Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/304

288 himself condescends, at intervals, to practise the same work of supererogation—as where he carefully analyses, and distributes to each man his due, the welcome given by Hamlet to Horatio, Bernardo, and Marcellus. The eagerness, too, of his endeavours to find in his own country relics of Shakspeare's mother English, not extant in ours, is a little amusing; particularly when, among the words supposed to be effete and forgotten in England, is the adjective sheer: for he thus discourses: "We [Americans] say sheer ale, or sheer brandy, or sheer nonsense, or sheer anything. … We use it ['sheer'] in this way, and have so used it beyond the memory of the oldest living men; just as we say sheer impudence, or sheer stupidity. … Thus, we would say that one man committed an act out of sheer selfishness, but that another's was pure benevolence." So ends one paragraph, and the next Mr. White begins with, "Thus much for the benefit of English readers." We can only respond to this beneficium with a graceless "Thank'ee for nothing,"—or exclaim with Celia, "O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all whooping!" The word "right," too, in the sense of direct or immediate ("for I do see the cruel pangs of death right in thine eye," King John, V. 4), he is happy to say, survives in America,—as it does in England, though the compound "right away," which he adduces in evidence, and which he taunts us with sneering at, is, we acknowledge, peculiar to America. And hereupon, "right away" he tells us, that "the language of the best educated Americans of the northern states is more nearly that of Shakespeare's day, than that of the best born and bred English gentlemen who visit them; although the advantage on the score of utterance is generally on the side of the Englishmen" —the Americans being possibly fonder than their "overweening cousins" of going to Naples, as a certain Clown might infer. Again,—on Johnson's explanation of the word "pheese" ("I'll pheese you in faith," says Kit Sly), and on that of Gifford and Charles Knight, Mr. White says, "All wrong, as any 'Yankee' could tell the learned gentlemen. The word has survived here with many others which have died out in England, and are thence called