rare virtue among his class, kindly introduced but few symbols among his fables which he published in London towards the close of the sixteenth century. Therefore, a specimen may be given in which some wandering stars of night, in the shape of accents, have been, it is trusted, discreetly omitted. The hous cok found a precios ston, whylst he turned the dunghil: saying, what! doo I find a thing so briht? But still the heart did need a language, and a certain Dr. Jones stept forward. This excellent scholar proposed with God's help to sweeten our tongue by writing Dixnary for Dictionary, with other like amendments which would from the beginning prevent all those ill habits of sounding amiss, which create such insufferable trouble to remedy them afterwards. To prevent this trouble, following the fashionable pronunciation of his time, he wrote poticary, obstropulous, sparrowgrass, chaw, lorum, and cubberd, thus annihilating the etymological diagnosis of the original words as completely as that of sciatica, palsy, dropsy, and proxy. Though the gh in plough and slaughter, and the h in white and what, are as much neglected as the monuments of our fathers in a churchyard, still they are monuments, and should not be light ly destroyed. In these matters the head followed the tail sufficiently already without the leading of the learned Jones. He, after scattering a few other suggestions such as hevvy, pleshure, côte, tuchy, sqware, blo, wel, dauter, and coff, retired from the stage, thinking these improvements enough for the present, and encouraged by a panegyric from a friend which represents him as the tamer of a wild orthography, and the suggestor of a clew to follow her into her most confused labyrinths. So Dr. Jones died, with the proud consciousness of leaving this world when he was summoned out of it, as one who had not lived in vain; and Bishop Wilkins, though with but faint hopes of seeing his practice generally prevail, succeeding him, wrote the Lord's Prayer thus: Yar Fâdher huitsh art in héven, halloed be dhyi nám, dhyi cingdym, &c. Such orthography would indeed have made our language "that precious deposit" which we wot of. Such surely was the English which Charles V. preferred for conversation with his horse. It But none of these rackers of orthography, as Holofernes calls them, came at all near to Mr. A. J. Ellis. The words of this gentleman were assuredly like those of Claudio in Much Ado about Nothing, a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes. Noting very justly, as so many had equally justly noted before him, that the darkest ciphers and most abstruse hieroglyphics are not better calculated to conceal the sentiments of those using them than our customary orthography to conceal true pronunciation, remembering the words of Murray, that the orthography of the English language is attended with much uncertainty and perplexity, but forgetful of the fate of those, his predecessors, and how impatient the ungrateful British public is of any change for the better, and that its ears are, to adopt the language of Demosthenes, orthographically diseased past cure, this gentleman rendered his name remarkable by the production of what he was pleased to describe as the Fonetik Nuz. His alphabet contained some two score characters, each with one and only one sound. was modelled on that of Lipsius, containing 286 characters. Each sound was supposed in Ellis's system, which, it is said, had been before offered to Webster by Dr. Franklin, to have its equivalent sign, each sign its equivalent and single sound. By this phonetic alphabet-relatively phonetic, for speaking generally all alphabets are phonetic which are not ideographic or pictorialthe writing of such diverse conceptions as "I saw the man whet the knife," and "I saw the man who ate the knife," would be identical; so of such single words as reign, rein, rain. To Ellis, ewe, whose vulgar pronunciation generally prevails, and aye, the respective sounds of which words are not produced by any of their letters separately or in combination, must have been a terrible eyesore. Nor could we have been well content with the economical use of a in father, fall, fatal. Whether he had his revenge in writing yowsitch for usage, in which no single letter of the original word remains, or whether this be a tale of a man delighting in his own conceits more than in the truth, it is certain that, esteeming the spelling of his day an absurd conventionality, he produced an 66 orthography of his own as little connected with it as a treatise on the Digamma with the sources of the Nile. What would a French Ellis have made out of his mayor, his mother, and his sea? his green, his glass, and his worms?-what of such a sentence as this: cinq cent sincères et simples capucins ceints de leurs saints coussins scindaient dans leurs seins, leurs seings et leurs cymbales qui donnaient une symphonie synchronique ?" or of that cacophony of the French officer, who, wishing a rope placed across the street to keep back the crowd eager to bask in the sunshine of the royal eyes, cried repeatedly, "qu'attend-on donc tant? que ne la tend-on donc tôt ?" What, if Ellis's system were adopted, would become of the nobility (orthographic) of the celebrated families of the Smijth and the Ffrench? Written in the heterotypic character, what would remain but the ignoble Smith and French? Owing to certain hidecus and mystic symbols with which this system was interlarded, a specimen of it cannot be here reproduced; the types of that new tongue which was pleasantly called by its