ORTHOGRAPHY. When this word is looked at in its elements (two Greek words denoting the art of writing and correctness), it would seem that there ought to be included under it whatever belongs to the art of writing a language correctly, including both what is called ety mology and syntax. But the grammarians have given it a restricted sense, and it is used to denote not the writing correctly in the general, but the proper selection of literal elements of each word that is used, and the proper division of each word when one part of it is at the end of one line and another at the beginning of the line which succeeds. In the ancient Hebrew manuscripts we may observe that this division of words never occurs, the scribes resorting to the expedient of widen ing certain of the letters, if in the ordinary form the words would not fill up the line. The law-stationers, in their copies of legal documents, fill up a line with a waved and unmeaning stroke, when the word which follows cannot conveniently be written in it at length.
We perceive by certain grammars and dictionaries published by practical men, both at home and still more in the United States of North America, that the writers appear to suppose that their works will be resorted to even by persons of cultivation as authorities or guides to orthography. But we believe it to be the case that the number is very few of persons who actually use dictionaries for this purpose. We mean, of course, not mere children or persons of very irniszfect education ; but even Of those there are very few persons who read much and write occasionally, who ever think of resorting to books of the kind we are speaking of ; while persons of_ a better education trust entirely to memory, and should a doubt arise, the reference would be made to some eminent author, and not to the guides of which we speak. In fact, the art is acquired almost without teaching, and is maintained in vigour through a whole life by the constant practice of writing and reading. At all events, there is no book, grammar, guide, or dictionary, which a scholar in England regards as in this point a book of authority.
Whether it would be expedient to raise some one work into an authority in such a point as this, is, in fact, a question—one of the greatest in philology that can he proposed—whether there shall be an invariable standard established to which a living language shall for ever conform. We doubt not only the possibility but the expediency
of this ; and in respect of orthography, we are quite sure that no such standard can be raised, because it would be quite impracticablo to bring all persons who have a right to a voice in such a matter to an agreement in any one system involving the admission of certain fixed principles. The contemporary usage of persons of cultivation, meaning of a great preponderating majority, which will always exist, is, wo apprehend, the authority to which each person who aspires to write correctly must continue to defer.
This has been the standard to which reference has always hitherto been made. Open any book printed in the reign of Queen Anne, and many words will present themselves in an orthography very different from that in which they would now be found. But we must not say that the persons who wrote them wrote incorrectly, if they wrote according to the practice of the cultivated persons of their time. If we ascend still higher, and go to the reign of Elizabeth, we find the orthography still more diverse from our own ; and when we reach the time of Caxton, and still more when we go back to the days of Chaucer and 'Wycliffe, we find many words which, though they are actually words now iu use, are so disguised in form that we can scarcely recognise them. We seem to have got among a people who spoke a different language, though they were our own forefathers, not more than some fourteen generations removed.
This has arisen from the want of a standard—something fixed, not varying like usage. There is an inconvenience in it as respects the writers before the time of Caxton and the invention of printing, and we may reasonably wish that, with reference to them, there had been some less varying standard and a continuous uniformity; but when we look in the writings of the men of the Elizabethan period, we find that, though now two centuries and a half have passed, there no more difficulty in perusing them than there is in perusing the writings of our own day ; and that the same will be the case in respect of the writings of the present day in the hands of Englishmen four or five centuries hence, may be safely foretold. So that there is no real pre judice arising from the unphilosophical and dangerous course of leaving this point to be regulated by anything so uncertain as contemporary usage.