Some diversity of opinion seems to exist as to the correct pronunciation of the word 'Dunsinane,' and the uncertainty on the subject is not dispelled by Shakespeare. In the fifth act of Macbeth, in no less than six places, the stress is on the last syllable" Dunsinane,' as:

"Till Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane."

The only place where it falls on the second syllable'Dunsinane '-is in the first scene of the fourth act:

"Macbeth shall never vanquished be, until

Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him."

This would result in a large majority of votes for 'Dunsinane'; on the other hand, however, in a note to Boswell's Tour to the Hebrides, Malone spells the word 'Dunsinnan,' and the family of Nairne, who now possess the property, spell it in that way, and pronounce it 'Dunsínnan.'

Sir George Bowen,in his Thirty Years of Colonial Government, tells a good story of Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, being unexpectedly snubbed as to the pronunciation of Greek by a young candidate for deacon's orders, who had spent his boyhood in Athens. The Bishop had been disposed to 'plough' him on account of what was really the correctness of his pronunciation, because it was so different from our barbarous conventional mode of pronouncing that language; but, on learning the state of the case, he discreetly 'shut up.'

Before leaving the subject of pronunciation, and in order to show the futility of pedantic efforts to coerce language into conformity with strict etymological principles, I may here mention that in the eighteenth century the learned Dr. Samuel Parr wanted his countrymen to pronounce the following words, and others of analogous formation, in the way in which I here mark them; namely, 'medicīnal,' 'inexorable,' and so forth, but his countrymen would none of it. The Italians almost invariably, and the Germans generally, pronounce their words of

classic origin in accordance with the custom of the ancients, but the English, otherwise so law-abiding, are in this matter peculiarly lawless, and pronounce such words in the manner most pleasing to themselves.

There is a curious tendency in words to set up a sort of pleonastic process by needless accumulation of factors. A good example of this is afforded by the word 'Brandonhill'; ‘bran' itself means hill, being identical with 'brae' and 'brow.' 'Don' likewise means hill, being only another form of 'dun,' 'dune,' and 'down.' Yet on the top of all is piled the word 'hill,' so that the word strictly means 'hill-hill-hill.' Why not superadd 'mont,' and make 'Brandonhillmont,' or even, in a germanised form, 'Brandonhillmontgebirge'?

The same process is seen in the names 'Orkney Islands' and 'Faröe Islands,' since the syllables 'ey' in Orkney, and 'oe' in Faröe, themselves mean 'island.' Orkney is derived from the Scandinavian 'Örkenö,' meaning 'a desolate isle'; accordingly the name 'Orkney Islands' amounts to 'the desolate island islands.' Similarly, Faröe is formed from the Danish words 'Faar Öer,' denoting the sheep islands'; and hence Faröe Islands means, 'the sheep islands islands.'

Some scholars are of opinion that our word 'saltcellar' is another example of the same thing. They think that originally the word was simply 'seller'—a vessel for containing salt-from the Norman French, 'sel'; and that in course of time, and perhaps in order to remove some obscurity and confusion which that form presented, the word 'salt' was prefixed; and they hold that the present formation is pleonastic. This seems probable enough, since it is curious that such a tiny utensil should be called a 'cellar.' We should smile if a mustard-pot were termed a mustard-cellar.

All observers of the phenomena of language must be familiar with that process of change which is for ever taking place, however microscopically, in the structure of every living tongue

-a process compounded of growth and of decay, of gain and of loss, of development and of corruption, of birth and of death. This process, like the movement of the glacier, is imperceptible at any given moment, yet it is ever going on. It might be compared to the movement of the hands of a clock, or even to the geologic slowness of the evolutions which occur in the structure of the earth. Like pulsation in a living body, it continues while a language lives; when it ceases the language is dead.

Without dwelling here on the various features of this process, I would advert now to those changes which arise from corruption-from the gradual advance and establishment of positive error. Changes due to legitimate and healthy growth are to be welcomed; those due to the creeping paralysis of error should be resisted. Of course, in matters of language, when error becomes universal it becomes law-as above said, communis error facit jus—but it should never be permitted to reach that stage without a struggle.

Purists have by this time almost abandoned all resistance to the use or abuse of such words as mutual,' 'reliable,' and the like. Such abuses have now almost established themselves in the language, and there is no more to be said about the matter. But there are some creeping errors which have not yet attained general sanction; and, on the principle of principiis obsta, these should be resisted while there is yet time to do so.

Conspicuous among these is the use, or rather the abuse, of the Greek derivative 'phil,' or 'phile,' or 'philo' in the formation of English compound words. Here error, though not yet established, is creeping on apace, and it is time to make a stand against it.

There would seem to be no clear idea of the correct law for the use of this factor; certainly there is no fixed or uniform practice in the matter. One writer adopts one way, another adopts its opposite, and sometimes the same writer—ay, and in

'Phil,' or 'philo,' as a prefix, has an a 'philanthropist,' 'one who loves man'; 'Ph horses.' 'Phil' or 'phile,' as a suffix, has in Theophilus,' 'beloved of God.' Acc desire to denote one who loves the Turk we should not say 'Turcophile' or 'Russ Turk' and Philo-Russ,' just as we do 'philharmonic,' and the like.

In the Edinburgh Review for April, 1888 Froude's then recent book on the West actually occurred within the same senter follows: "it may gladden the heart of the the philanthropist," etc. Both forms canno at least, until the law of communis erroryet established-shall make them so. It is to try to preserve accuracy in this matter, an that Dr. Murray will come to the rescue. sovereign British people prefer to be wrong, nissimo!-that is to say, they may please then

CHAPTER II

On commonplace books-Proverbs in various languages-Proverbial sayings on season and climate-Sententious domestic inscriptionsPunctuation-Equivoque- Fert, Fert, Fert '--Busillis-Giusti on decorations-Pasquinades-William Barnes.

THE man who keeps a commonplace book too often resembles the dog which carefully buries a bone for future use, yet seldom or never returns to dig it up; and it is positively pathetic to think of the intellectual dainties which probably lie buried in many a pale and faded volume of this class.

I

propose then to dig up some of the old bones which are to be found in a repository of this kind which lately came into my hands, and to serve up to the reader-if I can catch him-a few curious odds and ends culled from this source; a few literary or linguistic morsels which I trust may not prove altogether insipid. Of course they lay claim to no sort of originality, and to but little even of research; yet I am not without hope that some of them may be new to many persons, many of them to

some.

What may be called international proverbs, or proverbial sayings in various languages expressing the same, or nearly the same, sentiment, is a branch of folk-lore now tolerably familiar to scholars and linguists. But perhaps fortunately—not all people are linguists or scholars; and in any case I think I can produce some examples of such proverbs which may be found not uninteresting and not altogether hackneyed.

Our saying 'out of the frying-pan into the fire' is not badly expressed in German by reference to what may be called the