The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell Part 104

Then let her but the half possess, Troy was besieged ten years for less.

Now if there's any truth in Darwin, And we from what was, all we are win, I simply wish the child to be A sample of Heredity, Enjoying to the full extent Life's best, the Unearned Increment Which Fate her G.o.dfather to flout Gave _him_ in legacies of gout.

Thus, then, the cup is duly filled; Walk steady, dear, lest all be spilled.

ON A BUST OF GENERAL GRANT

Strong, simple, silent are the [steadfast] laws That sway this universe, of none withstood, Unconscious of man's outcries or applause, Or what man deems his evil or his good; And when the Fates ally them with a cause That wallows in the sea-trough and seems lost, Drifting in danger of the reefs and sands Of shallow counsels, this way, that way, tost, Strength, silence, simpleness, of these three strands They twist the cable shall the world hold fast To where its anchors clutch the bed-rock of the Past.

Strong, simple, silent, therefore such was he Who helped us in our need; the eternal law That who can saddle Opportunity Is G.o.d's elect, though many a mortal flaw May minish him in eyes that closely see, Was verified in him: what need we say Of one who made success where others failed, Who, with no light save that of common day, Struck hard, and still struck on till Fortune quailed, But that (so sift the Norns) a desperate van Ne'er fell at last to one who was not wholly man.

A face all prose where Time's [benignant] haze Softens no raw edge yet, nor makes all fair With the beguiling light of vanished days; This is relentless granite, bleak and bare, Roughhewn, and scornful of aesthetic phrase; Nothing is here for fancy, naught for dreams, The Present's hard uncompromising light Accents all vulgar outlines, flaws, and seams, Yet vindicates some pristine natural right O'ertopping that hereditary grace Which marks the gain or loss of some time-fondled race.

So Marius looked, methinks, and Cromwell so, Not in the purple born, to those they led Nearer for that and costlier to the foe, New moulders of old forms, by nature bred The exhaustless life of manhood's seeds to show, Let but the ploughshare of portentous times Strike deep enough to reach them where they lie; Despair and danger are their fostering climes, And their best sun bursts from a stormy sky: He was our man of men, nor would abate The utmost due manhood could claim of fate.

Nothing Ideal, a plain-people's man At the first glance, a more deliberate ken Finds type primeval, theirs in whose veins ran Such blood as quelled the dragon In his den, Made harmless fields, and better worlds began: He came grim-silent, saw and did the deed That was to do; in his master-grip Our sword flashed joy; no skill of words could breed Such sure conviction as that close-clamped lip; He slew our dragon, nor, so seemed it, knew He had done more than any simplest man might do.

Yet did this man, war-tempered, stern as steel Where steel opposed, prove soft in civil sway; The hand hilt-hardened had lost tact to feel The world's base coin, and glozing knaves made prey Of him and of the entrusted Commonweal; So Truth insists and will not be denied.

We turn our eyes away, and so will Fame, As if in his last battle he had died Victor for us and spotless of all blame, Doer of hopeless tasks which praters s.h.i.+rk, One of those still plain men that do the world's rough work.

APPENDIX

I. INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND SERIES OF BIGLOW PAPERS

[Lowell took occasion, when collecting in a book the several numbers of the second series of 'Biglow Papers,' which had appeared In the 'Atlantic Monthly,' to prefix an essay which not only gave a personal narrative of the origin of the whole scheme, but particularly dwelt upon the use in literature of the homely dialect in which the poems were couched. In this Cabinet Edition it has seemed expedient to print the Introduction here rather than in immediate connection with the poems themselves.]

Though prefaces seem of late to have fallen under some reproach, they have at least this advantage, that they set us again on the feet of our personal consciousness and rescue us from the gregarious mock-modesty or cowardice of that _we_ which shrills feebly throughout modern literature like the shrieking of mice in the walls of a house that has pa.s.sed its prime. Having a few words to say to the many friends whom the 'Biglow Papers' have won me, I shall accordingly take the freedom of the first person singular of the personal p.r.o.noun. Let each of the good-natured unknown who have cheered me by the written communication of their sympathy look upon this Introduction as a private letter to himself.

