By J. U. Powell, MA. 121 
of it in Yorkshire about 1840; Ruddock (robin red-breast). 
2.—But valuable as this Glossary is for the student of language, 
it has another side; it has preserved racy and idiomatic forms of 
‘speech, smelling of the soil sometimes, it is true, but vigorous, 
forcible, expressive, masculine, homely, and with what Matthew 
Arnold calls “a healthy country smack” (Celtic Literature). 
“Especially useful to him who would attempt to English the Sagas, 'is a 
knowledge of the spoken English of the country folk, who, as Mr. Barnes has 
proved to those who refused to see it before, often preserve the best English 
phrases, which the miserable conventional hack English of this and the preceding 
century has scornfully passed by.” (York Powell and Vigfusson. Corpus 
Poeticum Boreale, Introd., p. 116.) ; 
Lowell says, in his introduction to the Biglow Papers, speaking 
of America :— 
“hat we shall all be made to talk like books, is the danger with which we 
are threatened by the universal schoolmaster, who does his best to enslave the 
‘minds and memories of his victims to what he esteems the best models of English 
‘composition ; that is to say, to the writers whose style is faultily correct, and has 
no blood-warmth in it. No language that cannot suck up the feeling juices 
secreted for it in the rich mother earth of common folk, can bring forth a sound 
_ Lowell continues, still speaking of the exaggeration typical of 
the American character :— 
es Much of what is set down as mere extravagance, is more fitly to be called 
intensity and picturesqueness ; symptoms of the imaginative faculty in full health 
and strength, though producing as yet only the raw and formless material in 
which poetry is to work . . . Vulgarisms are often only poetry in the 
“a ” 
In this dialect I think we can trace many of the qualities which 
Matthew Arnold regards as typical of the English language and 
acter. In his delightful lectures on Celtic Literature, into which 
1¢ has put some of his most discriminating criticism, and in which 
2 uses most felicitous and discerning language, he talks of “ the 
ity to fact,” “the energy with honesty,” “the pleasant whole- 
ome smack of the soil,” which is the mark of the Englishman in 
age. You will find in this dialect, no doubt, great plainness 
speech, and odd and mean monosyllables; still it has four qualities, 
: be direct, simple, faithful, and true; and you get the right 
