own that as I turn over novels coming from Philadelphia, from New Mexico, from Boston, from Tennessee, from rural New England, from New York, every local flavor of diction gives me courage and pleasure.  Alphonse Daudet, in a conversation with H. H. Boyesen said, speaking of Tourguenief, “What a luxury it must be to have a great big untrodden barbaric language to wade into!  We poor fellows who work in the language of an old civilization, we may sit and chisel our little verbal felicities, only to find in the end that it is a borrowed jewel we are polishing.  The crown-jewels of our French tongue have passed through the hands of so many generations of monarchs that it seems like presumption on the part of any late-born pretender to attempt to wear them.”

This grief is, of course, a little whimsical, yet it has a certain measure of reason in it, and the same regret has been more seriously expressed by the Italian poet Aleardi: 

“Muse of an aged people, in the eve Of fading civilization, I was born. . . . . . .  Oh, fortunate, My sisters, who in the heroic dawn Of races sung!  To them did destiny give The virgin fire and chaste ingenuousness Of their land’s speech; and, reverenced, their hands Ran over potent strings.”

It will never do to allow that we are at such a desperate pass in English, but something of this divine despair we may feel too in thinking of “the spacious times of great Elizabeth,” when the poets were trying the stops of the young language, and thrilling with the surprises of their own music.  We may comfort ourselves, however, unless we prefer a luxury of grief, by remembering that no language is ever old on the lips of those who speak it, no matter how decrepit it drops from the pen.  We have only to leave our studies, editorial and other, and go into the shops and fields to find the “spacious times” again; and from the beginning Realism, before she had put on her capital letter, had divined this near-at-hand truth along with the rest.  Lowell, almost the greatest and finest realist who ever wrought in verse, showed us that Elizabeth was still Queen where he heard Yankee farmers talk.  One need not invite slang into the company of its betters, though perhaps slang has been dropping its “s” and becoming language ever since the world began, and is certainly sometimes delightful and forcible beyond the reach of the dictionary.  I would not have any one go about for new words, but if one of them came aptly, not to reject its help.  For our novelists to try to write Americanly, from any motive, would be a dismal error, but being born Americans, I then use “Americanisms” whenever these serve their turn; and when their characters speak, I should like to hear them speak true American, with all the varying Tennesseean, Philadelphian, Bostonian, and New York accents.  If we bother ourselves to write what the critics imagine to be “English,” we shall be priggish and artificial, and still more