By J. U. Powell, M.A. 



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 JBoreale, Introd., p. 116.) 



Lowell says, in his introduction to the Biglow Papers, speaking 

 of America : — 



" That 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 

 and lusty book." 



Lowell continues, still speaking of the exaggeration typical of 

 the American character : — 



"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 



In this dialect I think we can trace many of the qualities which 

 Matthew Arnold regards as typical of the English language and 

 character. In his delightful lectures on Celtic Literature, into which 

 he has put some of his most discriminating criticism, and in which 

 he uses most felicitous and discerning language, he talks of " the 

 fidelity to fact," "the energy with honesty," " the pleasanl whole- 

 some smack of the soil," which is the mark of the Englishma] 

 language. You will find in this dialect, no doubt, greal 

 of speech, and odd and mean monosyllables ; still ii hasfouj q 

 it will be direct, simple, faithful, and true; and you ; I 



