Page:A Plea for the Queen's English.djvu/21

2 common right, and the general property of our country. And so it is with the Queen's English. It is, so to speak, this land's great highway of thought and speech; and seeing that the Sovereign in this realm is the person round whom all our common interests gather, the source of our civil duties and centre of, our civil rights, the Queen’s English is not an unmeaning phrase, but one which may serve to teach us some profitable lessons with regard to our, language, and its use and abuse.

3. I called our common English tongue the Highway of thought and speech; and it may not be amiss to carry on this similitude further. The Queen's highway, now so broad and smooth, was, once a mere track over an unenclosed country. It was levelled, hardened, widened, by very slow degrees. Of all this trouble, the passer-by sees no trace now. He bowls along it with ease in a vehicle, which a few centuries ago would have been broken to pieces in a deep rut, or would have come to grief in a bottomless swamp. There were no Croydon baskets, in the day when Henry II. and his train came to do penance from Southampton up that narrow, hollow, rough pilgrims' road, leading over Harbledown Hill to Canterbury.