intonation of them, have an astonishing vitality and power of propagation by the root, like the gardener's pest, quitchgrass, while the application or combination of them may be new. It is in these last that my countrymen seem to me full of humor, invention, quickness of wit, and that sense of subtle analogy which needs only refining to become fancy and imagination. Prosaic as American life seems in many of its aspects to a European, bleak and bare as it is on the side of tradition, and utterly orphaned of the solemn inspiration of antiquity, I cannot help thinking that the ordinary talk of unlettered men among us is fuller of metaphor and of phrases that suggest lively images than that of any other people I have seen. Very many such will be found in Mr. Bartlett's book, though his short list of proverbs at the end seem to me, with one or two exceptions, as un-American as possible. Most of them have no character at all but coarseness, and are quite too longskirted for working proverbs, in which language always "takes off its coat to it," as a Yankee would say. There are plenty that have a more native and puckery flavor, seedlings from the old stock often, and yet new varieties. One hears such not seldom among us Easterners, and the West would yield many more. "Mean enough to steal acorns from a blind hog"; "Cold as the north side of a Jenooary gravestone by starlight"; "Hungry as a graven image"; " Pop'lar as a hen with one chicken"; "A hen's time ain't much"; 'Quicker 'n greased lightnin'"; "Ther's sech a thing ez bein' tu" (our Yankee paraphrase of undèv ayav); hence the phrase tooin' round, meaning a supererogatory activity like that of flies; "Stingy enough to skim his milk at both eends"; "Hot as the Devil's kitchen"; "Handy as a pocket in a shirt"; "He's a whole team and the dog under the wagon"; "All deacons are good, but there's odds in deacons" (to deacom berries is to put the largest atop); "So thievish they hev to take in their stone walls nights";t may serve as specimens. "I take my tea barfoot," said a backwoodsman when asked if he would have cream and sugar. (I find barfoot, by the way, in the Coventry Plays.) A man speaking to me once of a very rocky clearing said, "Stone's got a pretty heavy mortgage on that land," and I overheard Which, whether in that form, or under its aliases witch-grass and cooch-grass, points us back to its original Saxon quick. And, by the way, the Yankee never say "o' nights," but uses the older adverbial form, analogous to the Gerinan nachts. a guide in the woods say to his companions who were urging him to sing, Wal, I did sing once, but toons gut invented, an' thet spilt my trade." Whoever has driven over a stream by a bridge made of slabs will feel the picturesque force of the epithet slab-bridged applied to a fellow of shaky character. Almost every county has some good die-sinker in phrase, whose mintage passes into the currency of the whole neighborhood. Such a one described the county jail (the one stone building where all the dwellings are of wood) as "the house whose underpinnin' come up to the eaves," and called hell "the place where they didn't rake up their fires nights." I once asked a stage-driver if the other side of a hill were as steep as the one we were climbing: "Steep? chain lightnin' could n' go down it 'thout puttin' the shoe on!" And this brings me back to the exaggeration of which I spoke be. fore. To me there is something very taking in the negro "so black that charcoal made a chalk-mark on him," and the wooden shingle "painted so like marble that it sank in water," as if its very consciousness or its vanity had been overpersuaded by the cunning of the painter. I heard a man, in order to give a notion of some very cold weather, say to another that a certain Joe, who had been taking mercury, found a lump of quicksilver in each boot, when he went home to dinner. This power of rapidly dramatizing a dry fact into flesh and blood and the vivid conception of Joe as a human thermometer strike me as showing a poetic sense that may be refined into faculty. any rate there is humor here, and not mere quickness of wit, the deeper and not the shallower quality. The tendency of humor is always towards overplus of expression, while the very essence of wit is its logical precision. Captain Basil Hall denied that our people had any humor, deceived, perhaps, by their gravity of manner. But this very seriousness is often the outward sign of that humorous quality of the mind which delights in finding an element of identity in things seemingly the most incongruous, and then again in forcing an incongruity upon things identical. Perhaps Captain Hall had no humor himself, and if so he would never find it. Did he always feel the point of what was said to himself? I doubt it, because I happen to know a chance he once had given him in vain. The Captain was walking up and down the veranda of the coach changed horses. a country tavern in Massachusetts while A thunderstorm was going on, and, with that pleas - At ant European air of indirect self-compli- to him, "Behold, Sir George, the Greeks ment in condescending to be surprised by American merit, which we find so conciliating, he said to a countryman lounging against the door, "Pretty heavy thunder you have here." The other, who had divined at a glance his feeling of generous concession to a new country, drawled gravely, Waal, we du, considerin' the number of inhabitants." This, the more I analyze it, the more humorous does it seem. The same man was capable of wit also, when he would. He was a cabinetmaker, and was once employed to make some commandment-tables for the parish meeting-house. The parson, a very old man, annoyed him by looking into his workshop every morning, and cautioning him to be very sure to pick out "clear mahogany without any knots in it." At last, wearied out, he retorted one day "Wal, Dr. B., I guess ef I was to leave the nots out o' some o' the c'man'ments, 't 'ould soot you full ez wal!" If I had taken the pains to write down the proverbial or pithy phrases I have heard, or if I had sooner thought of noting the Yankeeisms I met with in my reading, I might