himself condescends, at intervals, to practise the same work of supererogation—as where he carefully analyses, and distributes to each man his due, the welcome given by Hamlet to Horatio, Bernardo, and Marcellus. The eagerness, too, of his endeavours to find in his own country relics of Shakspeare's mother English, not extant in ours, is a little amusing; particularly when, among the words supposed to be effete and forgotten in England, is the adjective sheer: for he thus discourses: "We [Americans] say sheer ale, or sheer brandy, or sheer nonsense, or sheer anything. … We use it ['sheer'] in this way, and have so used it beyond the memory of the oldest living men; just as we say sheer impudence, or sheer stupidity. … Thus, we would say that one man committed an act out of sheer selfishness, but that another's was pure benevolence." So ends one paragraph, and the next Mr. White begins with, "Thus much for the benefit of English readers." We can only respond to this beneficium with a graceless "Thank'ee for nothing,"—or exclaim with Celia, "O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all whooping!" The word "right," too, in the sense of direct or immediate ("for I do see the cruel pangs of death right in thine eye," King John, V. 4), he is happy to say, survives in America,—as it does in England, though the compound "right away," which he adduces in evidence, and which he taunts us with sneering at, is, we acknowledge, peculiar to America. And hereupon, "right away" he tells us, that "the language of the best educated Americans of the northern states is more nearly that of Shakespeare's day, than that of the best born and bred English gentlemen who visit them; although the advantage on the score of utterance is generally on the side of the Englishmen"[1]—the Americans being possibly fonder than their "overweening cousins" of going to Naples, as a certain Clown might infer. Again,—on Johnson's explanation of the word "pheese" ("I'll pheese you in faith," says Kit Sly), and on that of Gifford and Charles Knight, Mr. White says, "All wrong, as any 'Yankee' could tell the learned gentlemen. The word has survived here with many others which have died out in England, and are thence called
- ↑ To this statement Mr. White tags a notice of "one gross and radical error of language into which all Englishmen of the present day fall, without exception. Oxford-men and Cambridge-men speak it; and all English authors, Mr. Macaulay and Mr. Landor not excepted, write it.—They say that one thing is different to another. Now, this is not an idiom, or a colloquialism: it is radically, absurdly wrong. … One thing is different from another … and in America this is the only expression of the idea ever heard among those who have even the least pretensions to education." This is bad news, for news it certainly is to us, that "all Englishmen of the present day, without exception," are guilty of the solecism in question. But as to the truth of the allegation, we differ to Mr. White—and the sense of constraint we endured in writing that to instead of the wonted from, is our internal evidence against him: he may say, indeed, that nobody, even in England, writes "to differ to," while everybody in England writes "different to"—but de jure it is a distinction without a difference; and at any rate we rejoice in knowing plenty of people who do neither.
And here, by the way, as Mr. White is seemingly punctilious in these minutiæ, we would fain learn the reason of his eliminating an honest vowel from the word Shakspearian, which he systematically spells Shakesperian? Why oust the a in the antepenultimate? He may twit us with omitting the e of the first syllable; but that at least is no mere question of grammar, and is (what surely the other is not?) an open question.
