Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/100

76 me of a probationer's flight of oratory when he called statuary "the dumb dialect of cheeseld eloquence."

The old game of Scots and English, once so popular with boys on this side the Border, anticipated those movements which are giving such prominence in high politics to the problems of race. But it has a still deeper significance. The true inwardness of the Union of 1707, and the work it has done for good or ill, have still to be adequately told. Suffice it meanwhile to fight again the old battle on its kindly but not unprofitable side, the differences of tone and accent, of diction and idiom, which distinguish natives benorth the Tweed from their southern compatriots. If Mr. Chamberlain was right in facetiously describing Scotland as having annexed England, it is all the other way where language is concerned. Our northern authors of the eighteenth century wrote under an ever-present dread that some Scoticism, as they called it, should bewray them. Burns, Scotissimus Scotorum, in playing the part of Stevenson's "sedulous ape," gave his days and nights, not to Addison alone, but to all the best models in contemporary English. The process has spread apace since his day. The youthful Scot not only mouths the latest coster slang, but condescends even to such ubiquitous English solecisms as "like I do," and the book "lays on the table." All through the seventeenth century Scotsmen wrote lay and lays for lie and lies, but they pronounced the -ay long i. In time the pronunciation changed to rhyme with "day," but the spelling remained the same. This seems to be the real source of "lays" for "lies!" To go lower still, the Glasgow street urchin used to hawk his "Vestar, a penny a box!"

Though the Scottish language lingers now only as a decadent vernacular, there was a time when it was cultivated as literature. For more than a century after the age of Chaucer, when there was scarce even a third-rate poet to be found south of Tweed, Scotland was the Muses' haunt. Strange to say, however, not till near the close of the fifteenth century was the language ever spoken of as anything but the "Inglis tongue." It was Gavin Douglas that first knew the "Scottis speech" as a generic term,