When, more than twenty years ago, I wrote the first of the series, I had no definite plan and no intention of ever writing another. Thinking the Mexican war, as I think it still, a national crime committed in behoof of Slavery, our common sin, and wis.h.i.+ng to put the feeling of those who thought as I did in a way that would tell, I imagined to myself such an up-country man as I had often seen at antislavery gatherings capable of district-school English, but always instinctively falling back into the natural stronghold of his homely dialect when heated to the point of self-forgetfulness. When I began to carry out my conception and to write in my a.s.sumed character, I found myself in a strait between two perils.

On the one hand, I was in danger of being carried beyond the limit of my own opinions, or at least of that temper with which every man should speak his mind in print, and on the other I feared the risk of seeming to vulgarize a deep and sacred conviction. I needed on occasion to rise above the level of mere _patois_, and for this purpose conceived the Rev. Mr. Wilbur, who should express the more cautious element of the New England character and its pedantry, as Mr. Biglow should serve for its homely common-sense vivified and heated by conscience. The parson was to be the complement rather than the ant.i.thesis of his paris.h.i.+oner, and I felt or fancied a certain humorous element in the real ident.i.ty of the two under a seeming incongruity. Mr. Wilbur's fondness for sc.r.a.ps of Latin, though drawn from the life, I adopted deliberately to heighten the contrast. Finding soon after that I needed some one as a mouth-piece of the mere drollery, for I conceive that true humor is never divorced from moral conviction, I invented Mr. Sawin for the clown of my little puppet-show. I meant to embody in him that half-conscious _un_morality which I had noticed as the recoil in gross natures from a puritanism that still strove to keep in its creed the intense savor which had long gone out of its faith and life. In the three I thought I should find room enough to express, as it was my plan to do, the popular feeling and opinion of the time. For the names of two of my characters, since I have received some remonstrances from very worthy persons who happen to bear them, I would say that they were purely fortuitous, probably mere unconscious memories of sign-boards or directories. Mr. Sawin's sprang from the accident of a rhyme at the end of his first epistle, and I purposely christened him by the impossible surname of Birdofredum not more to stigmatize him as the incarnation of 'Manifest Destiny,' in other words, of national recklessness as to right and wrong, than to avoid the chance of wounding any private sensitiveness.

The success of my experiment soon began not only to astonish me, but to make me feel the responsibility of knowing that I held in my hand a weapon instead of the mere fencing-stick I had supposed. Very far from being a popular author under my own name, so far, indeed, as to be almost unread, I found the verses of my pseudonym copied everywhere; saw them pinned up in workshops; I heard them quoted and their authors.h.i.+p debated; I once even, when rumor had at length caught up my name in one of its eddies, had the satisfaction of overhearing it demonstrated, in the pauses of a concert, that _I_ was utterly incompetent to have written anything of the kind. I had read too much not to know the utter worthlessness of contemporary reputation, especially as regards satire, but I knew also that by giving a certain amount of influence it also had its worth, if that influence were used on the right side. I had learned, too, that the first requisite of good writing is to have an earnest and definite purpose, whether aesthetic or moral, and that even good writing, to please long, must have more than an average amount either of imagination or common-sense. The first of these falls to the lot of scarcely one in several generations; the last is within the reach of many in every one that pa.s.ses; and of this an author may fairly hope to become in part the mouthpiece. If I put on the cap and bells and made myself one of the court-fools of King Demos, it was less to make his majesty laugh than to win a pa.s.sage to his royal ears for certain serious things which I had deeply at heart. I say this because there is no imputation that could be more galling to any man's self-respect than that of being a mere jester. I endeavored, by generalising my satire, to give it what value _I_ could beyond the pa.s.sing moment and the immediate application. How far I have succeeded I cannot tell, but I have had better luck than I ever looked for in seeing my verses survive to pa.s.s beyond their nonage.

In choosing the Yankee dialect, I did not act without forethought. It had long seemed to me that the great vice of American writing and speaking was a studied want of simplicity, that we were in danger of coming to look on our mother-tongue as a dead language, to be sought in the grammar and dictionary rather than in the heart, and that our only chance of escape was by seeking it at its living sources among those who were, as Scottowe says of Major-General Gibbons, 'divinely illiterate.'

