Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[203] and ‘The whole of the instruction in higher English might be overtaken in such a course’ (p. 48); the italics being my own. If such are the ‘detailed examples’ given by professional teachers in England, what is to become of the followers? It is encouraging, perhaps, to see that the prolonged American resistance to the Anglicism ‘different to’ may be having a little reflex influence, when the Spectator describes Tennyson's second ‘Locksley Hall’ as being ‘different from’ his first. The influence is less favorable when we find one of the most local and illiterate of American colloquialisms reappearing in the Pall Mall Gazette, where it says: ‘Even Mr. Sala is better known, we expect, for his half-dozen books,’ etc. But the most repellent things one sees in English books, in the way of language, are the coarsenesses for which no American is responsible, as when in the graceful writings of Juliana Ewing the reader comes upon the words ‘stinking’ or ‘nigger.’ This last offensive word is also invariably used by Froude in ‘Oceana.’ Granting that taste and decorum are less important than logic and precision, it