talents which they are bound to employ. They live among educated men—knowledge is a drug in their market: of course they know this or that, but so does everybody else, and what have they to confer? It would be an impertinence for them (so they seem to feel) to teach or to dictate an opinion. Dr. Johnson has left a remark, in the records of his biographer, upon this tendency of refinement to abase individual merit, and I am sure a dogmatist like himself would not now be supported in English society. So very odd and unaccountable a phenomenon, even were his manners less forbidding, would be intolerable in intelligent circles, to say nothing of those of splendour and fashion. England exhibits just now the smooth and polished surface of a social condition which has no marked inequalities. Even rank fails to create those chasms and elevations which were once so striking and formidable. Gentlemen are very nearly alike, whatever their antecedents. All are well-informed, all have travelled, all are well-bred, and alike familiar with the world. The Universities, too, have done not a little to assimilate characters. Minds have been fashioned in one mould, and opinions shaped by one pattern. Even language and expression, and personal carriage are reduced to a common formula. I closely watched the pronunciation of thorough-bred men, and often drew them into classical quotations, to observe their delicacy in prosody, and their manner of pronouncing the Latin. I prefer very much the German or Italian theories of classical orthoepy; but for mere _longs and shorts_, there is no such adept as an English tongue. They carry it into the vernacular, however, against all analogy, and often startle an American by what seems elaborate pedantry and affectation. You are confounded by an allusion to Longfellow’s _Hyperion_—accent on the penultimate; or you are puzzled by the inquiry whether any _doctrinal_ differences exist between the English and American Churches—second syllable made studiously long! Yet the man would be thought an intolerable ass who should display his knowledge of purely French or Teutonic derivatives, by a similar deference to etymology: and no one thinks of carrying out this principle in all words of like analogy. Usage, however, with all its caprices, settles every dispute; and we Americans have no resource but conformity, unless we prefer to appear provincial. English usage must be the law of the English tongue, and the fashions of the court and capital are the standard of usage.