President Lincoln, the only really great public man whom these latter days have seen, was great also in this, that he was master--witness his speech at Gettysburg--of a truly masculine English, cla.s.sic, because it was of no special period, and level at once to the highest and lowest of his countrymen. I learn from the highest authority that his favorite reading was in Shakespeare and Milton, to which, of course, the Bible should be added. But whoever should read the debates in Congress might fancy himself present at a meeting of the city council of some city of Southern Gaul in the decline of the Empire, where barbarians with a Latin varnish emulated each other in being more than Ciceronian. Whether it be want of culture, for the highest outcome of that is simplicity, or for whatever reason, it is certain that very few American writers or speakers wield their native language with the directness, precision, and force that are common as the day in the mother country. We use it like Scotsmen, not as if it belonged to us, but as if we wished to prove that we belonged to it, by showing our intimacy with its written rather than with its spoken dialect. And yet all the while our popular idiom is racy with life and vigor and originality, bucksome (as Milton used the word) to our new occasions, and proves itself no mere graft by sending up new suckers from the old root in spite of us. It is only from its roots in the living generations of men that a language can be reinforced with fresh vigor for its needs; what may be called a literate dialect grows ever more and more pedantic and foreign, till it becomes at last as unfitting a vehicle for living thought as monkish Latin. That we should all be made to talk like books is the danger with which we are threatened by the Universal Schoolmaster, who does his best to enslave the minds and memories of his victims to what he esteems the best models of English composition, that is to say, to the writers whose style is faultily correct and has no blood-warmth in it. No language after it has faded into _diction_, none that cannot suck up the feeding juices secreted for it in the rich mother-earth of common folk, can bring forth a sound and l.u.s.ty book. True vigor and heartiness of phrase do not pa.s.s from page to page, but from man to man, where the brain is kindled and the lips suppled by downright living interests and by pa.s.sion in its very throe. Language is the soil of thought, and our own especially is a rich leaf-mould, the slow deposit of ages, the shed foliage of feeling, fancy, and imagination, which has suffered an earth-change, that the vocal forest, as Howell called it, may clothe itself anew with living green. There is death in the dictionary; and, where language is too strictly limited by convention, the ground for expression to grow in is limited also; and we get a _potted_ literature, Chinese dwarfs instead of healthy trees.

But while the schoolmaster has been busy starching our language and smoothing it flat with the mangle of a supposed cla.s.sical authority, the newspaper reporter has been doing even more harm by stretching and swelling it to suit his occasions. A dozen years ago I began a list, which I have added to from time to time, of some of the changes which may be fairly laid at his door. I give a few of them as showing their tendency, all the more dangerous that their effect, like that of some poisons, is insensibly c.u.mulative, and that they are sure at last of effect among a people whose chief reading is the daily paper. I give in two columns the old style and its modern equivalent.

_Old Style._ _New Style._

Was hanged. Was launched into eternity.

When the halter When the fatal was put round noose was adjusted his neck. about the neck of the unfortunate victim of his own unbridled pa.s.sions.

A great crowd A vast concourse came to see. was a.s.sembled to witness.

Great fire. Disastrous conflagration.

The fire spread. The conflagration extended its devastating career.

House burned. Edifice consumed.

The fire was got The progress of under. the devouring element was arrested.

Man fell. Individual was precipitated.

A horse and wagon A valuable horse ran against. attached to a vehicle driven by J.S., in the employment of J.B., collided with.

The frightened The infuriated animal.

horse.

Sent for the doctor. Called into requisition the services of the family physician.

The mayor of the The chief magistrate city in a short of the metropolis, in well- speech welcomed. chosen and eloquent language, frequently interrupted by the plaudits of the surging mult.i.tude, officially tendered the hospitalities.

I shall say a few I shall, with your words. permission, beg leave to offer some brief observations.

Began his answer. Commenced his rejoinder.

Asked him to dine. Tendered him a banquet.

