This has tended to make the
common language of talk more bookish, and has thus reacted unfavorably
on our literature, giving it sometimes the air of being composed in a
dead tongue rather than written from a living one. It gladdens us, we
confess, to see how goodly a volume of _Americanisms_ Mr. Bartlett has
been enabled to gather, for it shows that our language is alive. It is
only from the roots that a language can be refreshed; a dialect that is
taught grows more and more pedantic, and becomes at last as unfit a
vehicle for living thought as monkish Latin. This is the danger which
our literature has to guard against from the universal Schoolmaster,
who wars upon home-bred phrases, and enslaves the mind and memory of
his victims, as far as may be, to the best models of English
composition,--that is to say, to the writers whose style is faultlessly
correct, but has no blood in it. No language, after it has faded into
_diction_, none that cannot suck up feeding juices from the
mother-earth of a rich common-folk-talk, can bring forth a sound and
lusty book. True vigor of expression does not pass from page to page,
but from man to man, where the brain is kindled and the lips are
limbered by downright living interests and by passions in the very
throe.
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