measured deliberation." In what moment of intellectual oblivion did Lord Acton utter with measured deliberation a sentence in which a singular verb collides with a plural pronoun? Nor are we yet at the end of our bewilderment. Lord Acton writes the sentence in his study and reads it in the classroom; the lectures, after his death, are prepared for the Press, not by an editor, but by a brace of editors, lecturers at Cambridge. May they soon, in a second edition, find their chance of purgation!

Strange that so considerable a slight upon the language should disfigure the pages of so many writers of quality! Here it is again, in form still worse, in the fourth sentence of Mr. Stopford Brooke's delightful "Primer of English Literature":

Every English man and woman has good reason to be proud of the work done by their forefathers in prose and poetry.

Ruskin, a more consummate rhetorician than either of these, can write thus:

1

It is true that when perspective was first discovered everybody amused themselves with it.

Leslie Stephen writes of Charlotte Brontë:

Nobody ever put so much of themselves into their work.

Charles Reade, in "Hard Cash":

One fine afternoon everybody was on deck. amusing themselves as they could.

The truth is (and it is a truth to lay us all low) very few writers, whether of talent or of genius, are strictly and consistently loyal to grammar. Was it not R. L. Stevenson, the most conscientious and evenhanded stylist of his day, who said that, though some three

or four sentences might be compassed, a perfect page lay within no man's pen? Superior persons have been heard to protest that English is a language free from the shackles and conventions of grammar-meaning by this, no doubt, that we can all speak and write it properly without instruction. Alas for the superior, grammar there is; and, by the breaches that we make therein, we know it. In a dozen easy laws of English grammar there lurk at least a dozen easy pitfalls.

It is nearly thirty years since a little book by Dr. William Hodgson, an Edinburgh professor, appeared posthumously under the title, "Errors in the Use of English." Dr. Hodgson says in his introduction:

Acting on the principle that example is better than precept, the Spartans impressed upon their children the wisdom of sobriety by showing them the folly of intemperance in the person of the drunken Helot. Similarly this work is meant to set forth the merits of correctness in English composition by furnishing examples of the demerits of incorrectness-to bring home the abstract rule that "a sentence must be lucid in order and logical in sequence"-by citing such concrete specimens of obscure disorder as "The beaux of that day painted their faces as well as the women."

The blunder under which the bucks are seen painting their mistresses pink is fastened upon the elder Disraeli, but he is one only out of scores of famous writers whom Hodgson leads to the pillory. There they stand, pour encourager les autres (and might not the rest of us stand with them?): Gibbon, Grote, Sir Henry Holland, Swift, Fielding, Smollet, Alison, Burke, Mill, Emerson, Hazlitt, Bulwer Lytton, Beaconsfield, James Bryce, Kingsley, Farrar, G. H. Lewes, Lord Houghton, Moncure Conway, A. W. Ward. Wendell Holmes, Ruskin, Lecky, J. R. Lowell, Barham,

Dickens, Jane Austen. Sydney Smith, Lockhart, William Black, Mrs. Lynn Linton, Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Gaskell, Leslie Stephen many times, and Masthew Arnold again and again. Not one escapes, and mistakes are exposed in almost every review, magazine, and newspaper of note. Every mistake is verified by chapter and verse reference. Other works similar to Hodgson's may be consulted, but no one else has warshalled so many interesting authors imperfectly attired. Curious in especial degree are the cases of Leslie Stephen and Matthew Arnold. Stephen, the first editor of the "Dictionary of National Biography," was a scholar with a deep knowledge of the language; yet he is here constantly convicted of errors that the schoolmaster makes fun of in the schoolboy. Arnold (an inspector of schools) was the nice and very erudite and somewhat scornful critic whom, with no hint of satire, we dubbed our Apostle of Culture, yet, as we view him here, his literary raiment seems a patchwork of false concords. Truly-as careful as we seek to bethese instances should make us quake!

A blunder so common as to be wellnigh invariable is made with the adjective in the degrees of comparison. Things must be compared with other things. When, for instance, we say: "Never was there seen such a man as Napoleon," what we probably mean is that Napoleon was in some way the greatest of men; what we actually state is that no such person as Napoleon ever existed. If there never was seen such a man as Napoleon, it is obvious that Napoleon is himself excluded. When we compare two things only, we are bidden to use the comparative; Leslie Stephen is therefore wrong in saying:

Cowper was as indisputably the most virtuous man as Rousseau the greatest intellectual power.

