Their little airs of
nicety, their starched cadences and frilled phrases seem as if they
had just been taken out of a literary bandbox. If perchance you
happen to misplace an accent, you shall see their eyebrows curl up
like an interrogation mark, 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.
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