The result of these straight-forward and out-spoken remarks is set forth by Mark Twain himself:  ’When the musing spider steps upon the red-hot shovel, he first exhibits a wild surprise, then he shrivels up.  Similar was the effect of these blistering words upon the tranquil and unsuspecting agent.  I can be dreadfully rough on a person when the mood takes me.’

VI

This sermon might have been made even broader in its application.  It is not always only the ignorant who are discommoded by a misguided reliance on foreign words as bestowers of elegance; it is often the man of culture, aware of the meaning of the alien vocable but none the less jarred by its obtrusion on an English page.  The man of culture may have his attention disturbed even by a foreign word which has long been acclimatized in English, if it still retains its unfriendly appearance.  I suppose that savan has established its citizenship in our vocabulary; it is, at least, domiciled in our dictionaries[2]; but when I found it repeated by Frederic Myers, in Science and a Future Life, to avoid the use of ‘scientist’, the French word forced itself on me, and I found myself reviving a boyish memory of a passage in Abbott’s Life of Napoleon dealing with Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt and narrating the attacks of the Mamelukes, when the order was given to form squares with ‘savans and asses in the center’.

An otherwise fine passage of Ruskin’s has always been spoilt for me by the wilful incursion of two French words, which seem to me to break the continuity of the sentence:  ’A well-educated gentleman may not know many languages; may not be able to speak any but his own; may have read very few books.  But whatever language he knows, he knows precisely; whatever word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly; above all, he is learned in the peerage of words; knows the words of true descent and ancient blood at a glance from words of modern canaille; remembers all their ancestry, their intermarriages, distantest relationships, and the extent to which they were admitted, and offices they hold, among the national noblesse of words, at any time and in any country.’  Are not canaille and noblesse distracting?  Do they not interrupt the flow?  Do they not violate what Herbert Spencer aptly called the Principle of Economy of Attention, which he found to be the basis of all the rules of rhetoric?

Since I have made one quotation from Ruskin, I am emboldened to make two from Spencer, well known as his essay on ‘Style’ ought to be:—­’A reader or listener has at each moment but a limited amount of mental power available.  To recognize and interpret the symbols presented to him, requires part of his power; to arrange and combine the images suggested requires a further part; and only that part which remains can be used for realizing the thought conveyed.  Hence, the more time and attention