which I have laid down as principles of discrimination, are such as almost every reader will know to be generally true, and agreeable to present usage, though several of them have never before been printed in any grammar.  Their application will strike out some letters which are often written, and retain some which are often omitted; but, if they err on either hand, I am confident they err less than any other set of rules ever yet formed for the same purpose.  Walker, from whom Murray borrowed his rules for spelling, declares for an expulsion of the second l from traveller, gambolled, grovelling, equalling, cavilling, and all similar words; seems more willing to drop an l from illness, stillness, shrillness, fellness, and drollness, than to retain both in smallness, tallness, chillness, dullness, and fullness; makes it one of his orthographical aphorisms, that, “Words taken into composition often drop those letters which were superfluous in their simples; as, Christmas, dunghil, handful;” and, at the same time, chooses rather to restore the silent e to the ten derivatives from move and prove, from which Johnson dropped it, than to drop it from the ten similar words in which that author retained it!  And not only so, he argues against the principle of his own aphorism; and says, “It is certainly to be feared that, if this pruning of our words of all the superfluous letters, as they are called, should be much farther indulged, we shall quickly antiquate our most respectable authors, and irreparably maim our language.”—­Walker’s Rhyming Dict., p. xvii.

OBS. 27.—­No attempt to subject our orthography to a system of phonetics, seems likely to meet with general favour, or to be free from objection, if it should.  For words are not mere sounds, and in their orthography more is implied than in phonetics, or phonography.  Ideographic forms have, in general, the advantage of preserving the identity, history, and lineage of words; and these are important matters in respect to which phonetic writing is very liable to be deficient.  Dr. Johnson, about a century ago, observed, “There have been many schemes offered for the emendation and settlement of our orthography, which, like that of other nations, being formed by chance, or according to the fancy of the earliest writers in rude ages, was at first very various and uncertain, and [is] as yet sufficiently irregular.  Of these reformers some have endeavoured to accommodate orthography better to the pronunciation, without considering that this is to measure by a shadow, to take that for a model or standard which is changing while they apply it.  Others, less absurdly indeed, but with equal unlikelihood of success, have endeavoured to proportion the number of letters to that of sounds, that every sound may have its own character, and every character a single sound.  Such would be the orthography of a new language to be formed by a synod of grammarians upon principles of science.  But who can hope to prevail on nations to change their practice, and make all their old books useless? or what advantage would a new orthography procure equivalent to the confusion and perplexity of such an alteration?”—­Johnson’s Grammar before Quarto Dict., p. 4.