Chapter XXXII: Appendix: I. Introduction to the Second Series of Biglow Papers (1)

[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 passed 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 pronoun. 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 wishing 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 assumed 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 antithesis of his parishioner, and I felt or fancied a certain humorous element in the real identity of the two under a seeming incongruity. Mr. Wilbur's fondness for scraps 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 authorship 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 æsthetic 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 passes; 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 passage 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 passing 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 pass 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, classic, 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 lusty book. True vigor and heartiness of phrase do not pass from page to page, but from man to man, where the brain is kindled and the lips suppled by downright living interests and by passion 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 classical 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 cumulative, 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
passions.

A great crowd A vast concourse came to see. was assembled 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 multitude,
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 passed
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 shine 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 Cæsar. 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 class 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 entitled.

The quality of exaggeration has often been remarked on as typical of American character, and especially o£ American humor. In Dr. Petri's _Gedrängtes Handbuch der Fremdwörter_, 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 to me 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 fashioned 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 coarse 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 définis 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 Provençal, the last to the Tuscan before Dante had lifted it into a classic, 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 pronunciation, 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 pronunciation of _e_ (which Molière 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 _chămber_, _dănger_ (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. _sléfan_, 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 pronouncing 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 _métier_, 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 pronunciations of a single word,--_cowcumber_, _coocumber_, and _cucumber_. Of these the first, which is Yankee also, comes nearest to the nasality of _concombre_. Lord Ossory assures us that Voltaire saw the best society in England, and Voltaire tells his countrymen that _handkerchief_ was pronounced _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 pronunciation 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 every 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 pronunciation 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'_, _chapëlain_, 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 _crëature'_ 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_ pronounced 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 assumed that accent will finally settle on the syllable dictated by greater ease and therefore quickness of utterance. _Blas'-phemous_, for example, is more rapidly pronounced 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 quantity 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 pronounced _trŭth_, 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 shibboleth. Voltaire says that the English pronounce _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 pronounced with the Yankee nasality. In _rule_ the least sound of _a_ precedes the _u_. I find _reule_ in Pecock's 'Repressor.' He probably pronounced it _rayoolë_, 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 pronunciation. One other Gallicism survives in our pronunciation. 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 pronounced in the 'Mirror for Magistrates.' In Walter de Biblesworth I find _solives_ Englished by _gistes_. This, it is true, may have been pronounced _jeests_, but the pronunciation _jystes_ must have preceded the present spelling, which was no doubt adopted after the radical meaning was forgotten, as analogical 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 pronunciation 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 identity of sound in the last syllable. Indeed, this pronunciation 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 Godly 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_.

Of Yankee preterites I find _risse_ and _rize_ for _rose_ in Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton and Dryden, _clim_ in Spenser, _chees_ (_chose_) in Sir John Mandevil, _give_ (_gave_) in the Coventry Plays, _shet_ (_shut_) in Golding's Ovid, _het_ in Chapman and in Weever's Epitaphs, _thriv_ and _smit_ in Drayton, _quit_ in Ben Jonson and Henry More, and _pled_ in the Paston Letters, nay, even in the fastidious Landor. _Rid_ for _rode_ was anciently common. So likewise was _see_ for _saw_, but I find it in no writer of authority (except Golding), unless Chaucer's _seie_ and Gower's _sigh_ were, as I am inclined to think, so sounded. _Shew_ is used by Hector Boece, Giles Fletcher, Drummond of Hawthornden, and in the Paston Letters. Similar strong preterites, like _snew_, _thew_, and even _mew_, are not without example. I find _sew_ for _sewed_ in 'Piers Ploughman.' Indeed, the anomalies in English preterites are perplexing. We have probably transferred _flew_ from _flow_ (as the preterite of which I have heard it) to _fly_ because we had another preterite in _fled_. Of weak preterites the Yankee retains _growed_, _blowed_, for which he has good authority, and less often _knowed_. His _sot_ is merely a broad sounding of _sat_, no more inelegant than the common _got_ for _gat_, which he further degrades into _gut_. When he says _darst_, he uses a form as old as Chaucer.