The pronoun is constantly employed in

I never was so long in company with a girl in my life-trying to entertain her-and succeed so ill.

The perfect form of the infinitive, after a perfect verb, is incorrectly used for the simple form. Even Macaulay (though, to be sure, the example is taken from a letter) writes: "I had hoped never to have seen the statues again." The same error is Ruskin's in "I intended to have insisted"; and Mrs. Lynn Linton's in, "He would have liked to have read it."

A dreadful snare is the contracted sentence:

I am anxious for the time when he will talk as much nonsense to me as I have to him.-Landor.

I never have, and never will, attack a man for speculative opinions.-H. T. Buckle.

He ridicules the notion that truth will prevail; it never has, and it never will.-Leslie Stephen.

The little error of the "hanging" participle, the participle that lacks a subject:

Looking back on the affair, after the lapse of years, the chief mistake seems, &c.-Lord Houghton.

Entering the factory gate, the evidence offered his visual organs might

lead, &c.-Jas. Greenwood.

This copy is now in my possession, having purchased it at, &c.-A. Constable.

Looking back from this distance of time. . . it appears difficult to understand, &c.-Justin McCarthy.

Sad tricks are played with the adverb. Thackeray makes mention of a "seldom" entertainment; and such a shocking expression as "the failure or otherwise" is frequent. The preposition is sorely abused. Kingsley has the phrase "found rest into"; Miss Mitford, by letter, informs a friend that her "state of extremity" has been "doubted to"; and George Augustus Sala is "not averse from a moderate quantity of good, sound, fruity port." Mill must have known quite well that things which are unlike do not differ "to" but "from" one another, yet the phrase "different, to" occurs in the "Logic"; and Addison, Coleridge, Thackeray, and John Henry Newman are guilty of "different than." Matthew Arnold employs "directly" as a conjunction, and puts "one" for "one's" in this sentence from "Literature and Dogma":

But this does not make it the less really trifling, or hinder one nowadays seeing it to be trifling directly we examine it.

The whole sentence, indeed, is almost as bad as it could be. Bulwer Lytton, in the "Last Days of Pompeii"; Hawthorne, in the "House of the Seven Gables"; and William Black, in "A Daughter of Heth," fall into the not uncommon vice of using "than" after "scarcely." "Scarcely had she gone, than Claudius," &c. Mill lapses into the terrible "and which":

Those whom privileges not acquired by their merit, and which they feel to be, &c.

Faults in syntax are as plentiful as faults in accidence. A few examples, bearing on the rule of the concord of

subject and verb, were given at the outset; they might, were space of no importance, be added to. Matthew Arnold:

Culture points out that the harmonious perfection of generations of Puritans and Nonconformists have been, in consequence, sacrificed.

No action or institution can be salutary and stable which are not based on reason and the will of God. Goldwin Smith:

The obstinate maintenance, in the interest of a class, of an alien church and an alien land-law in Ireland are faults, not misfortunes, now.

Leslie Stephen:

The rational and the emotional nature have such intricate relations, &c. The fire which glows in Macaulay's history, the intense patriotic feeling, the love of certain moral qualities, is not, &c.

G. H. Lewes :

There is little illustration, and no sidelights of suggestion.

Certain authors are frequently in trouble with their relative pronouns, and Beaconsfield's:

The very two individuals whom he thought were far away,

could be matched a thousand times. "Pray remain single and marry nobody (let him be whom he may)," says Sydney Smith; and Louisa Alcott caps it with: "The sign of the Good Samaritan is written on the face of whomsoever opens to the stranger."

In the matter of government we may fail as egregiously as in that of concord. Mrs. Lynn Linton:

I wish that little Mavey would find them closeted together, he softened by her tears, and she receiving his devotions with effusion.

Scene The Library of a Country House. He is writing at a table near the window with his back turned to Her. She is standing irresolutely in the middle of the room behind an armchair, which she has just dragged and pushed laboriously from its usual place. The time is 3 p. m.

He (turning round upon her suddenly). I wish to heaven you wouldn't make such a frightful racket in the room! I can't get a thing written, and I counted on an hour or two of quiet.

