xxxiv ORMISTOUN'S LETTERS 



e.g. ' ne''er saw them right managed, cheaper made.' Examples 



too occur of a use of ' shall,' now regarded as specially Scottish, 



but quite common in English of an older day. A marked 



feature of Northern English, which includes Lowland Scots, 



was an apparent looseness in the use of plurals. Many 



examples are here : ' severals other ^ particulars ; when you 



are in doubts; you was complained of to them as you know 



you was to me ; money and time is lost.' The most interesting 



of all these idioms, however, is the omission of the relative in 



the nominative case, e.g. ' Alex. Cockburne's son and the man 



came with him ; in a ship sailed yesterday,' and many others. 



Now in the oldest Scots, as in the Laws of the Four Burghs, 



the unemphatic relative ' that ' regularly appears as 'at, and 



as regularly is heard in the speech of to-day. The slight stress 



on the word led to its being omitted. The ear of Burns must 



have noticed nothing amiss with this : — 



' Or like the snow ' [that] ' falls in the river^ 

 A moment white — then melts for ever. ' 2 



During the eighteenth century this became a familiar trick to 

 give an archaic effect, as in the ballads, and no point so well 

 supports, as this, Chambers's theory of the late and largely 

 artificial presentation of this much debated literature. The 

 unique value of the Letters in this regard consists in their 

 showing, without suspicion of pose and without the interven- 

 tion of the printer, how an educated Scotsman of the period 

 wrote and spoke. 



The Letters leave no doubt of the fact that Cockburn 

 wrote and spoke English, and that plain farmers like Wight, 

 and even Bell the gardener and Dods the ploughman, under- 

 stood it. And yet we are told that the speech of Scotsmen, 



^ * Other ' here is simply Chaucer's ' othere ' and Shakspeare's ' other ' — an 

 old plural that has lost its unemphatic suffix. 



2 When Burns wrote these lines ( Tarn 6' Shunter) he was not following what 

 is a distinctively colloquial English use of 'like' as a conjunction, for Lowland 

 Scots knows nothing of this. 



