Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 5.djvu/202

194 sciences, divinity, law, physick, and the like; I mean the traders in history, and politicks, and the belles lettres, together with those by whom books are not translated, but (as the common expressions are) done out of French, Latin, or other languages, and made English. I cannot but observe to you, that, until of late years, a Grub street book was always bound in sheepskin, with suitable print and paper, the price never above a shilling, and taken off wholly by common tradesmen or country pedlars; but now they appear in all sizes and shapes, and in all places; they are handed about from lapfuls in every coffeehouse to persons of quality; are shown in Westminster-hall and the Court of Requests; you may see them gilt, and in royal paper, of five or six hundred pages, and rated accordingly. I would engage to furnish you with a catalogue of English books, published within the compass of seven years past, which at the first hand would cost you a hundred pounds, wherein you shall not be able to find ten lines together of common grammar, or common sense.

"These two evils, ignorance and want of taste, have produced a third, I mean the continual corruption of our English tongue, which, without some timely remedy, will suffer more by the false refinements of twenty years past, than it has been improved in the foregoing hundred. And this is what I design chiefly to enlarge upon, leaving the former evils to your animadversion.

"But, instead of giving you a list of the late refinements crept into our language, I here send you a copy of a letter I received some time ago from a " most