n Ireland numerous
words were preserved in common use, "the dregs of the old ancient
Chaucer English", as he contemptuously calls it, which had become quite
obsolete and forgotten in England itself. For example, they still called
a spider an 'attercop'--a word, by the way, still in popular use in the
North;--a physician a 'leech', as in poetry he still is called; a
dunghill was still for them a 'mixen'; (the word is still common all
over England in this sense;) a quadrangle or base court was a
'bawn'{136}; they employed 'uncouth' in the earlier sense of unknown.
Nay more, their general manner of speech was so different, though
containing English still, that Englishmen at their first coming over
often found it hard or impossible to comprehend. We have another example
of the same in what took place after the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes, and the consequent formation of colonies of Protestant French
emigrants in various places, especially in Amsterdam and other chief
cities of Holland. There gradually grew up among these what came to be
called 'refugee French', which within a generation or two diverged in
several particulars from the classical language of France; its
divergence being mainly occasioned by this, that it remained stationary,
while the classical language was in motion; it retained usages and
words, which the latter had dismissed{137}.

{Sidenote: _Provincial English_}

Nor is it otherwise in respect of our English provincialisms. It is true
that our country people who in the main employ them, have not been
separated by distance of space, nor yet by insurmountable obstacles
intervening, from the main body of their fellow-countrymen; but they
have been quite as effectually divided by deficient education. They have
been, if not locally, yet intellectually, kept at a distance from the
onward march of the nation's mind; and of them also it is true that many
of their words, idioms, turns of speech, which we are ready to set down
as vulgarisms, solecisms of speech, violations of the primary rules of
grammar, do merely attest that those who employ them have not kept
abreast with the advance of the language and nation, but have been left
behind by it. The usages are only local in the fact that, having once
been employed by the whole body of the English people, they have now
receded from the lips of all except those in some certain country
districts, who have been more faithful than others to the tradition of
the