The principal advisers of King Custom are as follows. First, there is Etymology, the chiffonnier, or general rag-merchant, who has made such a fortune of late years in his own business that he begins to be considered highly respectable. He gives advice which is more thought of than followed, partly on account of the fearful extremes into which he runs. He lately asked some boys of sixteen, at a matriculation examination in English, to what branch of
the Indo-Germanic family they felt inclined to refer the Pushto language, and what changes in the force of the letters took place in passing from Greek into Mœso-Gothic. Because all syllables were once words, he is a little inclined to insist that they shall be so still. He would gladly rule English with a Saxon rod, which might be permitted with a certain discretion which he has never attained: and when opposed, he defends himself with analogies of the Aryan family until those who hear him long for the discovery of an Athanasyus. He will transport a word beyond seas—he is recorder of Rhematopolis—on circumstantial evidence which looks like mystery gone mad; but, strange to say, something very often comes to light after sentence is passed which proves the soundness of the conviction.
The next adviser is Logic, a swearing old justice of peace, quorum, and rotulorum, whose excesses brought on such a fit of the gout that for many years he was unable to move. He is now mending, and his friends say he has sown his wild oats. He has some influence with the educated subjects of Custom, and will have more, if he can learn the line at which interference ought to stop: with them he has succeeded in making an affirmative of two negatives; but the vulgar won't never have nothing to say to him. He has always railed at Milton for writing that Eve was the fairest of her daughters; but has never satisfactorily shown what Milton ought to have said instead.
The third adviser has more influence with the mass of the subjects of King Custom than the other two put together; his name is Fiddlefaddle, the toy-shop keeper; and the other two put him forward to do their worst work. In return, he often uses their names without authority. He took Etymology to witness that means to an end must be plural: and he would have any one method to be a mean. But Etymology proved him wrong, King Custom referred him to his Catechism, in which is "a means whereby we receive the same," and Analogy—a subordinate of
Etymology—asked whether he thought it a great new to hear that he was wrong. It was either this Fiddlefaddle, or Lindley Murray[[608]] his traveler, who persuaded the Miss Slipslops, of the Ladies Seminary, to put "The Misses Slipslop" over the gate. Sixty years ago, this bagman called at all the girls' schools, and got many of the teachers to insist on the pupils saying "Is it not" and "Can I not" for "Isn't it" and "Can't I": of which it came that the poor girls were dreadfully laughed at by their irreverent brothers when they went home for the holidays. Had this bad adviser not been severely checked, he might by this time have proposed our saying "The Queen's of England son," declaring, in the name of Logic, that the prince was the Queen's son, not England's.
Lastly, there is Typography the metallurgist, an executive officer who is always at work in secret, and whose lawless mode of advising is often done by carrying his notions into effect without leave given. He it is who never ceases suggesting that the same word is not to occur in a second place within sight of the first. When the Authorized Version was first printed, he began this trick at the passage, "Let there be light, and there was light;" he drew a line on the proof under the second light, and wrote "luminosity?" opposite. He is strongest in the punctuations and other signs; he has a pepper-box full of commas always by his side. He puts everything under marks of quotation which he has ever heard before. An earnest preacher, in a very moving sermon, used the phrase Alas! and alack a day! Typography stuck up the inverted commas because he had read the old Anglo-Indian toast, "A lass and a lac a day!" If any one should have the sense to leave out of his Greek
the unmeaning scratches which they call accents, he goes to a lexicon and puts them in. He is powerful in routine; but when two routines interlace or overlap, he frequently takes the wrong one.
Subject to bad advice, and sometimes misled for a season, King Custom goes on his quiet way and is sure to be right at last.
"Treason does never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, when it prospers, none dare call it treason."