A bystander advised. One of those omnipresent characters who, as if in pursuance of some previous arrangement, are certain to be encountered in the vicinity when an accident occurs, ventured the suggestion.

He died. He deceased, he pa.s.sed out of existence, his spirit quitted its earthly habitation, winged its way to eternity, shook off its burden, etc.

In one sense this is nothing new. The school of Pope in verse ended by wire-drawing its phrase to such thinness that it could bear no weight of meaning whatever. Nor is fine writing by any means confined to America.

All writers without imagination fall into it of necessity whenever they attempt the figurative. I take two examples from Mr. Merivale's 'History of the Romans under the Empire,' which, indeed, is full of such. 'The last years of the age familiarly styled the Augustan were singularly barren of the literary glories from which its celebrity was chiefly derived. One by one the stars in its firmament had been lost to the world; Virgil and Horace, etc., had long since died; the charm which the imagination of Livy had thrown over the earlier annals of Rome had ceased to s.h.i.+ne on the details of almost contemporary history; and if the flood of his eloquence still continued flowing, we can hardly suppose that the stream was as rapid, as fresh, and as clear as ever.' I will not waste time in criticising the bad English or the mixture of metaphor in these sentences, but will simply cite another from the same author which is even worse. 'The shadowy phantom of the Republic continued to flit before the eyes of the Caesar. There was still, he apprehended, a germ of sentiment existing, on which a scion of his own house, or even a stranger, might boldly throw himself and raise the standard of patrician independence.' Now a ghost may haunt a murderer, but hardly, I should think, to scare him with the threat of taking a new lease of its old tenement. And fancy the _scion_ of a _house_ in the act of _throwing itself_ upon a _germ of sentiment_ to _raise a standard!_ I am glad, since we have so much in the same kind to answer for, that this bit of horticultural rhetoric is from beyond sea. I would not be supposed to condemn truly imaginative prose. There is a simplicity of splendor, no less than of plainness, and prose would be poor indeed if it could not find a tongue for that meaning of the mind which is behind the meaning of the words. It has sometimes seemed to me that in England there was a growing tendency to curtail language into a mere convenience, and to defecate it of all emotion as thoroughly as algebraic signs. This has arisen, no doubt, in part from that healthy national contempt of humbug which is characteristic of Englishmen, in part from that sensitiveness to the ludicrous which makes them so shy of expressing feeling, but in part also, it is to be feared, from a growing distrust, one might almost say hatred, of whatever is super-material.

There is something sad in the scorn with which their journalists treat the notion of there being such a thing as a national ideal, seeming utterly to have forgotten that even in the affairs of this world the imagination is as much matter-of-fact as the understanding. If we were to trust the impression made on us by some of the cleverest and most characteristic of their periodical literature, we should think England hopelessly stranded on the good-humored cynicism of well-to-do middle-age, and should fancy it an enchanted nation, doomed to sit forever with its feet under the mahogany in that after-dinner mood which follows conscientious repletion, and which it is ill-manners to disturb with any topics more exciting than the quality of the wines. But there are already symptoms that a large cla.s.s of Englishmen are getting weary of the dominion of consols and divine common-sense, and to believe that eternal three per cent. is not the chief end of man, nor the highest and only kind of interest to which the powers and opportunities of England are ent.i.tled.

The quality of exaggeration has often been remarked on as typical of American character, and especially o American humor. In Dr. Petri's _Gedrangtes Handbuch der Fremdworter_, we are told that the word _humbug_ is commonly used for the exaggerations of the North-Americans.

To be sure, one would be tempted to think the dream of Columbus half fulfilled, and that Europe had found in the West a nearer way to Orientalism, at least in diction. But it seems tome that a great deal of what is set down as mere extravagance is more fitly to be called intensity and picturesqueness, symptoms ol the imaginative faculty in full health and strength, though producing, as yet, only the raw and formless material in which poetry is to work. By and by, perhaps, the world will see it fas.h.i.+oned into poem and picture, and Europe, which will be hard pushed for originality erelong, may have to thank us for a new sensation. The French continue to find Shakespeare exaggerated because he treated English just as our country-folk do when they speak of a 'steep price,' or say that they 'freeze to' a thing. The first postulate of an original literature is that a people should use their language instinctively and unconsciously, as if it were a lively part of their growth and personality, not as the mere torpid boon of education or inheritance. Even Burns contrived to write very poor verse and prose in English. Vulgarisms are often only poetry in the egg. The late Mr.

