an admirable paper on the “Italian Clergy and the Pope,” begins a sentence with the same phrase:  “As soon as the law was passed.”  And we ourselves, sure though we be that the use of as in this and every similar position is an error, need to brace both pen and tongue against running into it, so strong to overcome principle and conviction is the habit of the senses, accustomed daily to see and to hear the wrong.

AT THAT.  We should not have noticed this squat vulgarism, had not the pen blazoned its own depravity by lifting it out of newspapers into bound volumes.  The speech and page of every one, who would not be italicized for lingual looseness, should be forever closed against a phrase so shocking to taste, a phrase, we are sorry to say, of American mintage, coined in one of those frolicksome exuberant moods, when a young people, like a loosed horse full of youth and oats, kicks up and scatters mud with the unharnessed license of his heels.

ANOTHER.  Before passing to the letter B on our alphabetical docket, we will call up a minor criminal in A, viz. another, often incorrectly used for other; as in “on one ground or another,” “from one cause or another.”  Now, another, the prefix an making it singular,—­embraces but one ground or cause, and therefore, contrary to the purpose of the writer, the words mean that there are but two grounds or causes.  Write “on one ground or other,” and the words are in harmony with the meaning of the writer, the word other implying several or many grounds.

BOQUET.  The sensibility that gives the desire to preserve a present sparkling so long as is possible with all the qualities that made it materially acceptable, should rule us where the gift is something so precious as a word; and when we receive one from another people, gratitude, as well as sense of grace in the form of the gift itself, should make us watchful that it be not dimmed by the boorish breath of ignorance or cacophanized by unmusical voices.  We therefore protest against a useful and tuneful noun-substantive, a native of France, the word bouquet, being maimed into boquet, a corruption as dissonant to the ear as were to the eye plucking a rose from a variegated nosegay, and leaving only its thorny stem. Boquet is heard at times in well-upholstered drawing-rooms, and may even be seen in print.  Offensive in its mutilated shape, it smells sweet again when restored to its native orthography.

BY NO MANNER OF MEANS.  The most vigorous writers are liable, in unguarded moments, to lapse into verbal weakness, and so you meet with this vulgar pleonasm in Ruskin.

BY REASON OF.  An ill-assorted, ugly phrase, used by accomplished reviewers and others, who ought to set a purer example.

COME OFF.  Were a harp to give out the nasal whine of the bagpipe, or the throat of a nightingale to emit the caw of a raven, the aesthetic sense would not be more startled and offended than to hear from feminine lips, rosily wreathed by beauty and youth, issue the words, “The concert will come off on Wednesday.”  This vulgarism should never be heard beyond the “ring” and the cock-pit, and should be banished from resorts so respectable as an oyster-cellar.