Art. II.— I. A Glossary of Words and Phrases usually reyarded as peculiar to the United States. By John Russell Bartlett. 2d Edition. Boston. 1859. 2. An American Dictionary of the English Language. By Noah Webster, LL.D. Springfield, (Mass.) 1855. 3. A Collection of College Words and Customs. By B. H. Hall. Cambridge. 185*!. 4. The English Language in its Elements and Forms. By Wm. C. Fowler. New York. 1S55. 5. Language and the Study of Language. By William Dwight Whitney. New York. 1867. <>. Curiosities of American Literature. By Rufus W. Griswold. New York. 1856. 7. A Diary in America. By Captain Marryatt, R. N. New York. 1839. 8. LoicelVs Poems. (' The Biglow Papers.') Boston. 1858. 9. Breitmann's Ballads. By Charles CI. Leland. Philadelphia. 1869. 10. leaves of Grass. By Walt Whitman. Brooklyn. 1856. 11. A Cyclopaedia of American Literature. ByEvart A. and George L'. Duyckhinck. New York. 1S56. The subject of American variations from the standard of indigenous English speech, while it has been, on both sides of the Atlantic, made matter of frequent comment in a desultory way, has yet never been elaborately treated in a regular and scientific discussion. Abroad, our general style of speech and writing has met with a good deal of sarcastic eulogy and a good deal of stupid depreciation; at home, the defence has been conducted with a perfervid acharncment that is more ridiculous than the cause assailed; the controversy, however, has not been made luminous upon either part by much display of fact or much adventure in argument. The second edition of Mr. Bartlett's hook, cited above, is a fairly exhaustive summary of the subject as it stood at that date, and so far as words are concerned, it is a work that should be in every scholars library, being correct, authoritative, instructive, entertaining, creditable to the author's industry, and showing throughout excellent qualities of taste and judgment. But we have no work—there is none at least within the reviewers knowledge—which has undertaken to discuss Americanisms, both of words independently, and their choice relatively to style, in the light of what such words must be considered to be:—the reflected images of our physical, social, and mental condition and culture. It is the purpose of the present article to trace in brief outline what we conceive to be the essential features and substantial peculiarities of that relation between life and speech, as it subsists in this country. The Bibliography of Americanisms is a brief one. Dr. Witherspoon, who came to this country to preside over Princeton College, and who was a competent scholar as well as a very canny Scot, is supposed to have been the first who wrote upon the subject. His essays, a few brief papers in .an ephemeral publication, appeared in 17(51. Benjamin Franklin, however, a man whom few things escaped, had been observant of the divergences of our speech sometime before that date. In a letter to Noah Webster, he says that as early as 1733 he had, on his return to Boston, noticed the growing use of un-English words, most of them derived from the vftcabulary of Cotton Mather and other of the clerical despots of New England. The earliest Yankeeisms, avowedly printed as such, with which we are acquainted, occur in the original song of Yankee Doodle— 'Father and I went down to camp'—which was printed in 1775, during the tiege of Boston. The vernacular of New England is cleverly hit off in this famous ballad, as, for instance, in this: In 1786, Royal Tvler, a notable early wit, wrote and had played his comedy of The Contrast,1 the first stage production in which the Yankee dialect and story-telling, since so familiar in the parts written for Ilackett, Hill, and others, w€rd employed.'2 Not much later than this, Noah Webster was inspired by the success of his spelling-book to aim at the production of his 4 American Dictionary of the English Language.' His studies preparatory to this work gave him occasion at various times to utter quite a number of preposterous pamphlets and ridiculous books upon topics which he considered to be germane to the subject. In 1816, John Pickering printed his Vocabulary? the first considerable attempt to determine and classify Americanisms. This work, though brief, was very suggestive, attracted the attention of scholars, and was commented upon and reviewed by Webster, J. 11. Beck, Albert Gallatin, and others interested in linguistic studies. In 1854, Mr. Gulian C. Verplanck, in editing an edition of Shakspeare, took occasion to identify the many Americanisms, which, obsolete in current English, were in use in the common speech or in provincialisms at the Elizabethan period. Meantime, the provincialisms of the country, East, AVest, and South, had begun to be copiously illustrated, and not perhaps unprofitably, in various works of humor which appeared from time to time. Judge Ilaliburton, Seba Smith, J. Russell Lowell, and many others, gave us Yankeeisms; Mrs. Kirkland, Carleton, Hall, and others, Westernisms; and Judge Longstreet, ' Major Jones,'Thorpe, and several more, the peculiarities of Southern speech. These books, if they were caricatures, were still likenesses, and often accurate to a degree of nicety in their delineations. The latest publications of this sort, the laughable books of' Artemus Ward ' and 'Mark Twain', and the really original and noble tales and poems of Mr. Bratt Harte, have enriched us with graphic specimens of the highly metaphysical broad speech of the rural and mining populations of California and the Eastern and. Western slopes of the Rocky Mountains. '- Duyckhinck's Cyclopaedia. 