Horace Mann, in one of his public addresses, commented at some length on the beauty and moral significance ol the French phrase _s'orienter_ and called on his young friends to practise upon it in life. There was not a Yankee in his audience whose problem had not always been to find out what was _about east_, and to shape his course accordingly. This charm which a familiar expression gains by being commented, as it were, and.

set in a new light by a foreign language, is curious and instructive. I cannot help thinking that Mr. Matthew Arnold forgets this a little too much sometimes when he writes of the beauties of French style. It would not be hard to find in the works of French Academicians phrases as coa.r.s.e as those he cites from Burke, only they are veiled by the unfamiliarity of the language. But, however this may be, it is certain that poets and peasants please us in the same way by translating words back again to their primal freshness, and infusing them with a delightful strangeness which is anything but alienation. What, for example, is Milton's '_edge_ of battle' but a doing into English of the Latin _acies? Was die Gans gedacht das der Schwan vollbracht_, what the goose but thought, that the swan full brought (or, to de-Saxonize it a little, what the goose conceived, that the swan achieved), and it may well be that the life, invention, and vigor shown by our popular speech, and the freedom with which it is shaped to the instant want of those who use it, are of the best omen for our having a swan at last. The part I have taken on myself is that of the humbler bird.

But it is affirmed that there is something innately vulgar in the Yankee dialect. M. Sainte-Beuve says, with his usual neatness: '_Je definis un patois une ancienne langue qui a eu des malheurs, ou encore une langue toute jeune st qui n'a pas fait fortune._' The first part of his definition applies to a dialect like the Provencal, the last to the Tuscan before Dante had lifted it into a cla.s.sic, and neither, it seems to me, will quite fit a _patois/_, which is not properly a dialect, but rather certain archaisms, proverbial phrases, and modes of p.r.o.nunciation, which maintain themselves among the uneducated side by side with the finished and universally accepted language. Norman French, for example, or Scotch down to the time of James VI., could hardly be called _patois_, while I should be half inclined to name the Yankee a _lingo_ rather than a dialect. It has retained a few words now fallen into disuse in the mother country, like to _tarry_, to _progress_, _fleshy_, _fall_, and some others; it has changed the meaning of some, as in _freshet_; and it has clung to what I suspect to have been the broad Norman p.r.o.nunciation of _e_ (which Moliere puts into the mouth of his rustics) in such words as _sarvant_, _parfect_, _vartoo_, and the like. It maintains something of the French sound of _a_ also in words like _ch[)a]mber_, _d[)a]nger_ (though the latter had certainly begun to take its present sound so early as 1636, when I find it sometimes spelt _dainger_). But in general it may be said that nothing can be found in it which does not still survive in some one or other of the English provincial dialects. There is, perhaps, a single exception in the verb to _sleeve_. To _sleeve_ silk means to divide or ravel out a thread of silk with the point of a needle till it becomes _floss_. (A.S. _slefan_, to _cleave_=divide.) This, I think, explains the '_sleeveless_ errand'

in 'Troilus and Cressida' so inadequately, sometimes so ludicrously darkened by the commentators. Is not a 'sleeveless errand' one that cannot be unravelled, incomprehensible, and therefore bootless?

I am not speaking now of Americanisms properly so called, that is, of words or phrases which have grown into use here either through necessity, invention, or accident, such as a _carry_, a _one-horse affair_, a _prairie_, to _vamose_. Even these are fewer than is sometimes taken for granted. But I think some fair defence may be made against the charge of vulgarity. Properly speaking, vulgarity is in the thought, and not in the word or the way of p.r.o.nouncing it. Modern French, the most polite of languages, is barbarously vulgar if compared with the Latin out of which it has been corrupted, or even with Italian.

