“Alas, if I am such a creature
To grow the worse for growing greater.”
This rhyme at that time was perfect to the ear, though false to the eye. Again, Pope wishes—
“That all mankind might that just mean observe,
In which none e’er could surfeit, none could starve.”
As for the atmosphere, Pope called it aar, making the word rhyme with star, and are and were he pronounced occasionally air and ware. These pronunciations, it is interesting to note, are still heard now and then from the lips of educated men, either as an affected archaism or more probably from sheer force of a habit of utterance acquired in youth.
There is another vulgarism with a pedigree which is especially to be noted because it is never heard now except from the unlettered. Yet in the seventeenth century this was the standard pronunciation. We refer to the obsolete pronunciation of such words as oblige, join, poison and the like. In his Epistle to Arbuthnot in which Pope pilloried so many of his contemporary poetasters and there left them to the vulgar gaze of all subsequent ages, among others he damned Addison with faint praise as—
“Dreading e’en fools, by flatterers besieged,
And so obliging that he ne’er obliged.”
Our join, poison, point, soil, spoil, and so on, would have offended the ear of Dryden and Pope, who invariably said jine, pison, pint, etc. In this respect the speech of our rustics is the speech which Dryden and Pope spoke, though their faith and morals are probably not those which these authors held.
In the words of Pope himself:—
“Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join
The varying sense, the full-resounding line,
The long majestic march and energy divine.”
“Good nature and good sense must ever join;
To err is human; to forgive, divine.”
“’Tis not enough, taste, judgment, learning join;
In all you speak, let truth and candor shine.”
“In grave Quintilian’s copious work we find
The justest rules and clearest method join’d.”
It is interesting to observe that we still say choir. These words with the oi-diphthong are well-nigh all of Anglo-French origin, except boil, in the sense of tumor, where the Anglo-Saxon byle proves that its development into the now vulgar bile is regular. But in standard English the word has been wrested from its normal course of development, probably through association in the popular mind with the verb boil, or to avoid confusion with bile (secretion of the liver), and its spelling has been changed to boil to satisfy, in Lowell’s apt phrase, the logic of the eye. But let it be said parenthetically that logic is among the least potent factors in the development of a language.