y is
perplexing. But, on the other hand, what Mr. Ferguson suggests is
still more perplexing. He supposes that, 'because' the summit of this
mountain is such a peculiarly green and level plain, it might not
inappropriately be called _a fair field_.' Certainly it might; but by
Englishmen of recent generations, and not by Danish immigrants of the
ninth century. To balance the anomaly of what certainly wears a faint
_soupcon_ of anachronism--namely, the _apparent_ anticipation of the
modern Norse word _field_, Mr. Ferguson's conjecture would take a
headlong plunge into good classical English. Now of this there is no
other instance. Even the little swells of ground, that hardly rise to
the dignity of hills, which might be expected to submit readily to
changing appellations, under the changing accidents of ownership, yet
still retain their primitive Scandinavian names--as _Butterlip Howe_,
for example. Nor do I recollect any exceptions to this tendency,
unless in the case of jocose names, such as _Skiddaw's Cub_, for
Lattrig; and into this class, perhaps, falls even the dignified
mountain of _The Old Man_, at the head of Coniston. Mr. Ferguson will
allow that it would be as startling to the dense old Danes of King
Alfred's time, if they had found a mountain of extra pretensions
wearing a modern English name, as it would to the Macedonian
_argyraspides_, if suspecting that, in some coming century, their
mighty leader, 'the great Emathian conqueror,' could by any possible
Dean of St. Patrick, and by any conceivable audacity of legerdemain,
be traced back to _All-eggs-under-the-grate_. If the name really _is_
good English, in that case a separate and _extra_ labour arises for us
all; there must have been some old Danish name for this most
serviceable of fells; and then we have not merely to explain the
present English name, but also to account for the disappearance of
this archaeological Danish name. What I would throw out conjecturally
as a bare possibility is this:--When an ancient dialect (A) is
gradually superseded by a more modern one (E), the flood of innovation
which steals over the old reign, and gradually dispossesses it, does
not rush in simultaneously as a torrent, but supervenes stealthily and
unequally, according to the humouring or thwarting of local
circumstances. Nobody, I am sure, is better aware of this accident, as
besetting the transit of dialects, than Mr. Ferguson. For instance,
many of those words which a