shows that he is unacquainted with their meaning or derivation. A few short examples will illustrate this:

"These appear trifling minutiæ."—Curiosities of Literature. "He explained to her the mysteries of the arcana of alchymy." -Ibid.

"These battles of logomachy, in which so much ink has been spilt."-Quarrels of Authors.

The writer who penned such sentences could not be aware that "minutiæ" is a Latin word, and means "trifles;" that "arcana" is in the

same category, and means secrets, ""mysteries;" and that "logomachy" is derived from the Greek, and includes in its signification, "to battle," or "to dispute."

If we are surprised to meet, in D'Israeli, with an expression so palpably tautological as "trifling minutiæ," what are we to think of a writer of the ability and ripe scholarship of Archbishop Whately, who has the same fault in the following sentence :

"Some writers have confined their attention to trifling minutiæ of style.”—Introduction to Rhetoric.

And if we smile at D'Israeli and his "battles of logomachy," can we do otherwise than laugh outright at Sir A. Alison, who, in his "History of Europe from the Fall of Napoleon," talks of representative institutions as having been "reestablished in our time by the influence of English Anglomania!"

MANNERISM.

IN the foregoing chapters I have pointed out some of the defects that seem worthy of notice in our prose writings. It will be seen that, far from improving the art of composition, in proportion to our learning and enlightenment, we have in many respects degraded it from its proper dignity and importance. And not only is the language, as written and spoken, a different language from what it should be: each trade, each profession, each association, each quackery, has a language and style of composition peculiar to itself. There is the mob-orator style invented by O'Connell; the knock-down style by Robins; the washy style by Rowland; the unctuous style by Holloway; the glossy style by Day and Martin; and the patchwork style by Moses and Son. There is, moreover, the naval style, the military style, the theatrical style, the Cockney style, the snob style, and the penny-a-line style. The intelligent reader is sufficiently acquainted with the Protean forms