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Show The Spirit of America. The American Jove of bombast has made way for the American love of "smartness." Fourth of July firecrackers have outlived the pyrotechnics of Fourth of July orations. We still praise ourselves our-selves freely, as our ancestors did, but we do so with less "fuss and feathers." At the bar a similar change may be observed. ob-served. It is harder than it used to be to "enthuse" juries to borrow a word which, like "hifalutin," seems to imply that what was once sublime has become ridiculous. Lawyers talk to twelve men instead of "addressing the paneL" Rufus Choate, were he to come to life again, would find it difficult to win such cases as he did win, unless he kept his imagination imagi-nation in a leash, shortened and simplified simpli-fied liis periods and made his delivery more conversational. Even in orations on memorial days, or at college festivals, colloquial English is heard; and the essays spoken at college commencements are ceasing to be "mere emptiness." In the northern, and especially the northwestern north-western states, the taste for colloquial, rather than oratorical English is, for obvious reasons, Btronger than in the south and extreme west; but it is showing show-ing itself in all parts of the country. It is a taste that should be encouraged by I all who prefer the simple to the ornate, I the natural to the artificial, the sensible to the sonorous. Harper's Magazine. |