There is a wider gap, and one implying greater boorishness, between _ministerium_ and _metier_, or _sapiens_ and _sachant_, than between _druv_ and _drove_ or _agin_ and _against_, which last is plainly an arrant superlative. Our rustic _coverlid_ is nearer its French original than the diminutive cover_let_, into which it has been ignorantly corrupted in politer speech. I obtained from three cultivated Englishmen at different times three diverse p.r.o.nunciations of a single word,--_cowc.u.mber_, _cooc.u.mber_, and _cuc.u.mber_. Of these the first, which is Yankee also, comes nearest to the nasality of _concombre_. Lord Ossory a.s.sures us that Voltaire saw the best society in England, and Voltaire tells his countrymen that _handkerchief_ was p.r.o.nounced _hankercher_. I find it so spelt in Hakluyt and elsewhere. This enormity the Yankee still persists in, and as there is always a reason for such deviations from the sound as represented by the spelling, may we not suspect two sources of derivation, and find an ancestor for _kercher_ in _couverture_ rather than in _couvrechef_? And what greater phonetic vagary (which Dryden, by the way, called _fegary_) in our _lingua rustica_ than this _ker_ for _couvre_? I copy from the fly-leaves of my books, where I have noted them from time to time, a few examples of p.r.o.nunciation and phrase which will show that the Yankee often has antiquity and very respectable literary authority on his side. My list might be largely increased by referring to glossaries, but to them eyery one can go for himself, and I have gathered enough for my purpose.

I will take first those cases in which something like the French sound has been preserved in certain single letters and diphthongs. And this opens a curious question as to how long this Gallicism maintained itself in England. Sometimes a divergence in p.r.o.nunciation has given as two words with different meanings, as in _genteel_ and _jaunty_, which I find coming in toward the close of the seventeenth century, and wavering between _genteel_ and _jantee_. It is usual in America to drop the _u_ in words ending in _our_--a very proper change recommended by Howell two centuries ago, and carried out by him so far as his printers would allow. This and the corresponding changes in _musique_, _musick_, and the like, which he also advocated, show that in his time the French accent indicated by the superfluous letters (for French had once nearly as strong an accent as Italian) had gone out of use. There is plenty of French accent down to the end of Elizabeth's reign. In Daniel we have _riches'_ and _counsel'_, in Bishop Hall _comet'_, _chapelain_, in Donne _pictures'_, _virtue'_, _presence'_, _mortal'_, _merit'_, _hainous'_, _giant'_, with many more, and Marston's satires are full of them. The two latter, however, are not to be relied on, as they may be suspected of Chaucerizing. Herrick writes _baptime_. The tendency to throw the accent backward began early. But the incongruities are perplexing, and perhaps mark the period of transition. In Warner's 'Albion's England' we have _creator'_ and _creature'_ side by side with the modern _creator_ and _creature_. _E'nvy_ and _e'nvying_ occur in Campion (1602), and yet _envy'_ survived Milton. In some cases we have gone back again nearer to the French, as in _rev'enue_ for _reven'ue_, I had been so used to hearing _imbecile_ p.r.o.nounced with the accent on the first syllable, which is in accordance with the general tendency in such matters, that I was surprised to find _imbec'ile_ in a verse of Wordsworth. The dictionaries all give it so. I asked a highly cultivated Englishman, and he declared for _imbeceel'_. In general it may be a.s.sumed that accent will finally settle on the syllable dictated by greater ease and therefore quickness of utterance. _Blas'-phemous_, for example, is more rapidly p.r.o.nounced than _blasphem'ous_, to which our Yankee clings, following in this the usage of many of the older poets. _Amer'ican_ is easier than _Ameri'can_, and therefore the false quant.i.ty has carried the day, though the true one may be found in George Herbert, and even so late as Cowley.

To come back to the matter in hand. Our 'uplandish man' retains the soft or thin sound of the _u_ in some words, such as _rule_, _truth_ (sometimes also p.r.o.nounced _tr[)u]th_, not _trooth_), while he says _noo_ for _new_, and gives to _view_ and _few_ so indescribable a mixture of the two sounds with a slight nasal tincture that it may be called the Yankee s.h.i.+bboleth. Voltaire says that the English p.r.o.nounce _true_ as if it rhymed with _view_, and this is the sound our rustics give to it. Spenser writes _deow_ (_dew_) which can only be p.r.o.nounced with the Yankee nasality. In _rule_ the least sound of _a_ precedes the _u_. I find _reule_ in Pec.o.c.k's 'Repressor.' He probably p.r.o.nounced it _rayoole_, as the old French word from which it is derived was very likely to be sounded at first, with a reminiscence of its original _regula_. Tindal has _reuler_, and the Coventry Plays have _preudent_.

