With the gradual elimination of class distinctions in England, or rather with the blurring of the lines which separate one class from another, a multitude of persons pass for "gentlemen" in England to-day who could not have dreamed--and whose fathers certainly did not dream--of being counted among the gentry thirty-five years ago. The fact may be for good or ill; but one consequence has been that the newcomers, thrusting up into the circles above them, have taken with them the speech of their former associates, so that one hears now, in nominally polite circles, tones of voice, forms of speech, and the expression of points of view which would have been impossible in the youth of people who are now no more than middle-aged. There was a time when the dress proclaimed the man of quality at once. That distinction began to pass away with the disappearance of silk and ruffles and wigs from masculine costume. For a century longer, the shibboleths of voice and manner kept their force. But now those too are going; and the result is that the English speech of the educated class has become less precise and less uniform. The same speech is now common to a larger proportion of the people. In the days when nearly all the members of educated society--we are speaking of the men only, for they only counted in those days--had been to one or other of the same "seven great public schools" (which not one public school man in a hundred can name correctly to-day) and to one or other of the same two universities, they kept for use among themselves all through their after life the forms of speech, the catchwords, the classical references which passed current in their school and undergraduate days. It was a free-masonry of speech on which the outsider could not intrude. To-day, when not a quarter of the members of the same circles have been to one of those same seven schools nor a half to the same universities, when at least a quarter have been to no recognised classical school at all, it is impossible that the same free-masonry should prevail. There were a hundred trite classical quotations (no great evidence of scholarship, but made jestingly familiar by the old school curricula) which our fathers could use with safety in any chance company of the society to which they were accustomed; but even the most familiar of them would be a parlous experiment in small talk to-day. They have vanished from common conversation even more completely than they have disappeared from the debates of the House of Commons. And this is only a type of the change which has come over the educated speech of England, which we may regret or we may welcome. It may be sad that the English gentleman should speak in less literary form than he did thirty years ago, but the loss may be outweighed many times by the fact that so much larger a proportion of the people speak the same speech as he--not so refined as his used to be, but materially better than the majority of those who use