The Yankee has retained something of the long sound of the _a_ in such words as _axe_, _wax_, pronouncing them _exe_, _wex_ (shortened from _aix_, _waix_). He also says _hev_ and _hed_ (_hāve_, _hād_ for _have_ and _had_). In most cases he follows an Anglo-Saxon usage. In _aix_ for _axle_ he certainly does. I find _wex_ and _aisches_ (_ashes_) in Pecock, and _exe_ in the Paston Letters. Golding rhymes _wax_ with _wexe_ and spells _challenge_ _chelenge_. Chaucer wrote _hendy_. Dryden rhymes _can_ with _men_, as Mr. Biglow would. Alexander Gill, Milton's teacher, in his 'Logonomia' cites _hez_ for _hath_ as peculiar to Lincolnshire. I find _hayth_ in Collier's 'Bibliographical Account of Early English Literature' under the date 1584, and Lord Cromwell so wrote it. Sir Christopher Wren wrote _belcony_. Our _fect_ is only the O.F. _faict_. _Thaim_ for _them_ was common in the sixteenth century. We have an example of the same thing in the double form of the verb _thrash_, _thresh_. While the New Englander cannot be brought to say _instead_ for _instid_ (commonly _'stid_ where not the last word in a sentence), he changes the _i_ into _e_ in _red_ for _rid_, _tell_ for _till_, _hender_ for _hinder_, _rense_ for _rinse_. I find _red_ in the old interlude of 'Thersytes,' _tell_ in a letter of Daborne to Henslowe, and also, I shudder to mention it, in a letter of the great Duchess of Marlborough, Atossa herself! It occurs twice in a single verse of the Chester Plays,

'_Tell_ the day of dome, _tell_ the beames blow.'

From the word _blow_ (in another sense) is formed _blowth_, which I heard again this summer after a long interval. Mr. Wright[24] explains it as meaning 'a blossom.' With us a single blossom is a _blow_, while _blowth_ means the blossoming in general. A farmer would say that there was a good blowth on his fruit-trees. The word retreats farther inland and away from the railways, year by year. Wither rhymes _hinder_ with _slender_, and Shakespeare and Lovelace have _renched_ for _rinsed_. In 'Gammer Gurton' and 'Mirror for Magistrates' is _sence_ for _since_; Marlborough's Duchess so writes it, and Donne rhymes _since_ with _Amiens_ and _patïence_, Bishop Hall and Otway with _pretence_, Chapman with _citizens_, Dryden with _providence_. Indeed, why should not _sithence_ take that form? Dryden's wife (an earl's daughter) has _tell_ for _till_, Margaret, mother of Henry VII., writes _seche_ for _such_, and our _ef_ finds authority in the old form _yeffe_.

_E_ sometimes takes the place of _u_, as _jedge, tredge, bresh_. I find _tredge_ in the interlude of 'Jack Jugler,' _bresh_ in a citation by Collier from 'London Cries' of the middle of the seventeenth century, and _resche_ for _rush_ (fifteenth century) in the very valuable 'Volume of Vocabularies' edited by Mr. Wright. _Resce_ is one of the Anglo-Saxon forms of the word in Bosworth's A.-S. Dictionary. Golding has _shet_. The Yankee always shortens the _u_ in the ending _ture_, making _ventur, natur, pictur_, and so on. This was common, also, among the educated of the last generation. I am inclined to think it may have been once universal, and I certainly think it more elegant than the vile _vencher, naycher, pickcher_, that have taken its place, sounding like the invention of a lexicographer to mitigate a sneeze. Nash in his 'Pierce Penniless' has _ventur_, and so spells it, and I meet it also in Spenser, Drayton, Ben Jonson, Herrick, and Prior. Spenser has _tort'rest_, which can be contracted only from _tortur_ and not from _torcher_. Quarles rhymes _nature_ with _creator_, and Dryden with _satire_, which he doubtless pronounced according to its older form of _satyr_. Quarles has also _torture_ and _mortar_. Mary Boleyn writes _kreatur_. I find _pikter_ in Izaak Walton's autograph will.

