wrought into our minds, as parts of our habitual modes of expression, that not all the care and instruction of after life can rid us of them. How many men of culture and eminent ability do we meet with, who exhibit through life the marks of a defective or vicious early training in their native tongue! The dominion of habit is not less powerful in language than in anything else that we acquire and practise. It is not alone true that he who has once thoroughly learned English is thereby almost disqualified from ever attaining a native facility, correctness, and elegance in any foreign tongue; one may also so thoroughly learn a bad style of English as never to be able to ennoble it into the best and most approved form of his native speech. Yet, with us, the influences which tend to repress and eradicate local peculiarities and individual errors are numerous and powerful. One of the most effective among them is school instruction. It is made an important part of our education to learn to speak and write correctly. The pupil of a faithful and competent instructor is taught to read and pronounce, to frame sentences with the mouth and with the pen, in a manner accordant with that which is accepted among the well-educated everywhere. Social intercourse is a cultivating agency hardly less important, and more enduring in its action; as long as we live, by associating with those who speak correctly, we are shown our own faults, and at the same time prompted and taught to correct them. Reading—which is but another form of such intercourse—consultation of authorities, self-impelled study in various forms, help the work. Our speech is improved and perfected, as it was first acquired, by putting ourselves in the position of learners, by following the example of those who speak better than we do. He who is really in earnest to complete his mastery of his mother-tongue may hope for final success, whatever have been his early disadvantages; just as one may acquire a foreign tongue, like German or French, with a degree of perfection depending only on his opportunities, his capacity, his industry, and the length of time he devotes to the study.
Again, even when the process of training which we have
