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latter political pamphlets, you will find all the beauties of style and expression: of which, notwithstanding some very pardonable singularities, we must allow him to be a great master; and you may depend on him also as a friend to truth and virtue. His Lives of our English Poets, lately published, are inimitably written; and while they give you an example of style and composition, they will place before you, in a striking point of view, the inconsistency which is often found in the human character. They will shew you how the powers of wit and profligacy of morals, manly literature and childish improvidence, elegance of speech and roughness of manners, strength of imagination and absurdity of principle, are tempered together in some of the sons of Parnassus; whence you will infer, that virtue is preferable to genius, and that integrity without learning is better than learning without so briety.

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Our pleaders at the bar, and people of the law, having great practice in the English language, become well acquainted with the powers of it, and many of them have excelled as patterns of English eloquence; of which many great examples occur in the charges which are to be found in the State Trials.

Since the time when I attempted to improve my English, (which I brought very bad from the University) some new writers have risen into fame, such as Hume, &c. who are to be regarded in literature as thieves and assassins are in society, and are therefore to be read with caution, as Middleton their kinsman When truth and elegance meet together, we are safe as well as happy; but it is a dangerous employment, and scarcely worth the experiment, to gather flowers upon rotten ground, where there is a dirty bottom, which threatens to swallow us up.

LET

LETTER IX.

ON THE IDIOMS OF LANGUAGE.

EVERY language has its own proper forms, of expression, called idioms, which mean proprieties or peculiarities. If, when you speak or write in one language, you make use of the idiom proper to another, you are guilty of what is called a barbarism. The term is commonly applied to offences against the classical modes of speech, established by the authority of the best writers among the Latins or the Greeks. The Greeks and Romans accounted all nations barbarians but themselves; therefore to speak barbarous Latin is to speak in that language with the idiom peculiar to the language of some other nation. According to the idiom of the English language we use the phrase, to get by heart, which the Latins express by mandare memorice, to commit to memory; and recitare memoriter, to repeat by memory: but if you were to speak in Latin as you do in English, and say gignere corde, you would be guilty of a gross barbarism. We should laugh at a French

Frenchman, who, speaking of one that came to an untimely end should say, " he did not die his own proper death;" but in French sa propre mort is equivalent to what we call in English a natural death. How ridiculous it would sound to us in English, if a Frenchman, hearing one calling out with a loud voice, should say," he cries with his head full;" but so they express themselves in their own language: Crier a pleine tête, is, to cry with as loud a voice as your head can bear; and crier a tue tête, is to bawl so loud as to rend it. Languages differ very much in the use of the negative: in Latin and English two negatives make an affirmative; in Greek, French, and Italian, they' are still negative; as la scrittura non sa niente, ed insegna ogni cosa, "writing knows nothing (Ital. does not know nothing), and yet teaches all things." It is very useful to compare the proverbial idioms of different languages. When we see how they have adopted different ideas to express the same sentiment, and come by so many different ways, some of them very wise and ingenious, to the same end, the prospects of the mind are greatly opened and enlarged. My meaning may be illustrated by a single instance; we say in English, to pass the time away; and

gaming,

gaming, or any other like diverson, is called pastime but in French they affix a moral idea to the same expression, and call it tuer le tems, to kill time; as if every vain and useless employment were a species of murder, against that which is most valuable in this world, and dies a natural death much sooner than we could wish, and after all will certainly rise up against us in judgment.

We commonly use the word barbarous to denote the cruel spirit of uncivilized and savage nations; but the term originally belonged to confusion of speech, or the unintelligible language of a strange people; and it is so applied in the Scriptures: If I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me. A barbarian, therefore, in the primitive sense of the word, is a person of a strange language: the term itself is derived from the word Babel, by a substitution, which is very frequent, of one liquid consonant for another; and it is remarkable that the word Babel, as a monument of the confusion which happened there, has passed into all languages: the Greeks have it in their βαρβαρος, βαμβαίνω, for Babaw, to stammer; whence the Latin barbarus, balbus, and balbutio; the French babiller; the English babble, babbler, &c.