8 A Vocabulary, or Collection of Words and Phrases which have been supposed to be peculiar to the United States of America. To which is prefixed an Essay, &c. Boston. 1816. The second Edition of Mr. Bartlett's book came out in 1859, but the rapid march of events since that date, and the tumultuous passions that have boiled within us during the past decade, have added so largely to our vocabulary, that the book is already well nigh obsolete, and we hope the skilful author will speedily enlarge and revise it. It is not easy to overestimate the value of such collections, and the importance of the studies which can only be pursued by their aid. Within less than a century, philoloy, from being a mere exercise and pastime of the curious, has leaped into the front rank among the sciences that contribute to our knowledge of human nature. It has enabled us at once to correct, to rehabilitate, and to utilize history, and has given us the means, now for the first time, to employ the great problem of race, with all its wide-reaching formulas, in the interpretation of the laws, and in estimating the scope, of civilization. It would seem no more than reasonable, if the quest after Sanskrit roots and their affinities has been worthy to engage so much of the industry and time of scholars, and has been so fruitful in contributions towards a philosophic insight into the conditions of mankind, that the accurate study of the living and active forms of a speech a people have in daily use, should demand at least a like degree of attention, and promise a corresponding amount of recompense. If language be, as we know it is, one of the most considerable of the intelligent vehicles of historical facts and conditions at our command, if it be ' the outward appearance of the intellect of nations',4 then certainly, the language of our land and our day must needs engage the close attention of whomsoever would make himself acquainted with the condition of our intelligence and the degree and quality of our enlightenment. And conversely, if we have a culture which, as is claimed, is anywise peculiar and indigenous, our language will reflect that peculiarity, will serve as a proof of it, and a measure whereby to test whether it be excellent or the opposite. There is an architecture of speech just as there is an architecture of houses, and each people has in a greater or less degree its own peculiar style, both of language and of roo'.'-tree, to which it is guided and within which * Win. C. Fowler—op-eit. it is constrained, by the needs of its congenerons instincts, by climate, habits, and idiosyncrasies. The student of' language has not gone very far upon his search for the laws of its origin and its mutations, has not examined very closely the circumstances ot’ its inner life, before he becomes vividly impressed with the conception ot' how many vital forces are actively at work within it, and how peculiarly a living thing speech is. He does not need to be told that ‘it is not a dead begotten, but rather a begetting ; in itself it is not an épyfov, but an §vép7sza.’ 5 He comes at once to feel that while it is a treasure-house and depository of wisdom and experience in things enacted, it is in a still greater degree an operative mint and assay-house, wherein the rude bullion of thought is pnriiied, moulded, stamped and valued for currency in the social mart. It is moreover the autograph registry of our daily condition, as sensitive as an electrometer, as unerring as a chemist’s scales. It is the test of a man, and the criterion of a people. As has been said by a master in' its uses," ‘ Language most shows a man: speak, that I may see thee. It springs out ot' the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man’s form or likeness so true as his speech.’ The revclatien it makes of the individual man, it more than corroborates of the man collective, and society would have no consecutive existence without the intervention of speech. Being such, so living, so transient in the reflections, so instantaneous in catching the shape and color of every impression, speech must change eonstantl y, and must change, if not for the better, then for the worse. Its growth being unintermittent, if it cannot grow upward it must grow downward; if it cannot spread to the right, it must spread to the left; if it be debarred from the assimilation of good material, it must be suffered to assimilate bad. ‘ The growth of language cannot be suppressed ’, says Protl Fowlerf ‘ any more than can the genial activity of the human soul. Especially in our own country, in “this wilderness of free minds,” new thoughts and corresponding new 5 VVillhclm von Humboldt. 5 Ben J onson. 7 The English Language, &c. |