He considered the 's' in the former word, what indeed it is, a graft of ignorance. Hare, lately followed by Furnival, held it so much of a baseness to spell fashionably, that he roundly abused such pot-bellied words as spelled for spelt in the preterites of weak verbs, and gave us preacht, &c. with such genitive plurals as geniuses, and threw into the bargain invey and atchieve. He also maintained that mute 'e' should be expunged when not softening a preceding consonant, or lengthening a preceding vowel. Byron finding it impossible to determine but from the context, whether "read" be past or present, wrote redde, though he might have written red like led, there being little fear of its being confounded with the colour. Thirlwall inveighed against our established system, if the result of custom and accident may be called system, as a mass of anomalies, the growth of ignorance and chance, equally repugnant to good taste and common sense. But notwithstanding the good bishop's tirades, the British public never never will be slaves, even to an Academy. They cling to their old spelling with an impulsion proportioned to its inconvenience, and are as jealous of any encroachment on their prescriptive domain as of a trespass on their right in the public parks. We know what would become of English loyalty if her most Gracious Majesty were to take it into her royal head to close St. James's. Tyrwhitt, aware of this, contented himself with but few varieties, such as rime, a spelling which derivation, analogy, and ancient use alike support, and coud, which being obviously derived from can adds in its present state to the unnecessary anomalies in our language. The obtaining orthography arose out of uniformity probably with would from will and should from shall, and even in these words the '1' has unfortunately long ceased to be pronounced. With regard to rime, it were perhaps better written ryme, to distinguish it from hoar-frost. The Elizabethan impurity of the 'h' has been traced to Daniel. It is never found in Milton or Shakspeare. It arose most likely from the notion that the word was connected with rhythm. The learned Trench, in his English Past and Present, 1868, curiously enough discards "y" in ryme as a modern mis-spelling. The unsettled nature of our language has made its variations much more remarkable than those in other countries. Petrarch is still understood fairly by the modern Italian, but the modern Englishman can | bring up little from the well of English undefiled without a glossarial bucket. Lest he should fall into the same evil plight with Spenser, Swift was sanguine enough to propose a scheme to the Earl of Oxford for curbing any further variations in orthography; but that, as we have seen, was a work beyond the King and his Ministers. The son of the Prince of Wales may not now "chaste" his schoolmaster as Robert the Devil effectually "chasted" his with a long dagger, when the unlucky pedant suggested that the spelling of Robert was exceptional; and in that case we have no ground to suppose that the "Devil's" spelling ultimately prevailed. Cæsar was a greater than he, and yet could not introduce word; Claudian also, and yet could not introduce a letter. Kings and scholars must alike succumb to the tyranny of custom, and of that tyrant women chiefly are the executive and the body-guard. Their love of variety has probably produced as many new spellings as their love of eloquence has begotten new words. What are the dry rules of etymology to them when the usual spelling offends the delicacy of their ear? We have heard of a lady at a Spelling Bee-at present a silly, and so very popular entertainment a pretty young lady, who spelt myrrh thus: murr. What could be more simple, more novel, more ingenious? At least three-fourths of the male portion of the audience went away with the secret conviction that, although the dry little old gentleman who presided as referee, and a big dictionary to boot, were adverse to the candidate, the pretty young lady had a great deal which might be said on her side, and that if the word was not by some prejudiced people spelt as she had elected to spell it, it ought decidedly in future to be spelt so. The graceful appearance of our written language is indeed mainly owing to our women. These are at the head of what Chesterfield called the polite as opposed to the pedantic orthography. In the former they rule supreme. Learning here is rather disadvantageous than otherwise; it curbs the freedom of their imagination. Sit non doctissima conjux, says Martial-who might have rested well content in our island home. Who but a woman first dared to spell cap-à-pie apple-pie, or farsed-meat forced-meat? Would any man have enriched her favourite ornament with four changes of costume, as riband, ribon, ribbon, ribband? Who but one of these eminent rebels first wrote exiccate, or introduced that arbitrary but interesting diversity between laggard and braggart? To whom are we indebted for the perihelion of those capricious stars - kicksey-wicksey, welsh-rabbit, cuddle, poppet, higgledy-piggle, and tootsicums, or the aphelion of foupe, conjobble, warhable, smegmatick, screable, ablaqueation, moble, hamble, drumble, nubble, which it may well be Johnson was barbarous enough to forge himself, in jealous rivalry, in order to spite the sex ; but his efforts were, as they deserved to be, quite unavailing? No one, however, of mortals is happy on all sides. Our fair reformers have sometimes suffered inconvenience from their auricular orthography. Instances have been quoted of a lady writing to a gentleman to inquire after his health in such bold eccentricity of spelling as excited suspicion of an assignation in the breast of that gentleman's wife; of another who exercised her right and privileges so capriciously in the composition of a domestic receipt that a whole family were nearly poisoned by partaking of the ingredients of what was entitled a new soup, but which in ordinary orthography would have been a new soɑp. Soyez de votre siècle, is a motto which women seldom forget in fashion; it is one which neither men nor women should ever forget in spelling. We must not be the first, as Pope says in his "Essay on Criticism," to try the new words nor yet the last to lay aside the old. But after all it will not be among the least of the blessings of heaven, that spelling probably will not there be necessary. 