promoters a rational object of the greatest importance to all members of the community, have long ago been melted down into serviceable capitals and italics, pica and nonpareil. The conflagration of ignorance was not extinguished by the waters of Phoneticism. That boon from heaven, that inestimable blessing was not made common, but reserved only for a chosen few, who, it may be, still practise it in congenial privacy. No unseen path ever opened among the hills, and Mr. Isaac Pitman, the coadjutor of Ellis, laid down his own life on the altar of phonetic truth in vain. Alas! whether it was that the country was not yet prepared to receive so exquisite a present, or that the subscriptions lagged a little, it was announced in the infancy of a journal devoted to its interests, that, in obedience to the strict injunctions of his physician, the editor regretted to inform his readers that he was obliged to intermit the publication of his journal till perhaps the close of the year. There is no list of subscriptions in this number, and the journal never appeared again. Somewhere in the limbo of the moon may be found that forthcoming number among good intentions unsuccessful on this earth. Lecturers in its interest de, spised, it is to be hoped, gold and silver, for many received nothing but a PrayerBook, roan gilt, in phonetic spelling, and the reward of their own conscience. Peas, as Punch said somewhat cruelly, peas 2 iz hashes! Such was the end of the modest proposal to the English nation to deface its orthographical escutcheon, to place the wise at the feet of the ignorant, and to make all its old learning comparatively useless. Its authors forgot, as their predecessors had forgotten, that words had become conventional signs, Chinese characters, less musical utterances than algebraical symbols, and that no educated person goes through the form of spelling when he reads. Such "silly affectation and unpardonable presumption," as it has been, perhaps, not too harshly called, was not that reform which Mr. Max Müller hopes for in our "unhistorical, unsystematic, unintelligible, unteachable, but by no means unamendable spelling." Although we have dore for door in a line of Gower, quoted by Ben Jonson in his grammar, the changes which have taken place in spelling have happily seldom been made on any phonetic system. Prove and move are still written thus, though retaining the sound of the French words from which they came. They have mostly arisen from considerations of etymology, from caprice, from desire of distinction, from affectation or from that lazy love of uniformity, to which we owe our modernized ancient authors. Though Bacon and Shakspeare, not to mention Gower and Chaucer, would be caviare to the general in their proper clothing, it is difficult to say that this change of ancient orthography does more good than harm. The printers, as has been seen, have also contributed their share to orthographical alterations, and the desire of familiarizing the unknown has not been without effect. No lapse of years can conquer the tendency to phonetic endeavor. A simplification of the system of Ellis translated a passage of Shakspeare thus: ¿Hwot! ¿iz de dje mor precezs dan de lark What would become 'of our glorious and inestimable privilege of speaking that tongue which Shakespeare or Shakspere or Shakspeare, or &c. spoke, if this sort of thing were to be allowed? The least objectionable plan was that of Mr. Bell, who, to show sound without destroying orthography, and teach the former while the eye was still accustomed to the latter, wrote debt, plough, &c. How he could have expressed cough is not clear. So this best laid scheme, like the rest, went agley, and Mr. Bell has remained, like Diogenes in Raphael's picture of Philosophy, alone. In our own time, Dr. Brewer, who has rendered himself so justly dear to the rising generation by his collection of such inquiries as "Why do we poke the fire?" and "What blackens the saucepans?" is perhaps the heresiarch of schismatic orthographers. In sober seriousness he suggests the following reforms-thiefs, calfs, loafs, wifes, negros, danse, flowerist, entranse, innocense, excede, changable, with very many more than a whole page of this magazine could contain in pearl types. It is but justice to say that he has supported all these eccentricities with which he would enrich the Queen's English and earn the heartfelt gratitude of every school-girl with very able arguments. He expects to be condemned heartily, odium orthographicum being only second, as might be expected, to odium theologicum, but follows the example of Demosthenes or Themistocles, or whoever it was that faced the many-headed beast with the words "Strike but hear!" Perhaps one of the most extraordinary proceedings after that of Ritson, who wrote flys, i, il, wel, and horsees, was that of Pinkerton, who may be surnamed the consonant hater. He, thinking English was defective in music, owing to the infrequency of vowel endings, on comparing it with the Greek, set about briskly to some reformation. All plural s's he turned at once into a's, an Icelandic plural, and thus consonant to the genius of our tongue, so dogs became dega. Next the radical s, an innocent letter which he seems to have regarded with inveterate hatred, was where possible converted into z, as azz; thus he substituted the melodious buzz of the bee for the harsh hissing of the serpent. O, a fine and rare close, was introduced to impart sublimity to the period, thus cate for cat. He, quoth Pinkerton, who would hesitate to write tric or coc