is put into the mouth of the clown. Our people say Injun for Indian. The tendency to make this change where i follows d is common. The Italian giorno and French jour from diurnus are familiar examples. And yet Injun is one of those depravations which the taste challenges peremptorily, though it have the authority of Charles Cotton—who rhymes 'Indies' with 'cringes'—and four English lexicographers, beginning with Dr. Sheridan, bid us say invidgeous. Yet after all it is no worse than the debasement which all our terminations in tion and tience have undergone, which yet we hear with resignashun and payshunce, though it might have aroused both impat-i-ence and in-dig-na-ti-on in Shakespeare's time. When George Herbert tells us that if the sermon be dull,
'God takes a text and preacheth patience,'
the prolongation of the word seems to convey some hint at the longanimity of the virtue. Consider what a poor curtal we have made of Ocean. There was something of his heave and expanse in o-ce-an, and Fletcher knew how to use it when he wrote so fine a verse as the second of these, the best deep-sea verse I know,—
'In desperate storms stem with a little rudder
The tumbling ruins of the oceän.'
Oceanus was not then wholly shorn of his divine proportions, and our modern oshun sounds like the gush of small-beer in comparison. Some other contractions of ours have a vulgar air about them. More 'n for more than, as one of the worst, may stand for a type of such. Yet our old dramatists are full of such obscurations (elisions they can hardly be called) of the th, making whe'r of whether, where of whither, here of hither, bro'r of brother, smo'r of smother, mo'r of mother, and so on. And dear Brer Rabbit, can I forget him? Indeed, it is this that explains the word rare (which has Dryden's support), and which we say of meat where an Englishman would use underdone. I do not believe, with the dictionaries, that it had ever anything to do with the Icelandic hrar (raw), as it plainly has not in rareripe, which means earlier ripe,—President Lincoln said of a precocious boy that 'he was a rareripe.' And I do not believe it, for this reason, that the earliest form of the word with us was, and the commoner now in the inland parts still is, so far as I can discover, raredone. Golding has 'egs reere-rosted,' which, whatever else it mean, cannot mean raw-roasted, I find rather as a monosyllable in Donne, and still better, as giving the sound, rhyming with fair in Warner. There is an epigram of Sir Thomas Browne in which the words rather than make a monosyllable;—
'What furie is't to take Death's part
And rather than by Nature, die by Art!'
The contraction more'n I find in the old play 'Fuimus Troes,' in a verse where the measure is so strongly accented as to leave it beyond doubt,—
'A golden crown whose heirs
More than half the world subdue.'
It may be, however, that the contraction is in 'th'orld.' It is unmistakable in the 'Second Maiden's Tragedy:'—
'It were but folly,
Dear soul, to boast of more than I can perform.'