I shall now give some examples which cannot so easily be ranked under any special head. Gill charges the Eastern counties with _kiver_ for _cover_, and _ta_, for _to_. The Yankee pronounces both _too_ and _to_ like _ta_ (like the _tou_ in _touch_) where they are not emphatic. When they are, both become _tu_. In old spelling, _to_ is the common (and indeed correct) form of _too_, which is only _to_ with the sense of _in addition_. I suspect that the sound of our _too_ has caught something from the French _tout_, and it is possible that the old _too too_ is not a reduplication, but a reminiscence of the feminine form of the same word (_toute_) as anciently pronounced, with the _e_ not yet silenced. Gill gives a Northern origin to _geaun_ for _gown_ and _waund_ for _wound_ (_vulnus_). Lovelace has _waund_, but there is something too dreadful in suspecting Spenser (who _borealised_ in his pastorals) of having ever been guilty of _geaun!_ And yet some delicate mouths even now are careful to observe the Hibernicism of _ge-ard_ for _guard_, and _ge-url_ for _girl_. Sir Philip Sidney (_credite posteri!_) wrote _furr_ for _far_. I would hardly have believed it had I not seen it in _facsimile_. As some consolation, I find _furder_ in Lord Bacon and Donne, and Wittier rhymes _far_ with _cur_. The Yankee, who omits the final _d_ in many words, as do the Scotch, makes up for it by adding one in _geound_. The purist does not feel the loss of the _d_ sensibly in _lawn_ and _yon_, from the former of which it has dropped again after a wrongful adoption (retained in _laundry_), while it properly belongs to the latter. But what shall we make of _git, yit_, and _yis_? I find _yis_ and _git_ in Warner's 'Albion's England,' _yet_ rhyming with _wit, admit_, and _fit_ in Donne, with _wit_ in the 'Revenger's Tragedy,' Beaumont, and Suckling, with _writ_ in Dryden, and latest of all with _wit_ in Sir Hanbury Williams. Prior rhymes _fitting_ and _begetting_. Worse is to come. Among others, Donne rhymes _again_ with _sin_, and Quarles repeatedly with _in_. _Ben_ for _been_, of which our dear Whittier is so fond, has the authority of Sackville, 'Gammer Gurton' (the work of a bishop), Chapman, Dryden, and many more, though _bin_ seems to have been the common form. Whittier's accenting the first syllable of _rom'ance_ finds an accomplice in Drayton among others, and, though manifestly wrong, is analogous with _Rom'ans_. Of other Yankeeisms, whether of form or pronunciation, which I have met with I add a few at random. Pecock writes _sowdiers (sogers, soudoyers)_, and Chapman and Gill _sodder_. This absorption of the _l_ is common in various dialects, especially in the Scottish. Pecock writes also _biyende_, and the authors of 'Jack Jugler' and 'Gammer Gurton' _yender_. The Yankee includes '_yon_' in the same catagory, and says 'hither an' yen,' for 'to and fro.' (Cf. German _jenseits_.) Pecock and plenty more have _wrastle_. Tindal has _agynste, gretter, shett, ondone, debyte_, and _scace_. 'Jack Jugler' has _scacely_ (which I have often heard, though _skurce_ is the common form), and Donne and Dryden make _great_ rhyme with _set_. In the inscription on Caxton's tomb I find _ynd_ for _end_, which the Yankee more often makes _eend_, still using familiarly the old phrase 'right anend' for 'continuously.' His 'stret (straight) along' in the same sense, which I thought peculiar to him, I find in Pecock. Tindal's _debytë_ for _deputy_ is so perfectly Yankee that I could almost fancy the brave martyr to have been deacon of the First Parish at Jaalam Centre. 'Jack Jugler' further gives us _playsent_ and _sartayne_. Dryden rhymes _certain_ with _parting_, and Chapman and Ben Jonson use _certain_, as the Yankee always does, for _certainly_. The 'Coventry Mysteries' have _occapied, massage, nateralle, materal (material),_ and _meracles_,--all excellent Yankeeisms. In the 'Quatre fils, Aymon' (1504),[25] is _vertus_ for _virtuous_. Thomas Fuller called _volume vollum_, I suspect, for he spells it _volumne_. However, _per contra_, Yankees habitually say _colume_ for _column_. Indeed, to prove that our ancestors brought their pronunciation with them from the Old Country, and have not wantonly debased their mother tongue, I need only to cite the words _scriptur_, _Israll_, _athists_, and _cherfulness_ from Governor Bradford's 'History.' So the good man wrote them, and so the good descendants of his fellow-exiles still pronounce them. Brampton Gurdon writes _shet_ in a letter to Winthrop. _Purtend_ (_pretend_) has crept like a serpent into the 'Paradise Of Dainty Devices;' _purvide_, which is not so bad, is in Chaucer. These, of course, are universal vulgarisms, and not peculiar to the Yankee. Butler has a Yankee phrase, and pronunciation too, in 'To which these _carr'ings-on_ did tend.' Langham or Laneham, who wrote an account of the festivities at Kenilworth in honor of Queen Bess, and who evidently tried to spell phonetically, makes _sorrows_ into _sororz_. Herrick writes _hollow_ for _halloo_, and perhaps pronounced it (_horresco suggerens_!) _holló_, as Yankees do. Why not, when it comes from _holà_? I find _ffelaschyppe_ (fellowship) in the Coventry Plays. Spenser and his queen neither of them scrupled to write _afore_, and the former feels no inelegance even in _chaw_ and _idee_. _'Fore_ was common till after Herrick. Dryden