Some one of their stakes has a run of
luck. Either it is my Lord Eldon who sits on the wool-sack, or the young
curate bids his Oxford laurels against a head-mastership of a public
school and covers his baldness with a mitre, or Jones Lloyd steps from
his back parlor into the carriage which is to take Lord Overstone to the
House of Peers. From the day when young Osborne, the bold London
'prentice, leaped into the Thames to fish up thence his master's
daughter, and brought back, not only the little lady, but the ducal
coronet of Leeds in prospective, to that when Thomas Newcome the elder
walked up to the same London that he might earn the "bloody hand" for
Sir Brian and Sir Barnes, English life has been full of such gallant
achievements.
So it has been with the words these speak. The phrases of the noble
Canon Chaucer have fallen to the lips of peasants and grooms, while many
a pert Cockney saying has elbowed its sturdy way into her Majesty's High
Court of Parliament. Yet still there are two tongues flowing through our
daily talk and writing, like the Missouri and Mississippi, with distinct
and contrasted currents.
And this appears the more strikingly in this country, where other
distinctions are lost.
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