"Is anything but," &c

As your work seems adapted, amongst other subjects, to check the introduction into our language of undesirable words, phrases, and forms of speech, I would call the attention of your readers to the modern phrases, "is anything but," and the like, which have lately crept into use, and will be found, in many (otherwise) well-written books. I read the phrase "is anything but," for the first time, in Napier's *Peninsular War*; where it struck me as being so much beneath the dignity of historical composition, and at the same time asserting an impossibility, that I meditated calling the author's att…