ceived; for three years after, in 1704, he returned to his "spelling," which, he observed, "however mean, concerned the benefit of millions of persons." He had a notion to "invent a universal language to excel all others, if he thought that people would be induced to use it."* Even the learned of our own times have indulged some of these philological reveries. One would hardly have suspected that Dr. FRANKLIN, whose genius was so wholly practical, contemplated to revolutionise the English alphabet : words were to be spelt by the sounds of their letters, which were to be regulated by six new characters, and certain changes in the vowels. He seems to have revived old Bullokar. PINKERTON has left us a ludicrous scheme of what he calls "an improved language." Our vowel terminations amount but to one fourth of the language; all substantives closing in hard consonants were to have a final vowel, and the consonant was to be omitted after the vowel. We were to acquire the Italian euphony by this presumed melody for our harsh terminations. In this disfigurement of the language, a quack would be a quaco, and that would be tha. Plurals were to terminate in a pens would be pena; papers, papera. He has very innocently printed the entire Vision of Mirza from the Spectator, on his own system; the ludicrous jargon at once annihilates itself. Not many years ago, JAMES ELPHINSTONE, a scholar, and a very injudicious one, performed an extraordinary experiment. He ventured to publish some volumes of a literary correspondence, on the plan of writing the words as they are pronounced. But this editor, being a Scotchman, had two sorts of Scotticisms to encounter The second work of our Phonographer is entitled "The New Art of Spelling, designed chiefly for Persons of Maturity, teaching them to Spell and Write Words by the Sound thereof, and to Sound and Read Words by the Sight thereof,rightly, neatly, and fashionably, &c., by J. Jones, M. D., 1704.” I give a specimen of his words as they are written and as they are pronounced— VISIBLE LETTERS. Mayor Dictionary Bought CUSTOMARY AND FASHIONABLY. Mair "All words," he observes, "were originally written as sounded, and all which have since altered their sounds did it for ease and pleasure's sake from the harder to the easier the harsher to the pleasanter sound." -in idiom and in sound. Notwithstanding the agreeable subjects of a literary correspondence, it is not probable that any one ever conquered a single perusal of pages, which tortured the eye, if they did not the understanding. We may smile at these repeated attempts of the learned English, in their inventions of alphabets, to establish the correspondence of pronunciation with orthography, and at their vowelly conceits to melodise our orthoepy. All these, however, demonstrate that our language has never been written as it ought to have been. All our writers have experienced this inconvenience. Considerable changes in spelling were introduced at various periods, by way of experiment; this liberty was used by the Elizabethan writers, for an improvement on the orthography of Gower and Chaucer. Since the days of Anne, we have further deviated, yet after all our efforts we are constrained to read words not as they are written, and to write different words with the same letters, which leaves them ambiguous. And now, no reform shall ever happen, short of one by "the omnipotence of parliament," which, the great luminary of law is pleased to affirm, “can do anything except making a man of woman." Customary errors are more tolerable than the perplexing innovations of the most perverse ingenuity.* The eye, bewildered in such uncouth pages as are here recorded, found the most capricious orthography in popular use always less perplexing than the attempt to write words according to their pronunciation, which every one regulated by the sounds familiar to his own ear, and usually to his own county. Even the dismemberment of words, omitting or changing letters, distracts attention; † and modern readers have often been deterred from The Grammar prefixed to Johnson's Dictionary, curiously illustrated by the notes and researches of modern editors, will furnish specimens of many of these abortive attempts. When we began to drop the letter K in such words as physic, music, public, a literary antiquary, who wrote about 1790, observed on this new fashion, that "forty years ago no school-boy had dared to have done this with impunity." These words in older English had even another superfluous letter, being spelt physicke, musicke, publicke. The modern mode, notwithstanding its prevalence, must be considered anomalous; for other words ending with the consonants ck have not been shorn of their final k. We do not write attac, ransac, bedec, nor bulloc, nor duc, nor good luc. The appearance of words deprived of their final letter, though identically the same in point of sound, produce a painful effect on the reader. Pegge furnishes a ludicrous instance. It consists of monosyllables in which the final and redundant k is not written,-" Dic gave Jac a kic when Jac gave Dic a knoc on the bac the study of our early writers by their unsettled orthography. Our later literary antiquaries have, therefore, with equal taste and sagacity, modernised their text, by printing the words as the writers, were they now living, would have transcribed them. Such have been the impracticable efforts to paint the voice to the eye, or to chain by syllables airy sounds. The imperfections for which such reforms were designed in great part still perplex us. Our written language still remains to the utter confusion of the eye and the ear of the baffled foreigner, who often discovers that what is written is not spoken, and what is spoken is not written. The orthography of some words leads to their false pronunciation. Hence originated that peculiar invention of our own, that odd-looking monster in philology, "a pronouncing dictionary," which offends our eyes by this unhappy attempt to write down sounds. They whose eyes have run over