Much good may be effected in this way; but the questions selected should be of an importance as manifest as those which I have ventured to suggest. The preservation of our language in all its purity being one of the main objects of the Institution, its attention cannot too earnestly be directed to an abuse of terms, which is of much more serious importance than its mere philological inaccuracy, since it is calculated to injure morality and confound all our notions of right and wrong, by substituting certain silken phrases and taffeta terms precise for the most grave offences. Thus, killing an innocent man in a duel is called-an affair of honour; violating the rights of wedlock--an affair of gallantry; adultery—a faux-pas; defrauding honest tradesmen outrunning the constable; reducing a family to beggary by gaming-shaking the elbows; a drunkard, that worst of all livers, is-a bon-vivant; disturbing a whole street, and breaking a watchman's head—a midnight frolic; exposing some harmless personage to insults, annoyances, and losses-a good hoax; uttering deliberate falsehoods-shooting the long bow and various other polite epithets will occur to the Society, which, affecting to be used as synonymes for vice, not infrequently assume the language of virtue. It is not beneficial to the monarchical principle that a female of bad character should be termed a courtesan; nor to morality, that she should be described as a woman of pleasure. Such lenient periphrases are of most injurious tendency; and if the Society for the Suppression of Vice have failed to interfere for their discontinuance, I am confident that the Institution which I have the honour to address will not shrink from the full performance of its duty. Perhaps I may be subjecting myself to the imputation of a Hysteron-proteron, if, after noticing the abuses and perversions of words, I proceed to those of individual letters; but the importance of the conclusions to which it leads induced me to reserve this subject for my own conclusion, and so end where most people begin— with the alphabet. So obscure and incomprehensible is the origin of letters, that many authors have been glad to solve the difficulty of their invention by referring it to divine inspiration. In that case, however, there would have been some conformity of character, number, and sequence; whereas there is a marked difference in all these constituents among the various nations of the earth. The learned author of Hermes informs us, that to about twenty plain elementary sounds we owe that variety of articulate voices which have been sufficient to explain the sentiments of such an innumerable multitude as all the past and present generations of men; and of course our alphabet, assuming this hypothesis to be true, might be much contracted. Yet there are others still more numerous, embracing all numbers up to the Chinese, which reckons by thousands, and assuming every variety of collocation, without any one people being able to assign reasons for deviating from the order of its neighbours. An elucidation of this curious subject is well worth the most serious attention of the Society. The Scholiasts upon that ode of Anacreon which describes Cupid's being stung by a bee, state him to have been at that moment learning his letters; and that in perpetual remembrance of the pain inflicted by his winged assailant, he decreed that the alphabet should ever after commence with A B. Others suppose the whole ode to be allegorical, expressing how much Cupid felt stung and nettled at being compelled to undergo the drudgery of learning those letters. The precedence of B to C has been explained upon the principle that a man must be before he can see; but these, I apprehend, are plausible and ingenious conjectures, unsupported by any great philological or lexicographical authorities. Many curious discoveries have already been made in the hidden properties of letters, and the number might be indefinitely increased by the stimulating patronage and ingenious researches of the Society. But for the ingenuity of recent investigators, we should never have known that the letter S was of essential service at the siege of Gibraltar, by making hot shot; that the letter N is like a little pig, because it makes a sty nasty: that the letters U V can never go out to dinner because they always come after T; that the letters o a s t are like toast without tea (T); and that a barber may be said to fetter the alphabet, because he ties up the queues and puts toupees in irons. These most important additions to our philological science are a happy foretaste of what may be accomplished by a chartered company expressly instituted for the encouragement of letters. My limits not allowing me to enter at length into the subject of our hawkers' and pedlars' literature, vulgarly denominated the London Cries, I shall content myself with hinting that much of it is so alarmingly dissonant and cacophonous, as to need a thorough emendation. The wretches who yell "Hi-aw-Marakrel!" and "Owld Clew!" should be compelled to articulate in a sweet and gracious voice-" Here are Mackarel” and "Old Clothes." Our murderous dustmen's bells have converted many invalids, by depriving them of rest, into fit materials for their cart; and as their cry is at least as discordant as their clapper, I would have all these noisy nuisances converted into euphonious melodists by an immediate decree of the Society. The postman, as a man of letters, will of course receive a license to bear the bell wherever he goes; and the muffin-man's tinkle is too inoffensive to require regulation. The great majority of our cries demand revision; but I would have no innovation upon the milkwoman's--'mi-eau ! (probably handed down to us from the Norman times,) which is not only valuable as an antiquity, but as a frank confession that one-half of the commodity she vends is water. From words, which are the signs of ideas, the Society may turn their attention to the signs of our publichouses, in which a very barbarous taste and a Gothic predilection for gorgons, and monsters, and chimæras dire, is still but too visible. Since the recent discoveries in the interior of Asia, we are warranted in retaining the unicorn for our national arms; but the good taste of the Society will induce them to visit our public-houses, and procure the suppression of all such preposterous symbols as the Phoenix, the Griffin, the Green-dragon, the Blue-boar, the Red, Silver, and Golden Lions, with a hundred others; nor will they allow the continuance of such anomalous conjunctions as the Green Man and Still, which a recent French traveller has very excusably translated, "L'homme vert et tranquille." A LAMENTATION UPON THE DECLINE OF BARBERS. When they who lived to puff, by fortune cross'd, Must puff to live; when they whose fame was spread From pole to pole are in oblivion lost, And having others pinch'd, are pinch'd for bread ;When by more sad reverse they're environ'd Than any told of Emperor or Caliph, And they, who once toupees and queues have iron'd, IN tracing the changes produced by the alteration of human habits in the different ages and nations of the world, nothing is more affecting than to contemplate the reverses to which whole classes of our fellow-creatures are exposed by sudden fluctuations of fashion; and in all the sad records of prostration from eminence and favour to obscurity and neglect, we doubt whether any can offer a more melancholy contrast than the past and present situation of our Barbers. With the embalmers of the dead, and forgers of armour for the living, whose occupation's gone," we sympathise no more than we shall with the keepers of Lottery Offices, who will shortly be in the same predicament: their pursuits are associated with death, blood, and rapine; but the Barber's Profession (for by a statute of Henry the Eighth it is termed a science and a mystery) holds affinity with every thing that is gentle, touching, and endearing. Perhaps it would not be too much to affirm that the civilization of a state cannot be measured by any surer criterion than the estimation in which these professors are 66 |