234 



DISCOVliMY 



schoolmasters to break with tradition and to substi- 

 tute something which they consider superior have 

 bjen crowned with no small success in the past, and 

 it seems unlikely that they will b; less successful in 

 the future. Very soon English will have lost most of 

 its ancient and reputable traditional pronunciation, 

 and be little else than a modern concoction with 

 nothmg b:hind it. This process of re-creation is being 

 carried out in the name of ' correctness,' of clearness, 

 of reverence for the history of the language (which, 

 as a matter of fact, it sets at nought), upon any and 

 every pretext which suits the taste of the innovators. 

 It is my intention to set forth some of the ways 

 in which the colloquial English commonly accepted 

 as polite to-day, differs from that of the great age 

 of Dryden, Congreve, Pope, and Swift. Many of the 

 actual words chosen as examples can be shown to 

 have been pronounced as will be indicated several 

 centuries earlier, but I shall, as a rule, confine myself 

 to establishing the pronunciation current among the 

 refined and poUte in the 17th and i8th centuries. 



It will be seen that our present-day pronunciation, 

 where it differs from that of this earlier period, is due 

 to an attempt to follow the spelling. 



It is fair to Dr. Johnson to quote his own words on 

 pronunciation which have already been referred to. 

 There is no evidence known to me that this great man, 

 either in his practice or in his precepts, would have 

 supported the complete break with tradition which 

 has come about since his day. On the contrary, we 

 know that he was careful to ascertain what was the 

 prevalent custom with regard to words about which 

 there was any doubt. Further, had Johnson himself 

 habitually adopted any fantastical or pedantic modes 

 of pronunciation, we should hardly have been left 

 uninformed of them by Boswcll.' 



This is what Johnson says abDut English pronun- 

 ciation : " Most writers of English Grammars have 

 given long tables of words pronounced otherwise than 

 they are written, and seem not sufficiently to have 

 considered that of English, as of all living tongues, 

 there is a double pronunciation, one cursory and 

 colloquial, the other regular and solemn. The cursory 

 pronunciation is always vague and uncertain, being 

 made different in different mouths, by negligence, 

 unskilfulness, and affectation. The solemn pronuncia- 

 tion, though by no means immutable and permanent, 

 is yet always less remote from the orthography, and 

 less liable to capricious innovation." 



» As a matter of fact Boswell mentions that the people of 

 Lichfield, who, Johnson declared, spoke the purest English, 

 pronounced there so as to rhyme with /ear instead of with /air, 

 and once as " woonse instead of wunse or woitsc." He adds : 

 " Johnson himself never got entirely free of these provincial 

 accents." 



" For pronunciation the best general rule is, to 

 consider those the most elegant speakers who deviate 

 least from the written words." 



Here we have a very temperate and pregnant state- 

 ment. It will be noted that Johnson refers to the 

 ' solemn ' pronunciation as ' less liable to capricious 

 innovation ' than the ' colloquial.' Could he have 

 foreseen the length to which those who came after him 

 would go in the direction of innovation, we mav well 

 doubt whether he would not have qualified somewhat 

 his rule whereby the most elegant speakers might be 

 recognised. 

 (To be continued and concluded in the October number.) 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

 (References will be made to this in the further instalment 

 of the article.) 



Paston Letters. (Constable & Co., Ltd.) 



Cely Papers. (Camden Society.) 



Queen Elizabeth's Letters to James VI. (Camden Society.) 



Gregory's Chronicle. (Camden Society.) 



Bishop Latimer's Sermons. (Arber Reprints. Constable & Co., 



Ltd.) 

 Machyn's Diary. (Camden Society.) 

 Memoirs of the Verney Family. Four vols. (Longmans, Green 



& Co., Ltd.) 

 Correspondence of Dr. and Mrs. Basire. (John Murray. 1831.) 

 Wenlworth Papers. Ed. Cartwright. (Wyman & Sons, 1883.) 



The Life-History of 

 the Stars 



By the Rev. Hector Macpherson, M.A., 

 F.R..\.S., F.R.S.E. 



The idea of evolution in connection with the stars 

 dates only from the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century. Sagacious guesses as regards the origin of 

 the universe had, of course, been made from time to> 

 time ; and Kent in the middle, and Laplace at the close, 

 of the eighteenth century, had outlined theoretically 

 the possible course of development through which 

 our own Solar S\'stern had passed. But it was not 

 until the beginning of the ninteenth century that 

 Herschel, as a result of his long-continued study of 

 the nebulae, familiarised the scientific world with the 

 idea that stars had developed in the course of ages from 

 matter in a nebulous state. 



In his paper read before the Royal Society in iSii 

 Herschel gave a list of all the nebuK-e which he had 

 discovered and studied. " assorting them into as many 

 classes as will be required to produce the most gradual 

 affinity between the individuals contained in any one 

 class with those contained in that which precedes and 

 that which follows it." He traced a probable evolu- 



