[445] This Note, as well as all the others, will by-and-by be amply illustrated by citations from authors of sufficient repute to give it some value as a grammatical principle:  but one cannot hope such language as is, in reality, incorrigibly bad, will always appear so to the generality of readers.  Tastes, habits, principles, judgements, differ; and, where confidence is gained, many utterances are well received, that are neither well considered nor well understood.  When a professed critic utters what is incorrect beyond amendment, the fault is the more noteworthy, as his professions are louder, or his standing is more eminent.  In a recent preface, deliberately composed for a very comprehensive work on “English Grammar,” and designed to allure both young and old to “a thorough and extensive acquaintance with their mother tongue,”—­in the studied preface of a learned writer, who has aimed “to furnish not only a text-book for the higher institutions, but also a reference-book for teachers, which may give breadth and exactness to their views,”—­I find a paragraph of which the following is a part:  “Unless men, at least occasionally, bestow their attention upon the science and the laws of the language, they are in some danger, amid the excitements of professional life, of losing the delicacy of their taste and giving sanction to vulgarisms, or to what is worse.  On this point, listen to the recent declarations of two leading men in the Senate of the United States, both of whom understand the use of the English language in its power:  ’In truth, I must say that, in my opinion, the vernacular tongue of the country has become greatly vitiated, depraved, and corrupted by the style of our Congressional debates.’  And the other, in courteous response remarked, ’There is such a thing as an English and a parliamentary vocabulary, and I have never heard a worse, when circumstances called it out, on this side [of] Billingsgate!’”—­Fowler’s E. Gram., 8vo. 1850, Pref., p. iv.

Now of these “two leading men,” the former was Daniel Webster, who, in a senatorial speech, in the spring of 1850, made such a remark concerning the style of oratory used in Congress.  But who replied, or what idea the “courteous response,” as here given, can be said to convey, I do not know.  The language seems to me both unintelligible and solecistical; and, therefore, but a fair sample of the Incorrigible.  Some intelligent persons, whom I have asked to interpret it, think, as Webster had accused our Congress of corrupting the English language, the respondent meant to accuse the British Parliament of doing the same thing in a greater degree,—­of descending yet lower into the vileness of slang.  But this is hardly a probable conjecture.  Webster might be right in acknowledging a very depraving abuse of the tongue in the two Houses of Congress; but could it be “courteous,” or proper, for the answerer to jump the Atlantic, and pounce upon the English Lords and Commons, as a set of worse corrupters?