If we attend to the irregularities which have been long established in our language, we shall find most of them in the Saxon branch. The Roman tongue was almost perfectly regular, and perhaps its orthography and pronunciation were perfectly correspondent. But it is the peculiar misfortune of the fashionable practice of pronouncing _d_, _t_, and _s_, before _u_, that it destroys the analogy and regularity of the _Roman_ branch of our language; for those consonants are not changed in many words of Saxon original. Before this affectation prevailed, we could boast of a regular orthography in a large branch of our language; but now the only class of words, which had preserved a regular construction, are attacked, and the correspondence between the spelling and pronunciation, destroyed, by those who ought to have been the first to oppose the innovation.[76] Should this practice be extended to all words, where _d_, _t_ and _s_ precede _u_, as it must before it can be consistent or defensible, it would introduce more anomalies into our tongue, than were before established, both in the orthography and construction. What a perverted taste, and what a singular ambition must those men possess, who, in the day light of civilization and science, and in the short period of an age, can go farther in demolishing the analogies of an elegant language, than their unlettered ancestors proceeded in centuries, amidst the accidents of a savage life, and the shocks of numerous invasions! But it will be replied, _Custom is the legislator of language_, and custom authorizes the practice I am reprobating. A man can hardly offer a reason, drawn from the principles of analogy and harmony in a language, but he is instantly silenced with the decisive, _jus et norma loquendi_.[77] What then is custom? Some writer has already answered this question; "Custom is the plague of wise men and the idol of fools." This was probably said of those customs and fashions which are capricious and varying; for there are many customs, founded on propriety, which are permanent and constitute laws. But what kind of custom did Horace design to lay down as the standard of speaking? Was it a local custom? Then the _keow_ of New England; the _oncet_ and _twicet_ of Pennsylvania and Maryland; and the _keind_ and _skey_ of the London theaters, form rules of speaking. Is it the practice of a court, or a few eminent scholars and orators, that he designed to constitute a standard? But who shall determine what body of men forms this uncontrollable legislature? Or who shall reconcile the differences at court? For these eminent orators often disagree. There are numbers of words in which the most eminent men differ: Can all be right? Or what, in this case, is the _custom_ which is to be our guide?