Notice of Recent Publications [pp. 443-477]

Notices oqf Recent Publications.
ART. VII. -NOTICES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS.
English Past and Present. Eight Lectures by Richard Chenevix
Trencl, D. D., Archbishop of Dublin. Seventh Edition, Revised
and Improved. New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1871.
THE rank which Trench has achieved as an author will quite surely
attract attention to any of his publications, whether philological, exegetical, theological, literary, or miscellaneous. He has the rare faculty of
writing what at once interests scholars andgeneral readers. In no
department is this trait more conspicuous, or more advantageously
displayed, than his favorite topic of language and words. We cannot
better give our readers an idea of the book than by presenting them a
few extracts from it. The following will teach us charity for what
we are wont to think vulgarisms of pronunciation:
"The same may be asserted of certain ways of pronouncing words,
not now in use except among the lower classes; thus'contrary,'
mischievous,''blasphemious,' instead of' contrary,''mischievous,'
'blasphemous.' It would be easy to show by quotations from our
poets that these are no mispronunciations, but only the retention of
an earlier pronunciation by the people, after the higher classes have
abandoned it."
And may not the following make us less sensitive to many idioms
and uses of words so freely condemned as' Americanismns?'
"What has been just now said of our provincial English, namely,
that it is often old English rather than bad English, is not less true
of many so-called Americanisms. There are parts of America where
' het' is still the participle of' to heat;' if our Authorized Version had
not been meddled with, we should so read it at Dan. iii. 19, to this
day; where' holp' still survives as the perfect of' to help;'' pled' (as
in Spenser) of'to plead.' Longfellow uses' dove' as the perfect of
' to dive;' nor is this a poetical license, for I lately met the same in a
well-written book of American prose."
The following points to a nobler lineage for many words as well as
persons than their present rank and status would indicate:
"'Gossip' is a word in point. This name is given by our Hamp shire peasantry to the sponsors in baptism, the godfathers and god mothers. We have here a perfectly correct employment of'gossip,'
in fact its proper and original one, one involving moreover a very
1871.]
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