596 French Peasant Songs. IN such a singing country as France proverbially is, it seems odd that we hear so little of genuine popular ballads-of the songs that the peasant makes for himself. Almost every European country offers abundance of these artless verses. The ballads of Greece have been edited again and again; those of Denmark have been translated into English; Mr. Ralston has made us familiar with the songs of the Russian, and Mr. Symonds with those of the Italian people. All these lays present vivid pictures of the life of the peasants, their customs, beliefs, regrets; but the picture of French manners that may be put together out of French Volkslieder has been, comparatively, little regarded. We scarcely think of the French country-folk as possessing Volkslieder at all. The higher Muse has rarely looked on them with favour; they make little figure in any artistic poetry. To be sure, there is a pretty medieval comedy of Robin and Marion, and the pastourelles of the trouvères do justice to the charms and sometimes to the virtue of shepherdesses. The rustic in that most ancient French novel, Aucassin et Nicolette, who tells the lover how his lady had passed by-"li plus bele du monde, si que nos quidames que ce fust une fée, et que tos cis bois en esclarci”—is a poetical figure enough; but later French poetry has little to say of the real countryfolk, who, on their part, seem as silent in song as if they remembered that threat of the trouvère, "If I were king over the villeins, not one should dare to open his mouth, were it so much as to ask for bread or to say his pater noster." The villein, in short, did not sing loud enough to be heard, and thus have attention drawn to his lightness of heart. French society oppressed him, French literature left him alone; and M. Taine has well remarked how rarely even Molière dares to bring a rustic upon the stage. His Charlotte, in the Festin de Pierre, may match with Audrey in As You Like It; and his Lubin is a good heavy clown; but, as a rule, Molière does not work a mine of humour which Shakspeare found so rich. Coming to our own century, most authorities do not give the idea that the French peasant is a poetical creature. If we knew him only through the pictures of Millet, where his monotonous toil meets us everywhere, and his grave face and solemn demeanour are in keeping with the dark woods, grey skies, and colourless plains; or if we accepted Balzac's account of him; we might give up the search for French folksongs. There is neither humour, superstition, gaiety, nor memory of the past, in Balzac's rustics. Their only care is to add arpent to arpent of land; to poach in the fields and plunder the woods of their richer neighbours; their only knowledge a pettifogging acquaintance with the laws of trespass. The least offensive of all Balzac's detestable paysans is le Père Fourchon-a kind of sordid Edie Ochiltree, full of a crafty malice, by which he gains a rascally livelihood. Among people like the Fourchons it would be vain to look for remains of traditional ballads or for country poets. But there is a healthier, a more idyllic side of French life, which is the favourite theme of George Sand. Much of her long life has been passed in an unspoiled part of Berry; and her description of the peasant superstitions and practices is among the most delightful parts of her work. She has been present when a peasant-boy actually beheld la Grand' Bête, that mysterious terror of the night, a flying creature of indefinite form, which haunts the wolds of Yorkshire as well as of Berry. She has had the advantage of the friendship of a second-sighted poacher, who used to discover, in a kind of trance, where the rare and infrequent rabbit might be lurking. She has known elderly warlocks who had the art of calling wolves into a circle, and others who had the secret of the fiend "Georgeon," or who understood the language of cattle, or at least who had heard le Grand Veneur-the French Arthur's Hunt-sweep past, with cries and blowing of horns, through the forest. Quite lately a countryman of Madame Sand's, M. Laisnel de la Salle, has confirmed her stories by evidence of his own.* He has hunted the Grand' Bête (can that monster be our old "questing beast" of the Mort d'Arthur?) back to his pagan cover, or at least far into the middle ages. He has given learned explanations of superstitions which go to prove, what indeed is most probable, that the beliefs of the peasantry are derived from immemorial antiquity. The most ghastly heath-folk of Berry are les laveuses de la nuit-weird women, busy washing in the moonlight, by lonely tarns and meres, to the sound of their own monotonous dirges. What it is that they wash, no one knows. Some say the winding-sheets of the men and women that are to die within the year; others, that the white and phosphorescent substance they handle is the soul of a suicide or of an unchristened babe. In any case, the belated peasant thinks that he does well to shun moonlit pools of water and the company of grey women. Besides the weird women, there are, of course, fairies, fades or fées (fata), maidens who spin and comb their long hair by the roads, who steal away infants, and dance in the wind's eddies, like the wilis, fairies, and nereids of other European countries. There is very little said about these beings in the ballads of France, for they are not to be named too rashly, though the Celtic ballads of Brittany venture to make free with the korrigan. There are happier remains of paganism than the belief in fays, and the dread of the Grand' Bête, in Berry, as in Lorraine. The summer * Croyances et Légendes du Centre de la France. Par Laisnel de la Salle. Paris, 75. solstice is celebrated with dance and song on S. John's Eve. The parish curé comes forth with a glad procession of boys and girls to light the immemorial fire, through which, of old in Palestine, the children were passed to Moloch. In France, too, the dancers leap in the dying embers or bound across the falling flame, and end the revel by carrying off ashes, supposed to have a medical virtue. S. John's Eve is the great feast of Summer-the feast that many of the French ballads commemorate in their burden. It was on S. John's Eve that the lover, in one of the prettiest of folk-songs, met his sweetheart wandering by the cool water-side, and sang to her a song with this refrain :— Beau pommier, beau pommier, Que mon cœur d'amour. Oh, fair apple-tree, and oh, fair apple-tree, My heart is heavy with love. It wanteth but a little wind To make the blossoms fall; It wanteth but a young lover Another festival, almost as famous, is that of May Day. Lovers come in the night, and plant blossoming boughs where their mistresses will find them in the morning; or they hide bouquets of symbolic flowers-myrtle, ivy, mignonette-all with their secret message. Un jour de mai Cà m'y prend une envie D' planter un mai A la porte de ma mie. Flowers, birds, and clouds, in the ballads, are all the messengers of love, and carry the letters of peasants, who know not any other literature. Here is a song from La Vendée :— 一个 |