What a wealth of words in almost every language lies inert and unused; and certainly not fewest in our own. How much of what might be as current coin among us, is shut up in the treasure-house of a few classical authors, or is never to be met at all but in the columns of the dictionary, we meanwhile, in the midst of all this riches, condemning ourselves to a voluntary poverty; and often, with tasks the most delicate and difficult to accomplish,--for surely the clothing of thought in its most appropriate garment of words is such,--needlessly depriving ourselves of a large portion of the helps at our command; like some workman who, being furnished for an operation that will challenge all his skill with a dozen different tools, each adapted for its own special purpose, should in his indolence and self-conceit persist in using only one; doing coarsely what might have been done finely; or leaving altogether undone that which, with such assistances, was quite within his reach. And thus it comes to pass that in the common intercourse of life, often too in books, a certain restricted number of words are worked almost to death, employed in season and out of season--a vast multitude meanwhile being rarely, if at all, called to render the service which _they_ could render far better than any other; so rarely, indeed, that little by little they slip out of sight and are forgotten nearly or altogether. And then, perhaps, at some later day, when their want is felt, the ignorance into which we have allowed ourselves to fall, of the resources offered by the language to satisfy new demands, sends us abroad in search of outlandish substitutes for words which we already possess at home. [Footnote: Thus I observe in modern French the barbarous 'derailler,' to get off the rail; and this while it only needed to recall 'derayer' from the oblivion into which it had been allowed to fall.] It was, no doubt, to avoid so far as possible such an impoverishment of the language which he spoke and wrote, for the feeding of his own speech with words capable of serving him well, but in danger of falling quite out of his use, that the great Lord Chatham had Bailey's Dictionary', the best of his time, twice read to him from one end to the other.