e ambitious sort of people were trying their best to
lose the native dialect. We know the pains taken by great writers like
Hume and Robertson to clear their English composition of Scotch
idioms, and the greater but less successful pains taken by Wedderburn
to cure himself of his Scotch pronunciation, to which he reverted
after all in his old age. Under these circumstances Townshend's
sarcasm occasioned almost a little movement of lingual reform. Thomas
Sheridan, who was about this time full of a method he had invented of
imparting to foreigners a proper pronunciation of the English language
by means of sounds borrowed from their own, and who had just been
giving lessons to Wedderburn, and probably practising the new method
on him, was brought north in 1761 and delivered a course of sixteen
lectures in St. Paul's Chapel, Carrubber's Close, to about 300
gentlemen--"the most eminent," it is reported, "in the country for
rank and abilities." Immediately thereafter the Select Society
organised a special association for promoting the writing and speaking
of the English language in Scotland, and engaged a teacher of correct
English pronunciation from London. Smith was not one of the directors
of this new association, but Robertson, Ferguson, and Blair were,
together with a number of peers, baronets, lords of Session, and
leaders of the bar. But spite of the imposing auspices under which
this simple project of an English elocution master was launched, it
proved a signal failure, for it touched the national vanity. It seemed
to involve a humiliating confession of inferiority to a rival nation
at the very moment when that nation was raging with abuse of the
Scotch, when Wilkes was publishing the _North Briton_, and Churchill
was writing his lampoons; and when it was advertised in the Edinburgh
newspapers, it provoked such a storm of antipathy and ridicule that
even the honourable society which furthered the scheme began to lose
favour, its subscriptions and membership declined, and presently the
whole organisation fell to pieces. That is the account commonly given
of the fall of the Select Society, and the society certainly reached
its culminating point in 1762. After that subscribers withdrew their
names, or refused to pay their subscriptions, and in 1765 the society
had no funds to offer more than six prizes and ceased to exist, its
own explanation being that it died of the loss of novelty. "The
arrears of subscriptions seem,"