guments had been bandied backwards and forwards
rather inconclusively since the sixteenth century, and Addison in
_The Spectator_ No. 135 expresses a typically moderate opinion on
the matter: the English language, he says, abounds in monosyllables,
which gives us an opportunity of delivering our thoughts in few
sounds. This indeed takes off from the elegance of our tongue,
but at the same time expresses our ideas in the readiest manner,
and consequently answers the first design of speech better than
the multitude of syllables, which make the words of other
languages more tunable and sonorous.

It is likely that neither Swift nor Miss Elstob would have found much
to disagree with in that sentence. Swift certainly never proposed any
reduction in the number of English monosyllables, and the simplicity
of style which he described as "one of the greatest perfections in any
language," which seemed to him best exemplified in the English Bible,
and which he himself practised so brilliantly, has in English a very
marked monosyllabic character.

But in his enthusiasm to stamp out the practice of abbreviating,
beheading and curtailing polysyllables--a practice which seemed to
him a threat to both the elegance and permanence of the language--
he described it as part of a tendency of the English to relapse into
their Northern barbarity by multiplying monosyllables and eliding
vowels between the rough and frequent consonants of their language.
His ignorance of the historical origins of the language and his rather
hackneyed remarks on its character do not invalidate the general
scheme of his _Proposal_ or his particular criticisms of current
linguistic habits, but they did lay him open to the very penetrating
and decisive attack of Elizabeth Elstob.

In her reply to Swift she repeats all the stock defenses of the
English monosyllables and consonants, but, by presenting them in
combination, and in a manner at once scholarly and forceful, she
makes the most convincing case against Swift. Unlike most of her
predecessors, Miss Elstob is not on the defensive. She is always ready
to give a sharp personal turn to her scholarly refutations--as, for
instance, when she demonstrates the usefulness of monosyllables in
poetry by illustrations from a series of poets beginning with Homer
and ending with Swift. There can be little doubt that Swift is
decisively worsted in this argument.

It is not known whether Swift ever read Miss E