We have thus indicated the nature of the great contest in language between the conventional and the idiomatic. Idioms are just what their name implies. They are the commonalty of language,--private, proletarian words, who do the work, "_dum alteri tulerunt honores_." They come to us from all handiworks and callings, where you will always find them at their posts. Sharp, energetic, incisive, they do the hard labor of speech,--that of carrying heavy loads of thought and shaping new ideas. We think them vulgar at first, and savoring of the shop; but they are useful and handy, and we cannot do without them. They rivet, they forge, they coin, they "fire up," "brake up," "switch off," "prospect," "shin" for us when we are "short," "post up" our books, and finally ourselves, "strike a lead," "follow a trail," "stand up to the rack," "dicker," "swap," and "peddle." They are "whole teams" beside the "one-horse" vapidities which fail to bear our burdens. The Norman cannot keep down the Saxon. The Saxon finds his Wat Tyler or Jack Cade. Now "Mose" brings his Bowery Boys into our parlor, or Cromwell Judd recruits his Ironsides from the hamlets of the Kennebec. We declare for the prolétaires. We vote the working-words ticket. We have to plead the cause of American idioms. Some of them have, as we said, good blood in them and can trace their lineage and standing to the English Bible and Book of Common Prayer; others are "new men," born under hedge-rows and left as foundlings at furnace-doors. And before we go farther, we have a brief story to tell in illustration of the two tongues. A case of assault and battery was tried in a Western court. The plaintiff's counsel informed the jury in his opening, that he was "prepared to prove that the defendant, a steamboat-captain, menaced his client, an English traveller, and put him in bodily fear, commanding him to vacate the avenue of the steamboat with his baggage, or he would precipitate him into the river." The evidence showed that the captain called out,--"Stranger, ef you don't tote your plunder off that gang-plank, I'll spill you in the drink." We submit that for terseness and vigor the practitioner at the bar of the Ohio had the better of the learned counsel who appeared at the bar of justice, albeit his client was in a Cockney mystification at the address.