"This is but a small specimen of the irregula"rities to be found in the state of our written lan

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guage; yet it may serve to fhew how different, nay impoffible, the attempt must be to acquire a knowledge of the true pronunciation of the English; unless learners be furnished with a pro“ per clue to guide them through this labyrinth."

LECTURE

LECTURE

XXXIII.

Of the Refemblance between SOUND and SENSE.

HAVING confidered words as they serve to convey the fenfe, I come now to confider the properties of them as mere founds, or as they affect the external ear only.

Speech confifts of founds divided by a great variety of intervals. All ideas, therefore, either of real founds, or of intervals, and confequently all ideas analogous to those of founds and intervals, admit of a natural expreffion by words: that is, the words may not be mere arbitrary signs of fuch ideas, but bear a real resemblance to them; fo that a perfon, without being previously acquainted with the meaning of the words, might be made fenfible of it, by the pronunciation only: or, at least, if he could not perceive the particular ideas they denoted without an explanation, he might be affected by the found of the words only, in a manner fimilar to what he would have been by the fentiment.

That mere founds are capable of this kind of expreflion, is evident from the well-known power of mufic, which, according to the different species

of

of it which are employed, is capable of introducing very different ftates of mind. And indeed, fince these states of mind may afterwards, by affociation, introduce particular ideas, the ideas themfelves may, with propriety enough, be faid to be excited by the power of music, that is, of mere found.

All the properties of founds, befides those which depend upon their effential differences (as confifting of particular combinations of vowels and confonants) are the greater ease or difficulty of pronouncing them, and the longer or shorter time which the diftinct pronunciation of them requires; which properties arise from the forementioned radical differences.

Articulate founds may resemble those which are inarticulate, because the former are often copied from the latter; as the bleating of the sheep, the lowing of the ox, the roaring of the lion, the clangor of arms, &c. It is by this advantage that Pope describes the falling of trees, in the following paffage, which fo happily correfponds to the fense:

deep-echoing groan the thickets brown,

Then ruftling, crackling, crashing, thunder down.

Milton's defcription of the found made by the opening of hell-gates is equally happy, on the fame account;

On a fudden open fly,

With impetuous recoil and jarring found,

Th'

Th' infernal doors, and on their hinges grate
Harsh thunder, that the lowest botten fhook
Of Erebus.

A fentence conftructed fo as not to be pronounced without difficulty (which, by the way, it requires very little ingenuity to do, in our language) may very naturally represent any effort of labour and difficulty. Thus Milton hath well defcribed Satan ftruggling through chaos:

So he with difficulty and labour hard,
Mov'd on, with difficulty and labour he.

Mr. Pope hath not been quite fo happy in his profeffed imitation of Ajax's effort to throw a rock, and of the expreffion of that effort in words:

When Ajax ftrives fome rock's vaft weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words move flow.

The latter of thefe lines, in particular, is by no means of more difficult pronunciation than the generality of English verfes. It runs much fmoother, and more eafily, than his description of the gentle flow of a current:

And the finooth ftream in fmoother numbers flows.

But this miscarriage is not owing primarily to the poet, but to the language, in which every poffible advantage was not taken of all the properties of found. This is alío the cafe in another parti{cular.

Nothing

Nothing is more obvious than that fhort fyllables may aptly represent Speed, and long fyllables flownefs, and that quickness and flow nefs are analogous to a variety of other mental conceptions, which, by this means, might likewife be expreffed by founds. But, unfortunately, the structure of moft languages is such as to take little or no advantage of this property of found, any more than of the former. In no language, perhaps, are the fyllables of the words which exprefs Swiftnefs, upon the whole, fhorter than thofe of' words which exprefs flowness. In Latin, we find the penultima of velox. and fefiino unnaturally long, while the penultima of mora and piger is fhort, as alfo those of labor and opus, which is an unfortunate circumftance for the following oftenquoted line of Virgil:

Hic labor, hoc opus eft.

On this account Pope's defcription of Camilla's fwiftnefs (which English word, by the way, is far from correfponding to the idea it conveys) is very unfortunate:

Not fo when swift Camilla fcours the plain,

Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and fkims along the main.

His own fuccefs might have taught him that an Alexandrine verse is more proper to express flownefs and heaviness than speed:

A needlefs