human
Plea for the Queen's English,
gpt
and we do feel
human
But, while perusing these two books, we have had an 'umble and an 'arty laugh in the depths of our 'umiliation. It may have been very sinful in us, we know, but we could not help it. As the youthful culprit replied, when caught laughing in church, we say, 'umbly of course,
gpt
We didn't laugh, it laughed itself! At the risk of not being believed by those who have not yet read these, two books, we give the astounding information that even an Englishman, an educated Englishman, a dignitary of the English church, a poet, whose verses we republished in America, (and, confound us, left out the u's,) not only speaks and writes bad English, but also on his own showing, by the light of Mr. Moon's volume, presumes to teach others to do the same. Yes, these published lessons of the Very Rev. Dean, in speaking and spelling, are so outrageously ungrammatical, and so faulty in style, that we should not be surprised if the prediction of his antagonist would come true, that henceforth people will speak of bad English as Dean's English. Yet with all its faults it is a useful book; and we think that neither Mr. Moon nor the newspaper critics have done the author justice. We do not like
human
Dean's English, and it is humiliating, even to an American, to discover that he has carelessly spoken or written it; but we like the Dean's book better than we do Mr. Moon's. We like the schoolboy's walk better than the schoolmarm's. Mr. Moon's style is faultlessly prim and precise, and defies literary criticism; but we have felt, more than once, a wish to take up some of his exact sentences and give them a good shaking, so as to get a little of the stiffness out of them. The Dean has written as most people speak; Mr. Moon writes as nobody ever did or ever will speak. We should write correctly, it is true, but there is a comparison (however paradoxical it may appear) even in correctness. Mr. Moon aims to write
gpt
and we think that his style is far less pleasing than it would have been if he had simply written correctly. There is such a thing as