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334 abuse of it jars upon the ear of any well-bred man far more than the broadest Scotch or Irish brogue can do. These dialects, as I have shown, often preserve good old English forms that have long been lost to London and Oxford.

There are two things which are supposed to bring fresh ideas before the minds of the middle class — the newspaper on week days, and the sermon on Sundays. We have seen the part played by the former; I now turn to the latter. Many complaints have lately been made on the scarcity of good preachers; one cause of these complaints I take to be, the diction of the usual run of sermons. The lectern and the reading desk speak to the folk, Sunday after Sunday, in the best of English; that is, in old Teutonic words, with a dash of French terms mostly naturalized in the Thirteenth Century. The pulpit, on the other hand, too often deals in an odd jargon of Romance, worked up into long-winded sentences, which shoot high above the heads of the listeners. Swift complained bitterly of this a hundred and fifty years ago; and the evil is rife as ever now. Is it any wonder then that the poor become lost to the Church, or that they go to the meeting-house, where they can hear the way to Heaven set forth in English, a little uncouth it may be,