the practical ignorance of the ruler had its counterpart in the philosophical ignorance of the subject. The king asked him if he did not think the language was at that time in a decline. Beattie was forced to reply that such was the melancholy fact. The king agreed, and named the Spectator as one of the best standards of the speech. This was the only proper doctrine to hold then, and Beattie concurred in it with all his heart. It had long been his own opinion. He was a good, genuine conservative, and felt that neither the English tongue nor the English constitution stood in the slightest need of change. Consequently, he was always indulging in a mild form of terror at the ruin impending over the one because of the new ideas coming in, and over the other because of the new words. As for the principal personage in the conversation, his published correspondence has made us aware that the English of the king varied widely at times from the king's English.
The solicitude of Beattie grew upon him as he advanced in years. He contemplated, but never carried out, the composition of a criticism on the style of Addison, so as to show its peculiar merits, and furthermore to lay bare the hazards to which the language was exposed of being debased and corrupted by the innovations which had of late, he said, "found their way into the style of our best and most esteemed writers." He had prepared a collection of Scotticisms, which of course were expressions to be carefully avoided. He began, however, to be timid about publishing it. While he had been engaged in its compilation many of the words and phrases it contained had been adopted in the speech used south of the Tweed. "Our language (I mean the English) is degenerating very fast," he wrote sorrowfully to a friend in 1785; "and many phrases, which I know to be Scottish idioms, have got into it of late years, so that many of my strictures are liable to be opposed by authorities which the world accounts unexceptionable." As time went on, the prospect grew even more dismal. In a letter of 1790, commenting on the annotations made to a recent edition of the Tatler, he described the language employed in them as "full of those new-fangled phrases and barbarous idioms that are now so much affected by those who form their style from political pamphlets and those pretended speeches in Parliament that appear in newspapers. Should this jargon continue to gain ground among us, English literature will go to ruin. During the last twenty years, especially since the breaking out of the American war, it has made alarming progress. . . . If I live to execute what I propose on the writings and genius of Addison, I shall at least enter my protest against the practice; and by exhibiting a copious specimen of the new phraseology, endeavor to make my reader set his heart against it."
On more than one other occasion Beattie expressed the anxiety he felt at the degeneracy then taking place in the English tongue, and his fear of the impossibility of arresting its progress. The speech was not simply declining, it was declining rapidly. In a letter to a friend, written in August, 1790, he expressed his gratification that Miss Bowdler approved of the sentiments he entertained as to the increase of the corruption which was bringing about the deterioration of the language. "I begin to fear," he added, "it will be impossible to check it; but an attempt would be made if I had leisure and a little more tranquillity of mind." Time and tranquil mind were apparently both denied. Beattie never completed his treatise on the style of Addison. Accordingly, he never furnished his readers with a list of those neologisms which were stealing into and corrupting the speech. But in 1794 he printed privately some productions in prose and verse of his son, said to have been a youth of great promise, who died in 1790. Among them were two or three entitled "Dialogues of the Dead." These dealt with the subject of language, and unquestionably represented Beattie's own opinions. One of them is the report of an imaginary conversation between Swift and a bookseller and Mercury. Swift is disgusted with the expressions used by the tradesman, and begs Mercury to translate his gibberish into English. A few of the words and phrases, then indicated as corruptions, are still strange to us; but most of them are now used every day by those who are in a state of dis-