In the 'Parlyament of Byrdes' I find _reule_. As for _noo_, may it not claim some sanction in its derivation, whether from _nouveau_ or _neuf_, the ancient sound of which may very well have been _noof_, as nearer _novus_? _Beef_ would seem more like to have come from _buffe_ than from _boeuf_, unless the two were mere varieties of spelling. The Saxon _few_ may have caught enough from its French cousin _peu_ to claim the benefit of the same doubt as to sound; and our slang phrase _a few_ (as 'I licked him a few') may well appeal to _un peu_ for sense and authority.

Nay, might not _lick_ itself turn out to be the good old word _lam_ in an English disguise, it the latter should claim descent as, perhaps, he fairly might, from the Latin _lambere_? The New England _ferce_ for _fierce_, and _perce_ for _pierce_ (sometimes heard as _fairce_ and _pairce_), are also Norman. For its antiquity I cite the rhyme of _verse and pierce_ in Chapman and Donne, and in some commendatory verses by a Mr. Berkenhead before the poems of Francis Beaumont. Our _pairlous_ for _perilous_ is of the same kind, and is nearer Shakespeare's _parlous_ than the modern p.r.o.nunciation. One other Gallicism survives in our p.r.o.nunciation. Perhaps I should rather call it a semi-Gallicism, for it is the result of a futile effort to reproduce a French sound with English lips. Thus for _joint_, _employ_, _royal_, we have _jynt_, _emply_, _r[)y]le_, the last differing only from _rile_ (_roil_) in a prolongation of the _y_ sound. I find _royal_ so p.r.o.nounced in the 'Mirror for Magistrates.' In Walter de Biblesworth I find _solives_ Englished by _gistes_. This, it is true, may have been p.r.o.nounced _jeests_, but the p.r.o.nunciation _jystes_ must have preceded the present spelling, which was no doubt adopted after the radical meaning was forgotten, as a.n.a.logical with other words in _oi_. In the same way after Norman-French influence had softened the _l_ out of _would_ (we already find _woud_ for _veut_ in N.F. poems), _should_ followed the example, and then an _l_ was foisted into _could_, where it does not belong, to satisfy the logic of the eye, which has affected the p.r.o.nunciation and even the spelling of English more than is commonly supposed. I meet with _eyster_ for _oyster_ as early as the fourteenth century. I find _viage_ in Bishop Hall and Middleton the dramatist, _bile_ for _boil_ in Donne and Chrononhotonthologos, _line_ for _loin_ in Hall, _ryall_ and _chyse_ (for choice) _dystrye_ for _destroy_, in the Coventry Plays. In Chapman's 'All Fools' is the misprint of _employ_ for _imply_, fairly inferring an ident.i.ty of sound in the last syllable. Indeed, this p.r.o.nunciation was habitual till after Pope, and Rogers tells us that the elegant Gray said _naise_ for _noise_ just as our rustics still do. Our _cornish_ (which I find also in Herrick) remembers the French better than _cornice_ does. While clinging more closely to the Anglo-Saxon in dropping the _g_ from the end of the present participle, the Yankee now and then pleases himself with an experiment in French nasality in words ending in _n_. It is not, so far as my experience goes, very common, though it may formerly have been more so. _Capting_, for instance, I never heard save in jest, the habitual form being _kepp'n_. But at any rate it is no invention of ours. In that delightful old volume, 'Ane Compendious Buke of G.o.dly and Spirituall Songs,' in which I know not whether the piety itself or the simplicity of its expression be more charming, I find _burding_, _garding_, and _cousing_, and in the State Trials _uncerting_ used by a gentleman. I confess that I like the _n_ better than _ng_.