n people. Its peculiarities in pronunciation, syntax,
phraseology, and the use of words we are inclined to avoid in our own
speech, because they mark a lack of cultivation. We test them by the
standards of polite society, and ignore them, or condemn them, or laugh at
them as abnormal or illogical or indicative of ignorance. So far as
literature goes, the speech of the common people has little interest for
us because it is not the recognized literary medium. These two reasons
have prevented the average man of cultivated tastes from giving much
attention to the way in which the masses speak, and only the professional
student has occupied himself with their language. This is unfortunate
because the speech of the common people has many points of interest, and,
instead of being illogical, is usually much more rigid in its adherence
to its own accepted principles than formal speech is, which is likely to
be influenced by convention or conventional associations. To take an
illustration of what I have in mind, the ending _-s_ is the common mark in
English of a plural form. For instance, "caps," "maps," "lines," and
"places" are plurals, and the corresponding singular forms are "cap,"
"map," "line," and "place." Consequently, granted the underlying premise,
it is a perfectly logical and eminently scientific process from the forms
"relapse" (pronounced, of course, "relaps") and "species" to postulate a
corresponding singular, and speak of "a relap" and "a specie," as a negro
of my acquaintance regularly does. "Scrope" and "lept," as preterites of
"scrape" and "leap," are correctly formed on the analogy of "broke" and
"crept," but are not used in polite society.

So far as English, German, or French go, a certain degree of general
interest has been stimulated lately in the form which they take in
every-day life by two very different agencies, by the popular articles of
students of language, and by realistic and dialect novels. But for our
knowledge of the Latin of the common people we lack these two
all-important sources of information. It occurred to only two Roman
writers, Petronius and Apuleius, to amuse their countrymen by writing
realistic stories, or stories with realistic features, and the Roman
grammarian felt an even greater contempt for popular Latin or a greater
indifference to it than we feel to-day. This feeling was shared, as we
know, by the great humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
when the revival o