A Dorset rustic, on being reproved by a magistrate for being drunk and disorderly, explained that his sad plight was the result of taking his liquor the wrong way up; for, said he,
"Cyder upon beer is very good cheer,
Beer 'pon cyder is a dalled bad rider!"
The worthy magistrate, not to be vanquished by the poetic tippler, told him to remember—
"When the cyder's in the can
The sense is in the man!
When the cyder's in the man
The sense is in the can."
"I wish," said an old shepherd to me, with regret in his voice, "that you might taste such beer as my mother brewed when I was a boy. Bread, cheese and ingyens [onions] with a drop of beer was parfuse [ample] for a meal in those days, 'ess fay! But this beer they sell now is drefful wishee-washee stuff. I'll be dalled if I'll drink it; 'tez water bewitched and malt begridged [begrudged]." In Hodge's uncouth speech are found many words and usages of the Anglo-Saxon tongue, though it is not now relished by fastidious palates. William Barnes, the Dorset poet, enumerates the chief peculiarities of the Dorset dialect in his books on speech lore. He loved the odd phrases of children, and it is easy to see why. For a child, not knowing the correct method of describing a thing and seeking to express its meaning, will often go back to the strong old Anglo-Saxon definitions. The child can often coin very apt phrases. As, for instance, the Dorset child who spoke of honey as "bee-jam." Barnes was delighted, too, with the boy "who scrope out the 'p' in 'psalm' 'cose it didn't spell nothen."
Many of the humours of Arcady have been moulded into enigmatical sayings and metaphors which may still be heard on the lips of the Dorset rustic: