Tyndall,—­or any lively London apprentice out on a Sunday; but this general superciliousness with respect to Solomon, his Proverbs, and his politics, characteristic of the modern Cockney, Yankee, and Anglicised Scot, is a difficult thing to deal with for us of the old school, who were well whipped when we were young; and have been in the habit of occasionally ascertaining our own levels as we grew older, and of recognizing that, here and there, somebody stood higher, and struck harder.

9.  A difficult thing to deal with, I feel more and more, hourly, even to the point of almost ceasing to write; not only every feeling I have, but, of late, even every word I use, being alike inconceivable to the insolence, and unintelligible amidst the slang, of the modern London writers.  Only in the last magazine I took up, I found an article by Mr. Goldwin Smith on the Jews (of which the gist—­as far as it had any—­was that we had better give up reading the Bible), and in the text of which I found the word ‘tribal’ repeated about ten times in every page.  Now, if ‘tribe’ makes ‘tribal,’ tube must make tubal, cube, cubal, and gibe, gibal; and I suppose we shall next hear of tubal music, cubal minerals, and gibal conversation!  And observe how all this bad English leads instantly to blunder in thought, prolonged indefinitely.  The Jewish Tribes are not separate races, but the descendants of brothers.  The Roman Tribes, political divisions; essentially Trine:  and the whole force of the word Tribune vanishes, as soon as the ear is wrung into acceptance of his lazy innovation by the modern writer.  Similarly, in the last elements of mineralogy I took up, the first order of crystals was called ‘tesseral’; the writer being much too fine to call them ‘four-al,’ and too much bent on distinguishing himself from all previous writers to call them cubic.

10.  What simple schoolchildren, and sensible schoolmasters, are to do in this atmosphere of Egyptian marsh, which rains fools upon them like frogs, I can no more with any hope or patience conceive;—­but this finally I repeat, concerning my own books, that they are written in honest English, of good Johnsonian lineage, touched here and there with colour of a little finer or Elizabethan quality:  and that the things they tell you are comprehensible by any moderately industrious and intelligent person; and accurate, to a degree which the accepted methods of modern science cannot, in my own particular fields, approach.

11.  Of which accuracy, the reader may observe for immediate instance, my extrication for him, from among the uvularias, of these five species of the Butterwort; which, being all that need be distinctly named and remembered, do need to be first carefully distinguished, and then remembered in their companionship.  So alike are they, that Gerarde makes no distinction among them; but masses them under the general type of the frequent English one, described as the second