NOTES.

The foregoing Tract is one of great interest, not only on account of its intrinsic merit, but also for the racy style of writing adopted by its author. We find him continually garnishing his language with such idiomatic and colloquial expressions as the following:—“Quhae’s sillie braine will reache no farther then the compas of their cap” (page 2); and again, “but will not presume to judge farther then the compasse of my awn cap” (p. 20). He observes of the printers and writers of his age that they care “for noe more arte then may win the pennie” (p. 2), and on the same page he says, “quhiles I stack in this claye,” which appears to be equivalent to our term “stuck in the mud.” At p. 3 he says, “and it wer but a clod;” at p. 14, “neither daer I, with al the oares of reason, row against so strang a tyde;” and again, on p. 18, we find reason under another aspect, thus, “noe man I trow can denye that ever suked the paepes of reason.”

It seems that the expression, Queen’s English, is by no means of modern date, as we have it as the king’s language at p. 2.

Hume laments, in his Dedication, the uncertainty of the orthography prevailing at the time he writes, and yet we find him spelling words several different ways, even within the compass of a single sentence, without being able to lay the blame upon the printers; thus we find him writing judgement on p. 11, judge p. 8, and judg p. 33, but juge p. 18; and there are numberless other instances that it would be tedious to enumerate. Again, the author uses a mixture of Scotch and English, so we have sometimes ane and sometimes one; nae on page 1 and noe on p. 2; mare and mast, and more and most, even in the same sentence (p. 30); and two is spelt in three different ways, tuae, tuo, and tuoe.

Our author’s stay in England appears to have drawn his attention to the differences between the two languages of Scotland and England, which he distinguishes as North and South. He certainly shows, in some instances, the greater correctness of the Scotch with regard to the spelling of words derived from the Latin; as, retine instead of retain, corage instead of courage, etc. (p. 20), in which words the redundant letters that we Southerners have introduced are thrown out. He is, however, by no means partial, and gives us praise when he thinks we deserve it.

Page 9. The arguments in favour of the sound given by the English Universities to the Latin i are curious: it is stated to have its value in the Greek ει; but the author seems to have been in error as to the English sounding mihi and tibi alike, or our pronunciation must have changed since his time.

P. 10. The author speaks of the letter y as being used by the South for the sound now symbolized by i with a final e following the succeeding consonant, as will with an i, and wile with a y in place of the i and final e; thus in the same way he spells write, wryt.

P. 11 (7). He gives food, good, blood, as examples of the same sound, thus inferring that the English pronounced the two latter so as to rhyme with food.

P. 11 (8). He objects to the use of w for u in the diphthongal sound of ou, and therefore spells how, now, etc., hou, nou.

P. 11 (10). It is difficult here to see what the pronunciation of buu would be, which the author gives as the sound of bow (to bow). Probably the sound he meant would be better represented by boo.

P. 13 (12). The author here recommends the distinction both of sound and symbol of j and v as consonants, and i and u as vowels, and proposes that we should call j jod or je, and v vau or ve, and not single u, “as now they doe” (p. 16), and w he would call wau or we, and moreover he places them in his alphabet on the same page. If this proposal was originally his own, it is curious that the name ve should have been adopted, though not the we for w. Ben Jonson points out the double power of i and v as both consonant and vowel, but he does not attempt to make them into separate letters as Hume does.

P. 15 (12). He gives as an anomaly of the South that while the d is inserted before g in hedge, bridge, etc., it is omitted in age, suage, etc. He does not see that the short vowel requires a double consonant to prevent it from being pronounced long.

P. 21 (6). He disputes the possibility of a final e, separated from a preceding vowel by a consonant, having any effect whatever in altering the sound of the preceding vowel, and recommends the use of a diphthong to express the sound required; as, hoep for hope, fier for fire, bied for bide, befoer for before, maed for made, etc. He uniformly throughout follows this rule.

P. 22 (5). Hume here accents difficultie on the antepenultimate instead of the first syllable.

P. 23 (7). He puts down outrage as an instance of two distinct words joined by a hyphen, which is the derivation given by Ash in his dictionary, in strange obliviousness of the French word outrage.

P. 27 (1, 6). T is omitted after s in the second person singular of the verb, and so no distinction is made between the second and the third persons; thus, thou wrytes, and at p. 32 thou was, and thou hes.

P. 29 (7). The supposition that the apostrophe ’s as a mark of the possessive case is a segment of his, a question which has been lately revived, is here denied.

P. 34. In this last chapter on Punctuation, which the author styles “of Distinctiones,” no mention whatever is made of the “semicolon,” though it occurs frequently in the MS., as, for instance, p. 30, cap. 6. This stop, according to Herbert, was first used by Richard Grafton in The Byble printed in 1537: it occurs in the Dedication. Henry Denham, an English printer who flourished towards the close of the sixteenth century, was the first to use it with propriety.

P. 34 (6). The explanation of the mode of pronouncing the comma “with a short sob” is odd.⁵

The author continually uses a singular verb to a plural noun; for instance, “of this we, as the latines, hes almost no use” (p. 22), though on p. 20 he writes, “in our tongue we have some particles.”

With regard to the Manuscript, there are two corrections in it worth noting. At p. 10 (6), in the phrase, “the auctours whole drift,” the word had been originally written hael, but is marked through, and whole substituted for it in the same handwriting. At p. 21 (4), the word frensh has been inserted before exemples, but has been afterwards struck through.

The numbering is wrong in three places, but it has not been corrected. At p. 8 there are no sections 12 and 13, at pp. 17, 19, there are two cap. 7, and at p. 19 there are two sections 4.