need never attend a concert or look at a picture. The general effect of this permutation its proposer himself allowed might be at first astonishing, but maintained that in half a century it would become not only familiar but elegant. "Luckilizzime," observed a witty fellow who had liberally caricatured the system, "this propozalio of the abzurdizzimo Pinkertonio was noto adoptado by anybodyino whateverano!" Then the ingenious author angrily observed that all things in nature might be ridiculed by the feeble faculties of sciolists employed on unusual objects, and quoted Montesquieu, who is ungallant enough to say that women are the supreme judges of the absurd, owing to the general imbecility of their understandings. He might have earned the praise of posterity, had he not in all innocence printed the Vision of Mirza in his own tongue. It survives him bound up in his book, a sempiternal scarecrow! It will probably by this time be apparent to the ingenuous reader that "not to know how to spell" is not so great a disgrace as it is usually supposed to be. Let him try any of his most learned friends with Massachusetts, Mississippi, or Pennsylvania-with the sounds expressed by those excellent masquerades, yacht and phthisis-with liquefy and rarify-and he will find with sorrow or with satisfaction that humanity is imperfect. Monographic riddles are inherent in the nature of our language, and men do not conceive of its difficulties as they ought. They enter the portals of spelling, that labyrinth of infinite complexities, with insufficient reverence. As Archbishop Laud is reported to have gracefully observed in the Star Chamber, alluding to the careless behavior of Christians in Church, "they enter it as a tinker and his bitch the ale house." Cacography is like the seven deadly sins; men commit both every day without being aware of it. Universal disfranchisement would be the result of making good spelling the qualification of a voter. Orthography is the least satisfactory point of English grammar, with the exception perhaps of orthoepy. In no part of it are there more anomalies. This indeed might be expected in an irregular and fortuitous agglutination of two irregularities, the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman French. Our language is a Joseph's coat of many colors, a wall in which many different stones are bound together. Our alphabet is notoriously redundant in k and x, and defective in sounds of sh, ng, &c. The number of different combinations of letters producing one sound is only to be compared with that of the different sounds arising from the same combination of letters. The indefatigable Ellis is said to have discovered 6000 different ways of spelling scissors, e. g. schizzers, scissaughs, cizers, and so forth. For this wide field of possibility of error, this appendix to the curse of Babel, candidates for the civil and military service, those youthful and unskilled laborers in the vineyard of English philology, are no doubt devoutly thankful. And what shall be said of the unfortunate foreigner who dares attempt our tongue, and finds on the threshold that we speak what we do not write, and write what we do not speak? How will he conquer those ugly-headed monsters, though, tough, &c., which conceal like devilish and complex masks the innocent and simple tho and tuff, &c.? We have heard of a Spaniard who received, for his first lesson in English spelling and pronunciation, the mnemonic lines— Though the tough cough and hiccough plough me through, O'er life's dark lough I still my way pursue. He, feeling his native pride wounded, and his natural love of congruity outraged by such an assemblage of contradictions, quitted his master in disgust, and pursued his way no farther into the penetralia of our language. The trusting confidence of our children is well shown by their not accusing us of the basest fraud when we introduce them to these and the like peculiarities of our speech. Many celebrated persons, without entering into an orthographical crusade and revolutionizing the English spelling, like James Elphinstone, a man of considerable learning-who commenced a treatise on that subject thus: "To dhoze hoo pozes dhe large work, a succinct vew of Inglish orthoggaphy may be az plezing, az to odders indispensabel"-have nevertheless in a quiet way entered their protest against the fashion of their time. Milton wrote sovran, for instance, therefor, highth, in which last he was followed by Landor, who also wrote Aristotles on analogy of Empedocles, which is rarely, except in a young ladies' finishing school, pronounced Empedocle, though he hesitated to write Brute or Lucrece on the analogy of Terence, nor on the analogy of Pliny did he venture to speak of Marius by that name for which Byron confesses his preferential passion. Tennyson has adopted. plow. The timid Cowper was bold enough to write Greecian in his translation of Homer, after the fashion of Greece. Lardner wrote clandestin, famin (in words of this kind the final e seems not only useless but injurious), persue, sais, præface. A sample of Mitford's peculiarities is iland, endevor. He considered the 's' in the former word, what indeed it is, a graft of ignorance. Hare, lately followed by Furnival, held it so much of a baseness to spell fashionably, that he roundly abused such pot-bellied words. as spelled for spelt in the preterites of weak verbs, and gave us preacht, &c., with such genitive plurals as geniuses, and threw into the bargain invey and atchieve. He also maintained that mute 'e' should be expunged when