Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/448

 366 NOTES AND QUERIES. [HS.IX.NOV.M.M. of property I hope he will not be offended I have not left him more." To his son-in- j law John Rowntree a similar sum. The will is sealed with a seal representing a scroll j or roll wound round a rod with the motto ; "A Deo lux." Will proved Feb. 14, 1797.1 Peckitt died on Oct. 14, 1795, and an | obituary notice appeared in The York Chronicle of the following day, which has been reprinted by Hargrove in his * History of York,' vol. ii., p. 71 n. He was buried in the chancel of St. Martin-cum-Gregory, Micklegate. His widow, who survived him thirty-one years and who had helped him in his work, erected a window in the north aisle to his memory, which represents a large funeral urn with the following in- scription beneath : " Sacred to the memory of William Peckitt of this City, Glass- Painter and Stainer, who died 14th Oct., 1795, aged 64, and whose remains are deposited in the chancel. He was a most affectionate husband, Tender Parent, and j Pious Christian. This window was designed j and executed by his afflicted widow, 1796." ! The sentence " he was a most affectionate husband," &c., was either a stock phrase of the period or was copied direct from his obituary notice, as the two are practically identical. Mrs. Peckitt died on Jan. 11, 1826, and Harriot Peckitt died at the venerable age of 90 in 1866. A letter from her appeared in The Gentleman's Magazine for May, 1817, p. 391, stating that she considered " that much injustice has been done to my Father's memory in the Rev. Jas. Dallaway's ' Ob- servations on English Architecture,' " and | taking the author of that unreliable publi- cation to task for his many misstatements and inaccuracies. J OHN A> KNOWLES. (To be continued.) its pronunciation was invented by people with defective gullets. A century pre- ceding, Swift (in his 1712 ' Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining [i.e., fixing] the English Tongue') blamed " the poets from the time of the Resto'ra- tion " but did not Milton himself write 'd, 'n, V, and tti ? which (though Milton printed "flow'ry" and"edg'd") Professor Saintsbury fancies that Milton did not so pronounce ; yet did not the present Poot Laureate write, with intent of baser sound, not only "flow 'ry " but "fain" for " fallen," in his * Demeter ' ? blamed the poets for " that barbarous custom of abbreviating words," forming, so Milton himself main- tained, " such harsh inharmonious sounds as none but a northern ear would endure. . . . This perpetual disposition to shorten our words by retrenching the vowels,* is nothing else but a tendency to lapse into the barbarity of those northern nations from whom we are descended. "f Milton, in the seventeenth century, urged that English " speech ... be fashioned to a distinct and clear pronunciation, as near as may be to the Italian, especially in the vowels " : Spenserian vowels that elope with ease And float along like birds o'er summer seas, j The cause that so lamentably the pronun- ciation is otherwise, the great English artist Milton found in the fact that " we Englishmen being far northerly do not PASSING STRESS. (See 12 S. ix. 241, 263, 283, 303, 325, 348.) ENGLISH, so to repeat, has long been hardening 01 stiffening to the generally early syllable accenting. A hundred years ago Madame de Stae'l held, that, not- withstanding French self-satisfaction in la clarte frangaise, English was no less clear in expression* ; but she held that so great a lover of his native tongue, thought that " in wealth, good sense, closeness of struc- ture, no other language now spoken deserves to be compared with English." (1 588) notes, what" Elizabethan " poets of course exemplified : remuneration " makes a couple of good dactils " ; contribution, " a good spondeiis and a good dactil " ; recapitulation, " two dactils, and a syllable overplus." In this, anyway, Keats, among moderns, going back to older poets, had right instinct : " Echo into ob-li-vi-on, he said." " It feels E-ly-si-an, how rich to me." (' Endymion.') It was Shakespeare's way : I hate him for he is a Chris-ti-an " (' M. of V.,' I. iii. 42). And Ben Jonson's : " As whether a Chris-ti-an may hawk or hunt " (' Alchemist,' III. ii.). t Then tulerunt Nos nequiores ; for, hear the German (of which Swift thought), in Compliment, Mineral, Mantel, Ocean, Omnibus, Jason, Satan, and the words ending -tion ; and then the English approachings to complement, miriral, manVl, osh'n, omn'bus, Jas'n, SaVn, 'shn. As Aubrey de Vere said, in effect : you may say hist'ry, mem'ry ; but they are bad English, because they are barbarously-inclined speech. J Keats, ' Epistle to Cowden Clarke.'
 * The German Grimm, not long after her day,
 * Puttenham's ' Arte of English Poesie '