that he may not be supposed to make use of the humdrum literature of the day; who introduces obsolete words and coins new ones, and makes a patchwork of all languages; makes use of execrable phrases, and invents a style that may be called his own.' The Doctor compares these writers to parrots. Now it is a well-known peculiarity of parrots that they have a passion for perching themselves in places where they will be on a level with the heads of the superior race whose utterances they imitate. The perch a parrot affects is almost always an altitude of about six feet, or the height of the tallest men. They feel their inferiority keenly if you leave them to hop about on the floor. It occurs to us that nothing could please a parrot more, if it could be, than a pair of stilts on which it could hop comfortably. The literary parrot, more fortunate than his feathered fellow, finds stilts in words--obsolete words, such as men do not use in common intercourse with their fellows. Modern rhymesters more and more affect this thing. Every day sees some _outre_ old word resurrected from its burial of rubbish, and set in the trochaics and spondees of love songs and sonnets. Dabblers in literature, who would walk unseen, pigmies among a race of giants, get on their word-stilts, and straightway the ear-tickled critics and the unconsciously nose-led public join in paeans of applause. Sage men, who do not exactly see through the thing, nod their heads approvingly, and remark: 'Something in that fellow!' And the delighted ladies, prone as the dear creatures often are to be pleased with jingle that they don't understand, exclaim: 'A'n't he delightful!' The lamented Professor Alexander once produced a very excellent poem, which contained only words of a single syllable, forcibly illustrating the power of simple language. We should be glad to reproduce it here, by way of contrapose to our own accompanying poem, but cannot now recall it to memory in its completeness. Any child, who could talk as we all talk in our families, could read and understand fully the poem to which I refer. But ask any child to read the lines we have hammered out below, and tell you what they mean! Nay, ask any man to do it, and see if he _can_ do it. Probably not one in a hundred usual readers, could 'read and translate' the word-stilts with which we have trammelled our poetic feet, except with the aid of patient and repeated communion with his English dictionary. There are, however, no words employed here which may not be found in the standard dictionaries of our tongue. To it: THE POET INVOKETH HIS MUSE. Come, ethel muse, with fluxion tip my pen, For rutilant dignotion would I earn; As rhetor wise depeint me unto men: A thing or two I ghess they'll have to learn Ere they percipience can claim of what I'm up To, in macrology so very sharp as this; Off food oxygian hid them come and sup, Until, from very weariness, they all dehisce.