has _do's_ for _does_, and his wife spells _worse_ _wosce_. _Afeared_ was once universal. Warner has _ery_ for _ever a_; nay, he also has illy, with which we were once ignorantly reproached by persons more familiar with Murray's Grammar than with English literature. And why not _illy_? Mr. Bartlett says it is 'a word used by writers of an inferior class, who do not seem to perceive that _ill_ is itself an adverb, without the termination _ly_,' and quotes Dr. Mosser, President of Brown University, as asking triumphantly, 'Why don't you say '_welly_?' I should like to have had Dr. Messer answer his own question. It would be truer to say that it was used by people who still remembered that _ill_ was an adjective, the shortened form of _evil_, out of which Shakespeare and the translators of the Bible ventured to make _evilly_. This slurred _evil_ is 'the dram of _eale_' in 'Hamlet.' I find, _illy_ in Warner. The objection to _illy_ is not an etymological one, but simply that it is contrary to good usage,--a very sufficient reason. _Ill_ as an adverb was at first a vulgarism, precisely like the rustic's when he says, 'I was treated _bad_.' May not the reason of this exceptional form be looked for in that tendency to dodge what is hard to pronounce, to which I have already alluded? If the letters were distinctly uttered, as they should be, it would take too much time to say _ill-ly_, _well-ly_, and it is to be observed that we have avoided _smally_[26] and _tally_ in the same way, though we add _ish_ to them without hesitation in _smallish_ and _tallish_. We have, to be sure, _dully_ and _fully_, but for the one we prefer _stupidly_, and the other (though this may have come from eliding the _y_ before _a_s) is giving way to _full_. The uneducated, whose utterance is slower, still make adverbs when they will by adding _like_ to all manner of adjectives. We have had _big_ charged upon us, because we use it where an Englishman would now use _great_. I fully admit that it were better to distinguish between them, allowing to _big_ a certain contemptuous quality; but as for authority, I want none better than that of Jeremy Taylor, who, in his noble sermon 'On the Return of Prayer,' speaks of 'Jesus, whose spirit was meek and gentle up to the greatness of the _biggest_ example.' As for our double negative, I shall waste no time in quoting instances of it, because it was once as universal in English as it still is in the neo-Latin languages, where it does not strike us as vulgar. I am not sure that the loss of it is not to be regretted. But surely I shall admit the vulgarity of slurring or altogether eliding certain terminal consonants? I admit that a clear and sharp-cut enunciation is one of the crowning charms and elegances of speech. Words so uttered are like coins fresh from the mint, compared with the worn and dingy drudges of long service,--I do not mean American coins, for those look less badly the more they lose of their original ugliness. No one is more painfully conscious than I of the contrast between the rifle-crack of an Englishman's _yes_ and _no_, and the wet-fuse drawl of the same monosyllables in the mouths of my countrymen. But I do not find the dropping of final consonants disagreeable in Allan Ramsay or Burns, nor do I believe that our literary ancestors were sensible of that inelegance in the fusing them together of which we are conscious. How many educated men pronounce the _t_ in _chestnut_? how many say _pentise_ for _penthouse_, as they should. When a Yankee skipper says that he is "boun' for Gloster" (not Gloucester, with the leave of the Universal Schoolmaster),[27] he but speaks like Chaucer or an old ballad-singer, though they would have pronounced it _boon_. This is one of the cases where the _d_ is surreptitious, and has been added in compliment to the verb _bind_, with which it has nothing to do. If we consider the root of the word (though of course I grant that every race has a right to do what it will with what is so peculiarly its own as its speech), the _d_ has no more right there than at the end of _gone_, where it is often put by children, who are our best guides to the sources of linguistic corruption, and the best teachers of its processes. Cromwell, minister of Henry VIII., writes _worle_ for world. Chapman has _wan_ for _wand_, and _lawn_ has rightfully displaced _laund_, though with no thought, I suspect, of etymology. Rogers tells us that Lady Bathurst sent him some letters written to William III. by Queen Mary, in which she addresses him as '_Dear Husban_.' The old form _expoun'_, which our farmers use, is more correct than the form with a barbarous _d_ tacked on which has taken its place. Of the kind opposite to this, like our _gownd_ for _gown_, and the London cockney's _wind_ for _wine_, I find _drownd_ for _drown_ in the 'Misfortunes of Arthur' (1584) and in Swift. And, by the way, whence came the long sound of wind which our poets still retain, and which survives in 'winding' a horn, a totally different word from 'winding' a kite-string? We say _behīnd_ and _hīnder_ (comparative) and yet to _hĭnder_. Shakespeare pronounced _kind_ _kĭnd_, or what becomes of his play on that word and _kin_ in 'Hamlet'? Nay, did he not even (shall I dare to hint it?) drop the final _d_ as the Yankee still does? John Lilly plays in the same way on _kindred_ and _kindness_.

