SPELMAN 



SPENCER 



621 



of Mr Furnivall's ' fore-words ' belong to quite 

 another category, and might be commended alto- 

 gether, but for the saving caution of Mr Sweet 

 that ' nothing can be done without unanimity, and 

 until the majority of the community are convinced 

 of the superiority of some one system unanimity 

 is impossible.' For spelling reform must proceed 

 by a wise moderation, and Englishmen as yet are 

 far from being ready for such elaborate systems as 

 the Glossic of Mr Ellis, the Romic of Mr Sweet, or 

 even the Phonetik type which Mr Pitman has been 

 bravely printing for fifty years. Hut to these 

 scholars the cause owes all the progress it has 

 made, and their names will live in honoured 

 memory when rational principles at last prevail 

 over the tremendous forces of inertia and pre- 

 judice. It is hard to reason men out of beliefs 

 they have never been reasoned into, and it may 

 yet be long before our children are relieved of an 

 unnecessary burden too heavy to be borne. That 

 we can still read Chaucer and Piers Plowman 

 despite Johnson's Dictionary should dispose of the 

 one specious difficulty objected to reform ; another 

 viz. that uniformity would confound such ho- 

 monyms as write, rite, right, and wright is 

 answered by the fact that the identity of sound 

 troubles us little in speaking, and would trouble 

 us still less in reading, with the help of the con- 

 text before us. Meantime the tnie path of progress 

 should follow such wisely moderate counsels as 

 those of Dr Murray: the dropping of the final or 

 inflexional silent e ; the restoration of the histori- 

 cal t after breath-consonants ; uniformity in the 

 employment of double consonants, as in the Ameri- 

 can traveler, &c. ; the discarding of tie in words 

 like demagogue and catalogue ; the uniform level- 

 ling of the agent -our into -or, already so common 

 in America ; the making of ea = $ short into e and 

 the long IK into ee ; the restoration of some, come, 

 tongue, to their old English forms, yum, cum, tung; 

 a more extended use of z in the body of words, as 

 chozen, praize, raize ; and the correction of the worst 

 individual monstrosities, as foreign, scent, scythe, 

 ache, debt, people, parliament, court, would, sceptic, 

 phthisis, queue, schedule, twopence- half penny, yeo- 

 man, sieve, gauge, barque, buoy, yacht, &c. 



An encouraging success is the improvement of 

 German spelling, introduced in 1880, the chief 

 features of which are the omission of all superfluous 

 signs indicating the lengthening of a syllable, the 

 substitution of/forjA, the determination of the 

 sound of s hard and soft, the use of sz, the doubling 

 of consonants, the retention of h as indicating 

 vowel-lengthening only in root-syllables : Akt, 

 Armut, Elefant, tot, Irrtum, Wert. 



See PHONETICS, PHILOLOGY, ALPHABET; also the 

 Philological Socittjft Transactions for 1880-81 (includ- 

 ing the Presidential addresses of Murray and Ellis); 

 Sweet's Handbook of Phonetics (1877) and History of 

 Hixilith Sounds (1888) ; Max-Muller in Fort. Rev., April 

 1876. 



Spelman, SIR HENRY, antiquary, was born in 

 156% son of a gentleman of ancient family, at 

 Congham in Norfolk. He was educated at Trinity 

 College, Cambridge, whence he passed to Lincoln's 

 Inn. He was high-sheriff of Norfolk in 1604, and 

 was often employed in public affairs at home and 

 in Ireland by James I. Knighted by the king, he 

 retired in 1612 to prolonged private studies, and 

 died in 1641. His ponderous Glossarium Archa;- 

 ologicum, of which he published A L in 1626, was 

 completed by his son, Sir John Spelman, and 

 William Dngdale. His next great work, Concilia, 

 Decreta, Leges, Constitittiones in Re Ecclesiastica 

 Orbis Britannici (1639-64), he also left incom- 

 plete. Hi other works on Tithes, on Sacrilege, 

 are no less learned, and exhibit his strong devotion 

 to the Church of England. His Heliquite Spel- 



manniance were edited, with a Life, by [Bishop] 

 Edmund Gibson (1698). His eldest son, SIR JOHN 

 SPELMAN, inherited all his tastes and part of his 

 learning. He was knighted in 1641, and died in 

 1643, author, besides other works, of a life of King 

 Alfred (in Lat. trans. 1678; Spelman 's Eng. original, 

 edited by Thomas Hearae, 1709). 



