Here is ease and simplicity; but in such a phrase as “baiting-place of wit” there is also a want of that perfect discretion which we demand of the language of poetry, however we may be glad to miss it in the thought or emotion which that language conveys. _Baiting-place_ is no more a homespun word than the word _inn_, which adds a charm to one of the sweetest verses that Spenser ever wrote; but _baiting-place_ is common, it smacks of the hostler and postilion, and commonness is a very poor relation indeed of simplicity. But doubtless one main cause of the vivacity of phrase which so charms us in our earlier writers is to be found in the fact that there were not yet two languages--that of life and that of literature. The divorce between the two took place a century and a half later, and that process of breeding in and in began which at last reduced the language of verse to a kind of idiocy. Do not consider such discussions as these otiose or nugatory. The language we are fortunate enough to share, and which, I think, Jacob Grimm was right in pronouncing, in its admirable mixture of Saxon and Latin, its strength and sonorousness, a better literary medium than any other modern tongue--this language has not been fashioned to what it is without much experiment, much failure, and infinite expenditure of pains and thought. Genius and pedantry have each done its part towards the result which seems so easy to us, and yet was so hard to win--the one by way of example, the other by way of warning. The purity, the elegance, the decorum, the chastity of our mother-tongue are a sacred trust in our hands. I am tired of hearing the foolish talk of an American variety of it, about our privilege to make it what we will because we are in a majority. A language belongs to those who know best how to use it, how to bring out all its resources, how to make it search its coffers round for the pithy or canorous phrase that suits the need, and they who can do this have been always in a pitiful minority. Let us be thankful that we too have a right to it, and have proved our right, but let us set up no claim to vulgarize it. The English of Abraham Lincoln was so good not because he learned it in Illinois, but because he learned it of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible, the constant companions of his leisure. And how perfect it was in its homely dignity, its quiet strength, the unerring aim with which it struck once nor needed to strike more! The language is alive here, and will grow. Let us do all we can with it but debase it. Good taste may not be necessary to salvation or to success in life, but it is one of the most powerful factors of civilization. As a people we have a larger share of it and more widely distributed than I, at least, have found elsewhere, but as a nation we seem to lack it altogether. Our coinage is ruder than that of any country of equal pretensions, our paper money is filthily infectious, and the engraving on it,