But to come to some other ancient instances. Warner rhymes _bounds_ with _crowns_, _grounds_ with _towns_, _text_ with _sex_, _worst_ with _crust_, _interrupts_ with _cups_; Drayton, _defects_ with _sex_; Chapman, _amends_ with _cleanse_; Webster, _defects_ with _checks_; Ben Jonson, _minds_ with _combines_; Marston, _trust_ and _obsequious_, _clothes_ and _shows_; Dryden gives the same sound to _clothes_, and has also _minds_ with _designs_. Of course, I do not affirm that their ears may not have told them that these were imperfect rhymes (though I am by no means sure even of that), but they surely would never have tolerated any such had they suspected the least vulgarity in them. Prior has the rhyme _first_ and _trust_, but puts it into the mouth of a landlady. Swift has _stunted_ and _burnt_ it, an intentionally imperfect rhyme, no doubt, but which I cite as giving precisely the Yankee pronunciation of _burned_. Donne couples in unhallowed wedlock _after_ and _matter_, thus seeming to give to both the true Yankee sound; and it is not uncommon to find _after_ and _daughter_. Worse than all, in one of Dodsley's Old Plays we have _onions_ rhyming with _minions_,--I have tears in my eyes while I record it. And yet what is viler than the universal _Misses_ (_Mrs._) for _Mistress_? This was once a vulgarism, and in 'The Miseries of Inforced Marriage' the rhyme (printed as prose in Dodsley's Old Plays by Collier),

'To make my young _mistress_ Delighting in _kisses_,'

is put into the mouth of the clown. Our people say _Injun_ for _Indian_. The tendency to make this change where _i_ follows _d_ is common. The Italian _giorno_ and French _jour_ from _diurnus_ are familiar examples. And yet _Injun_ is one of those depravations which the taste challenges peremptorily, though it have the authority of Charles Cotton--who rhymes '_Indies_' with '_cringes_'--and four English lexicographers, beginning with Dr. Sheridan, bid us say _invidgeous_. Yet after all it is no worse than the debasement which all our terminations in _tion_ and _tience_ have undergone, which yet we hear with _resignashun_ and _payshunce_, though it might have aroused both _impat-i-ence_ and _in-dig-na-ti-on_ in Shakespeare's time. When George Herbert tells us that if the sermon be dull,

'God takes a text and preacheth patience,'

the prolongation of the word seems to convey some hint at the longanimity of the virtue. Consider what a poor curtal we have made of Ocean. There was something of his heave and expanse in _o-ce-an_, and Fletcher knew how to use it when he wrote so fine a verse as the second of these, the best deep-sea verse I know,--

'In desperate storms stem with a little rudder
The tumbling ruins of the oceän.'

Oceanus was not then wholly shorn of his divine proportions, and our modern _oshun_ sounds like the gush of small-beer in comparison. Some other contractions of ours have a vulgar air about them. _More 'n_ for _more than_, as one of the worst, may stand for a type of such. Yet our old dramatists are full of such obscurations (elisions they can hardly be called) of the _th_, making _whe'r_ of _whether_, _where_ of _whither_, _here_ of _hither_, _bro'r_ of _brother_, _smo'r_ of _smother_, _mo'r_ of _mother_, and so on. And dear Brer Rabbit, can I forget him? Indeed, it is this that explains the word _rare_ (which has Dryden's support), and which we say of meat where an Englishman would use _underdone_. I do not believe, with the dictionaries, that it had ever anything to do with the Icelandic _hrar_ (_raw_), as it plainly has not in _rareripe_, which means earlier ripe,--President Lincoln said of a precocious boy that 'he was a _rareripe_.' And I do not believe it, for this reason, that the earliest form of the word with us was, and the commoner now in the inland parts still is, so far as I can discover, _raredone_. Golding has 'egs reere-rosted,' which, whatever else it mean, cannot mean _raw_-roasted, I find _rather_ as a monosyllable in Donne, and still better, as giving the sound, rhyming with _fair_ in Warner. There is an epigram of Sir Thomas Browne in which the words _rather than_ make a monosyllable;--

'What furie is't to take Death's part
And rather than by Nature, die by Art!'

The contraction _more'n_ I find in the old play 'Fuimus Troes,' in a verse where the measure is so strongly accented as to leave it beyond doubt,--

'A golden crown whose heirs
More than half the world subdue.'

It may be, however, that the contraction is in 'th'orld.' It is unmistakable in the 'Second Maiden's Tragedy:'--

'It were but folly,
Dear soul, to boast of _more than_ I can perform.'

Is our _gin_ for _given_ more violent than _mar'l_ for _marvel_, which was once common, and which I find as late as Herrick? Nay, Herrick has _gin_ (spelling it _gen_), too, as do the Scotch, who agree with us likewise in preferring _chimly_ to _chimney_.