Sheridan, Walker, and other orthoepists, must often have smiled at their arbitrary disfigurements of the English language. These ludicrous attempts are after all inefficient, while they compel us to recollect, if the thing indeed be possible, a polysyllabic combination as barbarous as the language of the Cherokees. We may sympathise with the disconcerted foreigner who is a learner of the English language. All words ending in ugh must confound him for instance, though, through, and enough, alike written, are each differently pronounced; and should he give us bough rightly, he may be forgiven should he blunder at cough; if he escape in safety from though, the same wind will blow him out of thought. What can the foreigner hope when he discovers that good judges of their language pronounce words differently? A mere English scholar, who holds little intercourse with society, however familiar in his closet be his acquaintance with the words, and even their derivations, might fail in a material point, when using them in conversation or in a public speech. A list of names of places and of persons might be given, in which not a single syllable is pronounced of those that stand written. That a language should be written as it is spoken we see with a thic stic." If even such familiar words and simple monosyllables can distract our attention, though they have only lost a single and mute letter, how greatly more in words compounded, disguised by the mutilation of several letters. has been considered desirable by the most intelligent scholars. Some have laudably persevered in writing the past tense red, as a distinction from the present read, and anciently I have found it printed redde. Lord Byron has even retained the ancient mode in his Diary. By not distinguishing the tenses, an audible reader has often unwarily confused the times. G before I ungrammatical orthoepists declare is sounded hard, but so numerous are the exceptions, that the exceptions might equally be adopted for the rule. It is true that the pedantry of scholarship has put its sovereign veto against the practice of writing words as they are spoken, even could the orthoepy ever have been settled by an unquestioned standard. When it was proposed to omit the mute b in doubt and debt, it was objected that by this castration of a superfluous letter in the pronunciation, we should lose sight of their Latin original. The same circumstance occurred in the reform of the French orthography: it was objected to the innovators, that when they wrote tems, rejecting the p in temps, they wholly lost sight of the Latin original, tempus. Milton seems to have laid down certain principles of orthography, anxiously observed in his own editions, printed when the poet was blind. An orthography which would be more natural to an unlearned reader is rejected by the etymologist, whose pride and pomp exult in tracing the legitimacy of words to their primitives, and delight to write them as near as may be according to the analogy of languages. THE ANCIENT METRES IN MODERN VERSE. A STRONG predilection to reproduce the ancient metres in their vernacular poetry was prevalent among the scholars of Europe; but, what is not less remarkable, the attempt everywhere terminated in the same utter rejection by the popular ear. What occasioned this general propensity of the learned, and this general antipathy in the unlearned? These repeated attempts to restore the metrical system of the Greeks and the Romans would not only afford a classical common. ear, long exercised in the nice artifices of the ancient prosody, a gratification entirely denied to the uninitiated; but at bottom there was a deeper design-that of elevating an art which the scholar held to be degraded by the native but unlettered versifiers; and, as one of them honestly confessed, the true intent was to render the poetic art more difficult and less Had this metrical system been adopted, it would have established a privileged class. The thing was praticable; and, even in our own days, iambics and spondees, dactyls and tribrachs, charm a few classical ears by their torturous arrangement of words without rhythm and cadence.* Fortunately for all vernacular poetry, it was attempted too late among the people of modern Europe ever to be substituted for their native melody, their rhythm, the variety of their cadences, or the consonance of rhyme. With us the design of appropriating the ancient metres to our native verse was unquestionably borrowed from Italy, so long the model of our fashions and our literature. There it had early begun, but was neither admired nor imitated.† The nearly forgotten fantasy was again taken up by Claudio Tolommei, an eminent scholar, who composed an Italian poem with the Roman metres. More fortunate and profound than his neglected predecessors, Tolommei, in 1539, published his Versi e Regole della POESIA NUOVA―the very term afterwards adopted by the English critics--and promised hereafter to establish their propriety on principles deduced from philosophy and music. But before this code of "new poetry" appeared the practice had prevailed, for Tolommei illustrates "the rules" not only by his own verses, but by those of other writers, already seduced by this obsolete novelty. But what followed? Poets who hitherto had delighted by their euphony and their rhyme, were now ridiculed for the dissonance which they had so laboriously struck out. A literary war ensued! The champions for "the new poetry" were remarkable for their stoical indifference amid the loud outcries For a remarkable effusion of this ancient idolatry and classical superstition, see Quarterly Review, August 1834. The ancient poetry of the Greeks was composed for recitation. The people never read, for they had no books; they listened to their rhapsodists; and their practised ear could decide on the artificial construction of,verses regulated by quantity, and not by the latent delicacy and numerosity of which modern versification is susceptible. Quadrio, Storia e raggione d'ogni Poesia, i. 606. |