have been able to do more justice to my theme. But I have done all I wished in respect to pronunciation, if I have proved that where we are vulgar, we have the countenance of very good company. For, as to the jus et norma loquendi, I agree with Horace and those who have paraphrased or commented him, from Boileau to Gray. I think that a good rule for style is Galiani's definition of sublime oratory, "l'art de tout dire sans être mis à la Bastille dans un pays où il est défendu de rien dire." I profess myself a fanatical purist, but with a hearty contempt for the speech-gilders who affect purism without any thorough, or even pedagogic, knowledge of the engendure, growth, and affinities of the noble language about whose mésalliances they profess (like Dean Alford) to be so solicitous. If they had their way! "Doch es sey," says Lessing, "dass jene gothische Höflichkeit eine unentbehrliche Tugend des heutigen Umganges ist. Soll sie darum unsere Schriften eben so schaal und falsch machen als unsern Umgang?" And Drayton was not far wrong in affirming that ""T is possible to climb, Although in Skelton's rhyme." Cumberland in his Memoirs tells us that when, in the midst of Admiral Rodney's great sea-fight, Sir Charles Douglas said The and Trojans contending for the body of Beside the advantage of getting out of the beaten track, our dialect offered others hardly inferior. As I was about to make an endeavor to state them, I remembered something that the clear-sighted Goethe had said about Hebel's Allemannische Gedichte, which, making proper deduction for special reference to the book under review, expresses what I would have said far better than I could hope to do: "Allen diesen innern guten Eigenschaften kommt .... von die behagliche naive Sprache sehr zu statten. Man findet mehrere sinnlich bedeutende und wohlklingende Worte.. einem, zwei Buchstaben, Abbreviationen, Contractionen, viele kurze, leichte Sylben, neue Reime, welches, mehr als man glaubt, ein Vortheil für den Dichter ist. Diese Elemente werden durch glückliche Constructionen und lebhafte Formen zu einem Styl zusammengedrängt der zu diesem Zwecke vor unserer Büchersprache grosse Vorzüge hat." Of course I do not mean to imply that I have come near achieving any such success as the great critic here indicates, but I think the success is there, and to be plucked by some more fortunate hand. Nevertheless, I was encouraged by the approval of many whose opinions I valued. With a feeling too tender and grateful to be mixed with any vanity, I mention as one of these the late A. H. Clough, who more than any one of those I have known (no longer living), except Hawthorne, impressed me with the constant presence of that indefinable thing we call genius. He often suggested that I should try my hand at some Yankee Pastorals, which would admit of more sentiment and a higher tone without foregoing the advantage offered by the dialect. I have never completed anything of the kind, but, in this Second Series, both my remembrance of his counsel and the deeper feeling called up by the great interests at stake, led me to venture some passages nearer to what is called poetical than could have been admitted without incongruity into the former series. The time seemed call ing to me, with the old poet, "Leave, then, your wonted prattle The oaten reed forbear; For I hear a sound of battle, And trumpets rend the air!” The only attempt I had ever made at anything like a pastoral (if that may be called an attempt which was the result almost of pure accident) was in "The Courtin'." "While the introduction to the First Series was going through the press, I received word from the printer that there was a blank page left which must be filled. I sat down at once and improvised another fictitious "notice of the press," in which, because verse would fill up space more cheaply than prose, I inserted an extract from a supposed ballad of Mr. Biglow. I kept no copy of it, and the printer, as directed, cut it off when the gap was filled. Presently I began to receive letters asking for the rest of it, sometimes for the balance of it. I had none, but to answer such demands, I patched a conclusion upon it in a later edition. Those who had only the first continued to importune me. Afterward, being asked to write it out as an autograph for the Baltimore Sanitary Commission Fair, I added other verses, into some of which I infused a little more sentiment in a homely way, and after a fashion completed it by sketching in the characters and making a connected story. likely I have spoiled it, but I shall put it at the end of this Introduction, to answer once for all those kindly importunings. Most As I have seen extracts from what purported to be writings of Mr. Biglow, which were not genuine, I may properly take this opportunity to say, that the two volumes now published contain every line I ever printed under that pseudonyme, and that I have never, so far as I can remember, written an anonymous article (elsewhere than in the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly, during my editorship of it) except a review of Mrs. Stowe's "Minister's Wooing," and, some twenty years ago, a sketch of the antislavery movement in America for an English journal. A word more on pronunciation. I have endeavored to express this so far as I could by the types, taking such pains as, I fear, may sometimes make the reading harder than need be. At the same time, by studying uniformity I have sometimes been obliged to sacrifice minute exactness. The emphasis often modifies the habitual sound. For example, for is commonly fer (a shorter sound than fur for far), but when emphatic it always becomes for, as "wut for!" So too is pronounced like to (as it was anciently spelt), and to like ta (the sound as in the tou of touch), but too, when emphatic, changes into tue, and to, sometimes, in similar cases, into toe, as, "I did n' hardly know wut toe du!" Where vowels come together, or one precedes another following an aspirate, the two melt together, as was common with the older poets who formed their versification on French or Italian models. Drayton is thoroughly Yankee when he