She. Oh, don't bother about your writing now. You'll have to give it up anyhow in about twenty minutes, so you may as well get up at once and help me with these chairs.

He (pettishly). Bother the chairs! Why can't you leave them as they are? But you're never happy unless you're moving gigantic pieces of furniture from one place to another. My wardrobe, for instance. Where's that gone? It was in my dressing-room two days ago, and now

She (appealing to the universe). There --he grudges me the wardrobe, the only place where I can really put anything comfortably. He wants it for his coats and his trousers and his overgrown riding-boots. And I'm not to have even a tiny corner to hang a dress in. Charles, how can you be so selfish and so heartless?

He (desperately). Oh, take the wardrobe

She. I have.

He. Take everything. I never met a woman yet who didn't consider a man selfish for wanting to keep what belongs to me.

She. Him, Charles, him. You're getting your pronouns mixed. However, if you'll help me with these chairs, I'll forgive you even that.

He. But what on earth do you want to move the chairs for? Why can't you leave them where they are?

She (again to the universe). He's forgotten again Didn't I see an advertisement of Memory Powders somewhere the other day? Charles, you must take one in water after getting out of bed in the morning. It'll help your writing, too, you know. You're always forgetting where the quotations come from—

He (jumping from his chair). Will you or will you not tell me what game you're up to?

She (placidly). I'm not sure I like that expression, Charles. It doesn't seem to be quite in your best "fourguineas-a-thousand" style. "What game you're up to"! No, no. "What design you are contemplating," or "What project you have set your hand to." I'm sure something of that sort

He. If I were a weaker and a more brutal man, I'd throw you out of the

room

She. Don't be unjust to yourself, Charles.

He. Once more; what are you up to? She (cheerfully). Now, honestly, Charles, do you really mean to say you've forgotten that the S.P.A. are to meet here at 3,30 to-day?

He (passing his hand over his forehead). The S.P.A? What's that? Senatus Populus-no, that won't do What is it?

You

She. Don't be absurd, Charles. know well enough it's the Stocking and Petticoat Association.

He (blankly). Never heard of it. She. My dear! It's had two meetings here already.

He. No. That was the Tea and Coal Club.

She. Same thing. It's changed its name. Instead of giving tea and coal to the parents, we're gong to give stockings and petticoats to the children.

He. Oh, that's it, is it? But why is it to meet in this room? We had it in the dining-room last time.

She. My dear, it's too dreadfully formal having them all sitting round the dining-room table. We shall be much cosier here.

He. If you've settled it, of course there's no more to be said. I know that well enough.

She. That's a good sensible boy. Now

He. But, I say, didn't they make you Secretary last time?

She. Yes, I'm Secretary.

Punch.

She. What a funny thing to say, Charles. What does one do when one posts up minutes? Is it a painful thing to do?

He (appealing in his turn to the universe). Here's a woman, a Secretary, who doesn't know what minutes are. (To her) Have you written your account of the last meeting in the minute-book? She. Don't be ridiculous. Of course I have. How could I know you meant that? Listen. (She takes up the minute-book from a chair and reads): “Monday, July 6th. A meeting of the Tea and Coal Club was held at Bristol House, Sir William Lampeter in the chair. There were presentThere you are, all complete and beautiful. In fact, I'm the champion minuteposter of the parish- (There is a sound of carriage-wheels outside, and a ring is heard at the front door.) Gracious! There they are. Hurry up, Charles, and help with the chairs. He dashes in and helps magnificently. In the space of a minute they perform prodigies of chair-and-sofa-and-tablechanging together. The whole aspect of the room is altered. Ꭺ butler throws open the door of the room. With a whisk of her hands she smooths herself and advances smiling. He remains in the background also smiling. The Butler (announcing). Sir William and Lady Lampeter!

(Curtain.)

The Pleasant Thought Year Book, edited by M. R. J. DuBois, and published by Henry Holt & Co., is well named, for it contains cheering and helpful selections in prose and verse for each day in the year. Originally intended for private circulation its good sense and good cheer may well

make it a pleasant mentor for many over-burdened souls.

"Things Seen in China," by J. R. Chitty, is a book of modest proportions which may easily be read at a sitting, but it gives a more vivid idea of the China of to-day, its family life, its so