ark, and they will ask you what authority you have
for that pronunciation. As if, forsooth, a man could not talk without
book-license! As if he must have a permit from some dusty lexicon before
he can take a good word into his mouth and speak it out like the people
with whom he has lived!

The truth is that the man who is very particular not to commit himself,
in pronunciation or otherwise, and talks as if his remarks were being
taken down in shorthand, and shudders at the thought of making a
mistake, will hardly be able to open your heart or let out the best that
is in his own.

Reserve and precision are a great protection to overrated reputations;
but they are death to talk.

In talk it is not correctness of grammar nor elegance of enunciation
that charms us; it is spirit, VERVE, the sudden turn of humour, the
keen, pungent taste of life. For this reason a touch of dialect, a
flavour of brogue, is delightful. Any dialect is classic that has
conveyed beautiful thoughts. Who that ever talked with the poet
Tennyson, when he let himself go, over the pipes, would miss the savour
of his broad-rolling Lincolnshire vowels, now heightening the humour,
now deepening the pathos, of his genuine manly speech? There are many
good stories lingering in the memories of those who knew Dr. James
McCosh, the late president of Princeton University,--stories too good, I
fear, to get into a biography; but the best of them, in print, would not
have the snap and vigour of the poorest of them, in talk, with his own
inimitable Scotch-Irish brogue to set it forth.

A brogue is not a fault. It is a beauty, an heirloom, a distinction. A
local accent is like a landed inheritance; it marks a man's place in the
world, tells where he comes from. Of course it is possible to have too
much of it. A man does not need to carry the soil of his whole farm
around with him on his boots. But, within limits, the accent of a native
region is delightful. 'T is the flavour of heather in the grouse,
the taste of wild herbs and evergreen-buds in the venison. I like the
maple-sugar tang of the Vermonter's sharp-edged speech; the round,
full-waisted r's of Pennsylvania and Ohio; the soft, indolent vowels
of the South. One of the best talkers now living is a schoolmaster from
Virginia, Colonel Gordon McCabe. I once crossed the ocean with him on
a stream of stories that reached from Liverpool to New York. He did not
talk in the least like a book. He talked like a Vir