Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 3.djvu/21

 9 th S. III. JAN. 7, '99.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

15

rimes soot with root, but we cannot be sure of the pronunciation of one so lax in hi rimes. For aught we can say he may hav sounded the doubled vowel of soot as u in bu or oo in foot, for the latter pronunciation is a least a hundred years old.* No one to'-daj regards Walker's precept ; foot and put arc the only perfect rimes for soot, matching it further in having vulgar pronunciation riming with but. F. ADAMS.

In my early recollection soot was pro nounced to rime with cut about as often a with/oo*. But J. S. is wrong in saying tha fifty years ago it was always made to rime with cut. 'The Ancient Mariner' was pub lished, if I mistake not, before the end of lasi century :

And every tongue through utter drought

Was withered at the root : We could not speak 110 more than if We had been choked with soot.

C. B. MOUNT.

In the dialect of North Lincolnshire soot is pronounced so as to rime with boot. That was the form I used as a child, but those whc had the care of my education corrected me, saying sut (like unto cut) was the correct pro- nunciation. This took place between fifty and sixty years ago. In or about 1852 I observed that soot (like boot) was coming into use among young people, but many of the old folk adhered to sut. Now our dialectic pronunciation seems to have become nearly universal. EDWARD PEACOCK.

Tom Hood's 'The Sweep's Complaint' has : Why isn't the mouths of muffin-men compell'd to

he equally shut ?

Why, because Parliament members eat muffins, but they never eat no sut [sic].

If one might draw an inference from dialect pronunciation, it would be that in Hood's day soot was improperly made to rhyme with shut. The course of refinement in its ordinary trend would turn soot into sut, not sut into soot.

ARTHUR MAYALL.

Fifty years ago, as your correspondent avers, soot was made to rhyme with cut, but did it ever become customary to rhyme it with foot ? I do not think you can round the vowels in foot so that they may bear a kindred sound to that which we have in the word loot. Arid yet soot would rhyme with the latter perfectly. I can quite understand, however, that modernity would scarcely stickle at taking away the rotundity of the

(my copy dated 1805), s.v.
 * See, for instance, Chambaud's ' Engl.-Fr. Diet.'

sound common to this word in order to give it colloquial similarity to foot. In the North soot pronounced like loot is everywhere notice- able among the better classes, but among working classes the tendency is to give the word a short sound, as sut. Yet there are to be found old people who cling to this latter way, in spite of usage.

JAMES C. RENWICK. Winlaton, co. Durham,

VANITY FAIR (9 th S. ii. 29). With regard to ASTARTE'S query whether there is any mention of this popular phrase, immortalized by Thackeray, earlier than 'The Pilgrim's Pro- gress ' (1678), has it never been pointed out that Chaucer, towards the close of book v. of ' Troilus and Creseide,' seems clearly to allude thereto, unless, indeed, it be supposed that he was father to it? The lines I refer to, which I wrote down years ago on a fly-leaf of my copy of " a Novel without a Hero," are as follows :

young fresh folkes, he or she,

In which that love upgroweth with your age,

Repaireth home from worldly Vanite,

And of your hertes up casteth the visage,

To thilke God that alter His image

You made, and thinketh all nis but a Faire,

This world that passeth sone, as floures faire.

The italics are mine. I can sympathize with Charles Kingsley when, in a letter to his wife n 1850, he says :

"I can read nothing but ' Vanity Fair' over and over again, which fills me with delight, wonder, and lumility. I would rather have drawn Rawdon Crawley than all the folks I ever drew."

I remember that the late Archbishop of

anterbury (Dr. E. W. Benson), when nead

master at Wellington, told us boys of the

sixth form in class one morning that he had


 * aken up the book recently and found it so

"ascinating that he would go on reading it of

i morning whenever he had a spare half-hour

)efore getting up, the rest of his time being

,00 busily occupied. H. E. M.

St. Petersburg.

JOHN OXENBRIDGE (9 th S. ii. 467). Consult he 'Diet. Nat. Biog.,' xliii. 7, and notes hereon in ' N. & Q.,' 8 th S. viii. 203. See also N. & Q.,' 3 rd S. i. 141, 322, 361. Clement Dxenbridge, Esq., was in the Navy Prize )ffice, London, 1654. W. C. B.

PRIME MINISTER (8 th S. x. 357, 438 ; xi. 69, 51, 510 ; xii. 55, 431; 9 th S. ii. 99). Vanbrugh, ear the close of the seventeenth century, em- Joyed the term "First Minister," showing ow the idea of a premiership was coming nto vogue. In ' The Provok'd Wife,' which as produced in the spring of 1697, Mr