(though I am by
no means sure even of that), but they surely would never have tolerated
any such had they suspected the least vulgarity in them. Prior has the
rhyme _first_ and _trust_, but puts it into the mouth of a landlady.
Swift has _stunted_ and _burnt_ it, an intentionally imperfect rhyme, no
doubt, but which I cite as giving precisely the Yankee pronunciation of
_burned_. Donne couples in unhallowed wedlock _after_ and _matter_, thus
seeming to give to both the true Yankee sound; and it is not uncommon to
find _after_ and _daughter_. Worse than all, in one of Dodsley's Old
Plays we have _onions_ rhyming with _minions_,--I have tears in my eyes
while I record it. And yet what is viler than the universal _Misses_
(_Mrs._) for _Mistress_? This was once a vulgarism, and in 'The Miseries
of Inforced Marriage' the rhyme (printed as prose in Dodsley's Old Plays
by Collier),

'To make my young _mistress_
Delighting in _kisses_,'

is put into the mouth of the clown. Our people say _Injun_ for _Indian_.
The tendency to make this change where _i_ follows _d_ is common. The
Italian _giorno_ and French _jour_ from _diurnus_ are familiar examples.
And yet _Injun_ is one of those depravations which the taste challenges
peremptorily, though it have the authority of Charles Cotton--who rhymes
'_Indies_' with '_cringes_'--and four English lexicographers, beginning
with Dr. Sheridan, bid us say _invidgeous_. Yet after all it is no worse
than the debasement which all our terminations in _tion_ and _tience_
have undergone, which yet we hear with _resignashun_ and _payshunce_,
though it might have aroused both _impat-i-ence_ and _in-dig-na-ti-on_
in Shakespeare's time. When George Herbert tells us that if the sermon
be dull,

'God takes a text and preacheth patience,'

the prolongation of the word seems to convey some hint at the
longanimity of the virtue. Consider what a poor curtal we have made of
Ocean. There was something of his heave and expanse in _o-ce-an_, and
Fletcher knew how to use it when he wrote so fine a verse as the second
of these, the best deep-sea verse I know,--

'In desperate storms stem with a little rudder
The tumbling ruins of the oceaen.'

Oceanus was not then wholly shorn of his divine proportions, and our
modern _oshun_ sounds like the gush of small-beer in comparison. Some
other contractions of ours have a vulgar air about them. _More 'n_ for
_more than_, as one of the worst, may stand for a t