ometimes perpetrates horrible solecisms. He
will pronounce face as fits, accurately enough; but he will rhyme it
quite impossibly to nice, which Tompkins would pronounce as newts: for
example Mawl Enn Rowd for Mile End Road. This aw for i, which I have
made Drinkwater use, is the latest stage of the old diphthongal oi,
which Mr. Chevalier still uses. Irish, Scotch and north country readers
must remember that Drinkwater's rs are absolutely unpronounced when they
follow a vowel, though they modify the vowel very considerably. Thus,
luggage is pronounced by him as laggige, but turn is not pronounced as
tern, but as teun with the eu sounded as in French. The London r seems
thoroughly understood in America, with the result, however, that the use
of the r by Artemus Ward and other American dialect writers causes Irish
people to misread them grotesquely. I once saw the pronunciation of
malheureux represented in a cockney handbook by mal-err-err: not at
all a bad makeshift to instruct a Londoner, but out of the question
elsewhere in the British Isles. In America, representations of English
speech dwell too derisively on the dropped or interpolated h. American
writers have apparently not noticed the fact that the south English h
is not the same as the never-dropped Irish and American h, and that to
ridicule an Englishman for dropping it is as absurd as to ridicule the
whole French and Italian nation for doing the same. The American
h, helped out by a general agreement to pronounce wh as hw, is
tempestuously audible, and cannot be dropped without being immediately
missed. The London h is so comparatively quiet at all times, and so
completely inaudible in wh, that it probably fell out of use simply by
escaping the ears of children learning to speak. However that may be, it
is kept alive only by the literate classes who are reminded constantly
of its existence by seeing it on paper.

Roughly speaking, I should say that in England he who bothers about
his hs is a fool, and he who ridicules a dropped h a snob. As to the
interpolated h, my experience as a London vestryman has convinced me
that it is often effective as a means of emphasis, and that the London
language would be poorer without it. The objection to it is no more
respectable than the objection of a street boy to a black man or to a
lady in knickerbockers.

I have made only the most perfunctory attempt to represent the dialect
of the missionary. There is no literary notati