Spelt. See WHEAT. 



Spelter. See ZINC. 



Spence, JOSEPH, anecdotist, was born at 

 Kingsclere in Hants, 25th April 1699. A sickly 

 boy, he went to Eton, but in a short time left it 

 for Winchester, thence passing to New College, 

 Oxford, in 1720, of which he became a fellow in 

 1722. He took orders in 1724, three years later 

 became professor of Poetry, and was presented to 

 the rectory of Birchanger in Essex. He travelled 

 on the Continent with the Earl of Middlesex, 

 afterwards second Duke of Dorset (1730-33), 

 again with Mr Trevor (1737), and Henry, Earl of 

 Lincoln, afterwards Duke of Newcastle ( 1 739-42 ). 

 Before first going abroad he had published his 

 Essay on Pope's Odyssey (1726), which procured 

 him the lasting friendship of the poet. Almost 

 from the beginning of their intimacy he began 

 to record Pope's conversation and the incidents 

 of his life, to which gradually many curious par- 

 ticulars were added gathered from the conversa- 

 tion of other eminent men. In 1736 he edited 

 Gorboduc, and in 1737 became rector of Great Har- 

 wood in Bucks, and regius professor of Modern 

 History. In 1747 he published his Polymetis, 

 which is said to have brought him 1500, great 

 part of which he spent on landscape-gardening at 

 Byfleet in Surrey. In 1754 he became a prebend- 

 ary of Durham. He was accidentally drowned at 

 Byfleet, August 20, 1768. He was a constant friend 

 to Pope, Horace Walpole, Shenstone, and Lowth, 

 and was noted for his large charity, a devoted love 

 to his aged mother that rivalled Pope's own, and 

 his kind patronage of such men as Stephen Duck, 

 thresher and poet ; Robert Hill, the learned tailor ; 

 Thomas Blacklock, the blind poet ; and Robert 

 Dodsley, footman before publisher. 



His MS. collection of Anecdotes was given by his 

 executors to the Duke of Newcastle, who did not approve 

 of their being published. Some, however, reached the 

 public through Warburton, AVarton, Johnson, and Malone 

 in the case of the first two from Spence himself. 

 Malone's edition (1820) was quickly superseded by that 

 of S. W. Singer (1820; 2d eoL 1858), printed from the 

 original papers, with notes and a memoir. 



Spencer, a town of Massachusetts, 64 miles by 

 rail W. by S. of Boston, with several manufactories 

 of boots and woollens. Pop. ( 1890) 8747. 



Spencer, a family which has given several 

 statesmen to the service of their country, was 

 founded by the Hon. John Spencer, youngest son 

 of the third Earl of Sunderland, by Anne, daughter 

 and co-heiress of the great Duke of Marlborough. 

 He inherited much property from his grandmother, 

 Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, and his only son, 

 JOHN (1734-83), was made Earl Spencer in 1765. 

 GEORGE JOHN, second Earl (1758-1834), was 

 First Lord of the Admiralty under Pitt's adminis- 

 tration ( 1794-1801 ), the period of the great naval 

 victories of Camperdown, Cape St Vincent, and the 

 Nile. He retired when Addington became premier, 

 and was famous as a munificent collector of rare 

 books and the first president of the Roxburghe Club. 

 The Spencer Library, dispersed under the hammer 

 in 1881-83, brought 50,581. JOHN CHARLES, third 

 Earl Spencer, better known under the courtesy title 

 of Lord Althorp, was born in 1782, and educated 

 at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. He 

 entered parliament in 1804 for Oakhampton, and 

 became a junior Lord of the Treasury when in 1808 



