Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/300

 242 NOTES AND QUERIES. [i 2 s.ix.s H PT.24,io2i. for pronunciation, they want to know, for j accent, which is right. They know not the j overlord, usage, or where he has his seat of authority ; and how flexible are his laws. And they do not feel that what is called " vulgar "is often what is old. Mr. Walker, in his dictionary, did not. They do not con- sider curiously. They may have the mark of the ill-educated to be irritated by what seems new and strange, rather than there- with to be interested. Dictionaries, speakers of equal authority, poets, stress variously. Of less use, so far, are your collections of words " mispronounced." Many words like " ally " have been, or still are, balancing between the older accent further on in the word, and the newer, further back. Archbishop Trench suggest er, 1857, of the ' New English (Oxford) Dictionary ' noted, in 1855,* prestige as already so pro- nounced by some. It has taken long to tip back ; if it has tipped back at all. In America, of course, and unhappily, it has to prestige. And depot which, at that date, the same writer noted as lately having changed from depot has stayed so ; and has, by some in America, been further " anglicized " into deepott. Of course crowds of French dissyllables in English had not only in Chaucer but in " Elizabethan " writers always is meant, by that, writers of Elizabeth's later days, and of the days of the early Stuarts a stress on the last syllable ; and now have it on the first. Trench cites honour, sentence in Chaucer ; forest, captive, cruel in Spenser ; comrade, surface in Milton ; and uproar ; as noted further on. He states that the earlier accent in English is "as in French." But this, " with a difference," he should have added. For, there is no such heavy stress in French. And the English speakers, with Teutonic in- stinct, doubtless exaggerated the stress, whether placed on the word earlier or later. " Les Anglais mangent leurs gyllabes," remains true for their syllables left un- stressed. So, English readers will not make the name sound " as in French," when they read in ' Childe Harold ' (iii. 72) of The self -torturing sophist, wild Rousseau. or in Mangan : Though you find me, as I near my goal, Sentimentalising like Rousseau, O 1 I had a grand Byronian soul, Twenty golden years ago. Nor the French word, when, in Pope's Timon's Villa (Ep. iv.) : The rich buffet well-coloured serpents grace, And gaping Tritons spew to wash your face. Nor in Crabbe's 'Borough' (xx.), 'Ellen Orford ' : Lo ! that chateau, the western tower decay' d.* Shall you compensate ; or will you com- pensate, with " uneducated Scots " in- schwebende Betonung, " hovering accent," in English words, such as in Milton's " In his own image he Created thee, in the image of God Express." (' Paradise Lost,' vii. 526.) " In regions mild of calm and serene air." (' Comus,' 4.) >? " Such serene tidings moved such human smart." (' Mary and Gabriel,' by Rupert Brooke.) " With ripples of her perplexed shaken heart." (Ib.) And in the word divine. Perhaps, as when Ben Jonson says : " The divine secret that doth fly in clouds." (' Alchemist,' III. ii.) Certainly, in " And divine liquids come with odorous ooze." ( Keats' s ' Isabella.') And in " The herd went wandering o'er the divine mead." (Shelley's ' Homer's Mercury,' xvii.) The same poem has no doubt the fixed " Of earthly or divine from its recess." (Ib. Ixxvi.) Wordsworth, also, though commonly using the word thus fixed, has " The divine Milton." " And divine Art." And A. de Vere, ' St. Thomas of Canterbury,' I. ii. : " The divine burthen, and the weight from God." Though, in the same scene, " Worldly pomps, We said last night, are death to zeal divine." And Swinburne ' Atalanta in Calydon ' in one line : " And divine deeds and abstinence divine." with subtle contrast and balancing ; as in ' Lycidas ' : " Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more." or in Morris's ' Life and Death of Jason ' (iv. 75) : " Once more, and once more cast upon this land." or in the ' Paradise Lost ' passage with " image," just cited. But that word "dhine" is common, thus, hovering. In rece it verse, ' The Survival of the Fittest and Other Poems,' by J. C. Squire, 1916 : " And when the evidence appeared to prove The divine origin of Him who died."
 * ' English Past and Present,' 1st ed.
 * Here is no intent to ignore beautiful