not softening a preceding consonant, or lengthening a preceding vowel. Byron finding it impossible to determine but from the context, whether "read" be past or present, wrote redde, though he might have written red like led, there being little fear of its being confounded with the color. Thirlwall inveighed against our established system, if the result of custom and accident may be called system, as a mass of anomalies, the growth of ignorance and chance, equally repugnant to good taste and common sense. But notwithstanding the good bishop's tirades, the British public never, never will be slaves, even to an Academy. They cling to their old spelling with an impulsion proportioned to its inconvenience, and are as jealous of any encroachment on their prescriptive domain as of a trespass on their right in the public parks. We know what would become of English loyalty if her most Gracious Majesty were to take it into her royal head to close St. James'. Tyrwhitt, aware of this, contented himself with but few varieties, such as rime, a spelling which derivation, analogy, and ancient use alike support, and coud, which being obviously derived from can adds in its present state to the unnecessary anomalies in our language. The obtaining orthography arose out of uniformity probably with would from will and should from shall, and even in these words the '1' has unfortunately long ceased to be pronounced. With regard to rime, it were perhaps better written ryme to distinguish it from hoar-frost. The Elizabethan impurity of the 'h' has been traced to Daniel. It is never found in Milton or Shakspeare. It arose most likely from the notion that the word was connected with rhythm. The learned Trench in his English Past and Present, 1868, curiously enough discards "y" in ryme as a modern mis-spelling. The unsettled nature of our language has made its variations much more remarkable than those in other countries. Petrarch is still understood fairly by the modern Italian, but the modern Englishman can bring up little from the well of English undefiled without a glossarial bucket. Lest he should fall into the same evil plight with Spenser, Swift was sanguine enough to propose a scheme to the Earl of Oxford for curbing any further variations in orthography; but that, as we have seen, was a work beyond the King and his Ministers. The son of the Prince of Wales may not now "chaste" his schoolmaster as Robert the Devil effectually "chasted" his with a long dagger, when the unlucky pedant suggested that the spelling of Robert was exceptional; and in that case we have no ground to suppose that the "Devil's" spelling ultimately prevailed. Cæsar was a greater than he, and yet could not introduce a word; Claudian also, and yet could not introduce a letter. Kings and scholars must alike succumb to the tyranny of custom, and of that tyrant women chiefly are the executive and the body-guard. Their love of variety has probably produced as many new spellings as their love of eloquence has begotten new words. What are the dry rules of etymology to them when the usual spelling offends the delicacy of their ear? We have heard of a lady at a Spelling Bee-at present a silly, and so very popular entertainment-a pretty young lady who spelt myrrh thus: murr. What could be more simple, more novel, more ingenious? At least three-fourths of the male portion of the audience went away with the secret conviction that, although the dry little old gentleman who presided as referee, and a big dictionary to boot, were adverse to the candidate, the pretty young lady had a great deal which might be said on her side, and that if the word was not by some prejudiced people spelt as she had elected to spell it, it ought decidedly in future to be spelt so. The graceful appearance of our written language is indeed mainly owing to our women. These are at the head of what Chesterfield called the polite as opposed to the pedantic orthography. In the former they rule supreme. Learning here is rather disadvantageous than otherwise; it curbs the freedom of their imagination. Sit non doctissima conjux, says Martial-who might have rested well content in our island home. Who but a woman first dared to spell cap-à-pie apple-pie, or farsed-meat forced-meat? Would any man have enriched her favo rite ornament with four changes of costume, as riband, ribon, ribbon, ribband! Who but one of these eminent rebe first wrote exiccate, or introduced tha arbitrary but interesting diversity be tween laggard and braggart? To whom are we indebted for the perihelion of those capricious stars-kicksey-wicksey, welsh-rabbit, cuddle, poppet, higgledy-piggle, and tootsicums, or the aphelion of foupe, conjobble, warhable, smegmatick, screable, ablaqueation, moble, hamble, drumble, nubble, which it may well be Johnson was barbarous enough to forge himself, in jealous rivalry, in order to spite the sex; but his efforts were, as they deserved to be, quite unavailing? No one, however, of mortals is happy on all sides. Our fair reformers have sometimes suffered inconvenience from their auricular orthography. Instances have been quoted of a lady writing to a gentleman to inquire after his health in such bold eccentricity of spelling as excited suspicion of an assignation in the breast of that gentleman's wife; of another who exercised her right and privileges so capriciously in the composition of a domestic receipt that a whole family were nearly poisoned by partaking of the ingredients of what was entitled a new soup, but which in ordinary orthography would have been a new soap. |