We are not making a dictionary of Americanisms, but merely wandering a little way into our native forests.  We refer to the prevalent habit of idiomatic speech as a fact that makes part of our literature.  It cannot be ignored, nor do we see how it is to be avoided.  It is well, of course, to retain the sterling classic basis of our speech as we received it from abroad, and to this all that is best and purest in our literature past and present will tend.  But we hold to no Know-Nothing platform which denies a right of naturalization to the worthy.  As Ruskin says of the river, that it does not make its bed, but finds it, seeking out, with infinite pains, its appointed channel, so thought will seek its expression, guided by its inner laws of association and sympathy.  If the mind and heart of a nation become barbarized, no classic culture can keep its language from corruption.  If its ideas are ignoble, it will turn to the ignoble and vulgar side of every word in its tongue, it will affix the mean sense it desires to utter where it had of old no place.  It converts the prince’s palace into a stable or an inn; it pulls down the cathedral and the abbey to use the materials for the roads on which it tramples.  It is good to sanctify language by setting some of its portions apart for holy uses,—­at least, by preserving intact the high religious association which rests upon it.  The same silver may be moulded to the altar-chalice or the Bacchic goblet; but we touch the one with reverent and clean hands, while the other is tossed aside in the madness of the revel.  Men clamor for a new version of the Sacred Scriptures, and profess to be shocked at its plain outspokenness, forgetting that to the pure all things are pure, and that to the prurient all things are foul.  It was a reverent and a worshipping age that gave us that treasure, and so long as we have the temper of reverence and worship we shall not ask to change it.

And to return once more to our original illustration.  We have the two nations also in us, the Norman and the Saxon, the dominant and the aspiring, the patrician and the proletaire.  The one rules only by right of rule, the other rises only by right of rising.  The power of conservatism perishes, when there is no longer anything to keep; the might of radicalism overflows into excess, when the proper check is taken away or degraded.  So long as the noble is noble and “noblesse oblige,” so long as Church and State are true to their guiding and governing duties, the elevation of the base is the elevation of the whole.  If the standards of what is truly aristocratic in our language are standards of nobility of thought, they will endure and draw up to them, on to the episcopal thrones and into the Upper House of letters, all that is most worthy.  Whatever makes the nation’s life will make its speech.  War was once the career of the Norman, and he set the seal of its language upon poetry.  Agriculture was the Saxon’s