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 Virginian.
When Montaigne mentions GAYETY as the third clement of satisfying
discourse, I fancy he does not mean mere fun, though that has its
value at the right time and place.
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