It was a visit to The Beggar's Opera that made me think the following sentence worthy of comment. The present-day vulgarism of dropping the initial aspirate was not widespread much before the end of the eighteenth century, and it made one wince to hear an otherwise good actor so far go out of his part as to drop "h's" where the original would never have done so. The restoration of an aspirate in humour is a trick of yesterday. The gap in the evidence between Machyn and two hundred years later is remarkable. The practice which did exist in Machyn's day in London must have been confined to a limited class. The wrong addition of h is far more noticeable.
In a most diverting final chapter Professor Wyld dilates on colloquial idiom, and reminds us how impossible it would be for us, if we were transported into the sixteenth century, to know how to greet or take leave of those we met, how to express our thanks suitably, how to ask a favour, pay a compliment or send a polite message to a gentleman's wife. We should be at a loss how to begin and end the simplest note, whether to a friend, relative or stranger. We should hesitate every moment how to address the person we were talking to.
Readers of Ford Madox Hueffer's Ladies whose Bright Eyes, and those who saw When Knights were Bold, will realise what infinite amusement can be called up by imagining oneself driven to talk on level terms with our ancestors.
Professor Wyld opens up the subject by giving characteristic specimens of modes of greeting, farewells, compliments, endearments, angry speeches, oaths, affectations and so on, all of which are entertaining and enlightening. We find, for instance, most of our modern formulas in letter-writing in use before the end of the first half of the seventeenth century.
For anyone in the least interested in the sources and development of his own language there is no book which will whet his appetite to pursue the subject still more deeply than Professor Wyld's History. It has the added advantage that scholars will find in it plenty of material for further research; but everyone should read it for the flood of light it sheds on what we fondly imagined to be good taste, on what is falsely thought to be "the correct thing," and most of all because it shows us still another way of "catching the manners" of other ages "living as they rise."
II
THE ROMANCE OF WORDS—BY ERNEST WEEKLEY
Professor Weekley interests us in philology no less than Professor Wyld, but he treads an entirely different path. His aim is to select the unexpected in etymology, to show us the close connection between jilt and Juliet, to trace assegai back to Chaucer, to explain the true meaning of phrases like curry favour, which really means the combing down of a horse of a particular colour.
The result of this system is that we begin for ourselves to eye every word with suspicion, and work out by ourselves reasons why trivial means commonplace (it can be picked up anywhere, at the meet of "three ways," trivium), and so on.