such scattered and remote villages as have not yet been reached by the ravages of the schoolmaster, or the inroads of the railway.

What has been just now said of our provincial English, namely, that it is often old English rather than bad English, is not less true of many so-called Americanisms.* There are parts of America where ‘het' is still the participle of 'to heat;' if our Authorized Version had not been meddled with, we should so read it at Dan. iii. 19 to this day; where 'holp' still survives as the perfect of 'to help;' 'pled' (as in Spenser) of 'to plead.' Longfellow uses 'dove' as the perfect of 'to dive;' nor is this a poetical license, for I lately met the same in a well-written book of American prose.

The dialects then are worthy of respectful attention -and if in their grammar, so in their vocabulary no less. If the sage or the scholar were required to invent a word which should designate the slight meal claimed in some of our southern counties by the labourer before he begins his mowing in the early morning, they might be sorely perplexed to do it. The Dorsetshire labourer, who demands his 'dewbit,' has solved the difficulty. In the same dialect they express in a single word that a house has a northern aspect; it is 'backsunned.' You have marked the lighting of the sky just above the horizon when clouds are about to break up and disappear. Whatever name you gave it you would hardly improve on that of the 'weather-gleam,' which in some of our dialects it bears. And this is what we find con

* See Bartlett, Dictionary of Americanisms, passim.

V.

The Richness of Dialects.

205

tinually, namely, that the true art of word-making, which is hidden from the wise and learned of this world, is revealed to the husbandman, the mechanic, the child. Spoken as the dialects are by the actual cultivators of the soil, they will often be inconceivably rich in words having to do with the processes of husbandry; thus ripe corn blown about, or beaten down by rain or hail, may in East Anglia be said either to be 'baffled,' or 'nickled,' or 'snaffled,' or 'shuckled,' or 'wilted,'* each of these words having its own shade of meaning. Spoken by those who are in constant and close contact with external nature, the dialects will often possess a far richer and more varied nomenclature to set forth the various and changing features of this than the literary language itself. Max Müller has said in a passage of singular eloquence on the subject of 'dialectical regeneration,' and of dialects as the true feeders of a language, 'We can hardly form an idea of the unbounded resources of dialects. When literary languages have stereotyped one general term, these dialects will supply fifty, each with its own special shade of meaning. If new combinations of thought are evolved in the progress of society, dialects will readily supply the required names from the store of their so-called superfluous words.' Thus a brook, a streamlet, a rivulet are all very well, but what discriminating power

* See Nall, Dialect of East Anglia, s. vv. 'To wilt,' provincial with us, is not so in America (Marsh, Lectures, 1860, p. 668).

+ On the Science of Language, Ist part, p. 60.

Compare Heyse, System der Sprachwissenschaft, p. 229.

do they possess as compared with a 'beck,' a 'burn,' a 'gill,' a 'force,' North-country words, with each a special signification of its own?

Words from the local dialects are continually slipping into the land's language. 'Poney,' a northern word, has crept into English during the last century; 'gruesome,' which has always lived in Scotland, is creeping back into English, being used by Browning; and with it not a few other words from the same quarter, as ‘blink,' 'canny,' 'douce,' 'daft,' 'feckless,' ' eerie,' 'foregather,' 'glamour,' 'gloaming,' 'glower,' 'uncanny,' all excellent in their kind. Wordsworth has given allowance to 'force,' which I just now cited as the North-country name for a waterfall; and, if my memory do not err, to 'beck,' and 'burn' as well.* 'Clever' is an excellent example of a low-born word which almost without observation has passed into general allowance. Sir Thomas Browne noted it two centuries ago as an East Anglian provincialism, and Ray as dialectic. Johnson protests against it as 'a low word,

*What use Luther made of the popular language in his translation of the Bible he has himself told us, and here is one secret of its epoch-marking character. These are his words: 'Man muss nicht die Buchstaben in der lateinischen Sprache fragen, wie man soll deutsche reden; sondern man muss die Mutter im Hause, die Kinder auf den Gassen, den gemeinen Mann auf dem Markte darum fragen, und denselben auf das Maul sehen, wie sie reden.' Montaigne, who owes not a little of his reputation to his wonderful style, pleads guilty to the charge brought in his lifetime against him, that he employed not a few words and idioms which, till he gave them a wider circulation, belonged to his native Gascony alone. Goethe too has given general currency to words not a few, which were only provincial before him.

V.

Dialects yield us new Words.

207

scarcely ever used but in burlesque or conversation.' The facts of the case do not quite bear his statement out, but there can be no doubt that it is a parvenu, which has little by little been struggling up to the position which it has now obtained.* 'Fun' too, a word not to be found in our earlier Dictionaries, was 'a low cant word' in Johnson's time and in his estimation.

So much has been done in this matter, the language has been so largely reinforced, so manifestly enriched by words which either it has received back after a longer or shorter absence, or which in later days it has derived from the dialects and enlisted for the first time, as to afford abundant encouragement for attempting much more in the same direction. But these suggestions must for the present suffice. for my lecture which follows the other half of a subject which is very far from being half exhausted.

I reserve

* Nisard (Curiosités de l'Étymol. Franç. p. 90): Les patois sont à la fois l'asile où s'est réfugiée en partie l'ancienne langue française et le dépôt où se gardent les éléments de la nouvelle.

LECTURE VI.

DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. (CONTINUED.)

WHA

THAT in my last preceding lecture has been said must suffice in respect of the words, and the character of the words, which we have lost or let go. Of these, indeed, if a language, as it travels onwards, loses some, it also acquires others, and probably many more than it loses; they are leaves on the tree of language, of which if some fall away, a new succession takes their place. But it is not so, as I already observed, with the forms or powers of a language, that is, with the various inflections, moods, duplicate or triplicate formation of tenses. These the speakers of a language come gradually to perceive that they can do without, and therefore cease to employ; seeking to suppress grammatical intri cacies, and to obtain grammatical simplicity and, so far as possible, a pervading uniformity, sometimes even at the cost of letting go what had real worth, and contributed to the more lively, if not to the clearer, setting forth of the inner thought or feeling of the mind.* Here there is only loss, with no com

* It has been well said, 'There is nothing more certain than this, that the earlier we can trace back any one language, the