Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/85

Rh imitation, the vernacular lends itself naturally to local environment in choice of words, significant content, idioms, tone and accent—everything, in short, which gives to style its colour and individuality. Scotland, from the more archaic character of its development, and from the fact that the whole nation early found its native speech shouldered out of general literature, presents a specially rich field for the study of dialectic growth.

While education and intercourse are between them killing out the vernacular, and writers for striking effects have to resort to Yankee or coster slang, or even sheer Kiplingesque audacity in diction, decadence can never apply to the classic Scottish speech. As long as we have Barbour, Blind Harry, Henryson, Douglas, Dunbar, Lindsay, their diction can be studied like that of Chaucer, Langland and Spenser. But, alongside of this, there has always existed a vernacular with a character and contents of its own. It lives quite independently of literary production, but pines away before the breath of education and its fashions. It was as well that Ramsay, Burns, and Fergusson were but little versed in classical Scots, for they could no more have kept it alive than could Elizabethans the archaisms of Chaucer and Spenser. What they did was to have the courage to admit so much of the vernacular into literary diction, and this is now the true strength of their style. But it is with Barbour, Wynton, and the Burgh Laws with which the vernacular is most in touch. From these one might cull many expressions that are only now ceasing to be "household words." Thus Barbour describes the good Earl James of Douglas as "a black-a-vised man that wlispyt sum daill, but that set him richt weill." In "Peebles to the Play," when the cadger has tumbled in the mire off his horse,—

Henry Morley ("Shorter English Poems") glosses this as "vexed him," in defiance of the context. After the disaster of Methven, when Bruce and he were "dreand in the Month (Mount, i. e. the Grampians) thair pyne;" and "gret defaut of mete had thai,"