psalms the phrase, "They go astray _as_ soon
as they be born." We ask, Were not the translators of the Bible as
liable to err in grammar as De Quincey, or Wordsworth, or Shelley? A
writer in the English "National Review" for January, 1862, in an
admirable paper on the "Italian Clergy and the Pope," begins a
sentence with the same phrase: "_As_ soon as the law was passed." And
we ourselves, sure though we be that the use of _as_ in this and every
similar position is an error, need to brace both pen and tongue
against running into it, so strong to overcome principle and
conviction is the habit of the senses, accustomed daily to see and to
hear the wrong.

AT THAT. We should not have noticed this squat vulgarism, had not the
pen blazoned its own depravity by lifting it out of newspapers into
bound volumes. The speech and page of every one, who would not be
italicized for lingual looseness, should be forever closed against a
phrase so shocking to taste, a phrase, we are sorry to say, of
American mintage, coined in one of those frolicksome exuberant moods,
when a young people, like a loosed horse full of youth and oats, kicks
up and scatters mud with the unharnessed license of his heels.

ANOTHER. Before passing to the letter B on our alphabetical docket, we
will call up a minor criminal in A, viz. _another_, often incorrectly
used for _other_; as in "on one ground or another," "from one
cause or another." Now, _another_, the prefix _an_ making it
singular,--embraces but one ground or cause, and therefore, contrary
to the purpose of the writer, the words mean that there are
but two grounds or causes. Write "on one ground or other," and the
words are in harmony with the meaning of the writer, the word _other_
implying several or many grounds.

BOQUET. The sensibility that gives the desire to preserve a present
sparkling so long as is possible with all the qualities that made it
materially acceptable, should rule us where the gift is something so
precious as a word; and when we receive one from another people,
gratitude, as well as sense of grace in the form of the gift