says "I'xpect," and Pope when he says "t' inspire.' With becomes sometimes 'ith, 'uth, or 'th, or even disappears wholly where it comes before the, as, "I went along th' Square" (along with the Squire), the are sound being an archaism which I have noticed also in choir, like he old Scottish quhair. (Herrick has, Greene, in his Quip for an Upstart Courtier, says, "to square it up and downe the streetes before his mistresse." "Of flowers ne'er sucked by th' theeving bee.") Without becomes athout and 'thout. Afterwards always retains its locative_s, and is pronounced always ahterwards', with a strong accent on the last syllable. This oddity has some support in the erratic towards' instead of towards, which we find in the poets and sometimes hear. The sound given to the first syllable of to'wards, I may remark, sustains the Yankee lengthening of the o in to. At the beginning of a sentence, ahterwurds has the accent on the first syllable; at the end of one, on the last; as, "ah'terwurds' he tol' me," he tol' me ahterwurds'.' in both respects so far as the British provinces are concerned. To me the dialect was native, was spoken all about me when a boy, at a time when an Irish day-laborer was as rare as an American one now. Since then I have made a study of it so far as opportunity allowed. But when I write in it, it is as in a mother tongue, and am carried back far beyond any studies of it to long-ago noonings in my father's hay-fields, and to the talk of Sam and Job over their jug of blackstrap under the shadow of the ash-tree which still dapples the grass whence they have been gone so long. The Yankee never makes a mistake in But life is short, and prefaces should be.. his aspirates. U changes in many words And so, my good friends, to whom this to e, always in such, brush, tush, hush, introductory epistle is addressed, farewell. rush, blush, seldom in much, oftener in Though some of you have remonstrated trust and crust, never in mush, gust, bust, with me, I shall never write any more tumble, or (?) flush, in the latter case "Biglow Papers," however great the probably to avoid confusion with flesh. temptation, great especially at the preshave heard flush with the sound, how-ent time, unless it be to complete the ever. For the same reason, I suspect, never in gush (at least, I never heard it), because we have already one gesh for gash. A and i short frequently become e short. U always becomes o in the prefix un (except unto), and o in return changes to u short in uv for of, and in some words beginning with om. T and d, b and p, v and w, remain intact. So much occurs to me in addition to what I said on this head in the preface to the former volume. Of course in what I have said I wish to be understood as keeping in mind the difference between provincialisms properly so called and slang. Slang is always vulgar, because it is not a natural but an affected way of talking, and all mere tricks of speech or writing are offensive. I do not think that Mr. Biglow can be fairly charged with vulgarity, and I should have entirely failed in my design, if I had not made it appear that high and even refined sentiment may coexist with the shrewder and more comic elements of the Yankee character. I believe that what is essentially vulgar and mean-spirited in politics seldom has its source in the body of the people, but much rather among those who are made timid by their wealth or selfish by their love of power. A democracy can afford much better than an aristocracy to follow out its convictions, and is perhaps better qualified to build those convictions on plain principles of right and wrong, rather than on the shifting sands of expediency. I had always thought "Sam Slick" a libel on the Yankee character, and a complete falsification of Yankee modes of speech, though, for aught I know, it may be true original plan of this Series by bringing out of Divine institution, and is based (so far as I have heard) on two passages in the First Series and, "An' you've gut to git up airly, Ef you want to take in God," "God 'll send the bill to you," and on some Scriptural illustrations by Mr. Sawin. Now, in the first place, I was writing under an assumed character, and must talk as the person would whose mouthpiece I 'made myself. Will any one familiar with the New England countryman venture to tell me that he does not speak of sacred things familiarly? that Biblical allusions (allusions, that is, to the single book with whose language, from his church-going habits, he is intimate) are not frequent on his lips? If so, he cannot have pursued his studies of the character on so many long-ago muster-fields and at so many cattle-shows as I. But I scorn any such line of defence, and will confess at once that one of the things I am proud of in my countrymen is (I am not speaking now of such persons as I have assumed Mr. Sawin to be) that they do not put their Maker away far from them, or interpret the fear of God into being afraid of Him. The Talmudists had conceived a deep truth when they said, that "all things were in the power of God, save the fear of God"; and when people stand in great dread of an invisible power, I suspect they mistake quite another personage for the Deity. I might justify myself for the passages criticised by many parallel ones from Scripture, but I need not. The Reverend Homer Wilbur's note-books supply me with three apposite quotations. The first is from a Father of the Roman Church, the second from a Father of the Anglican, and the third from a Father of Modern English poetry. The Puritan divines would furnish me with many more such. St. Bernard says, Sapiens nummularius est Deus: nummum fictum non recipiet; 'A cunning money-changer is God: he will take in no base coin. Latimer says, "You shall perceive that God, by this example, shaketh us by the noses and taketh us by the ears.' Familiar enough, both of them, one would say! But I should think Mr. Biglow had verily stolen the last of the two maligned passages from Dryden's "Don Sebastian," where I find "And beg of Heaven to charge the bill on me!" And there I leave the matter, being willing to believe that the Saint, the Martyr, |