ion is undergoing constant
changes, although changes for the most part unmarked, or marked only by
a few, would be abundantly easy to prove. Take a Pronouncing Dictionary
of fifty or a hundred years ago; turn to almost any page, and you will
observe schemes of pronunciation there recommended, which are now merely
vulgarisms, or which have been dropped altogether. We gather from a
discussion in Boswell's _Life of Johnson_{236}, that in his time 'great'
was by some of the best speakers of the language pronounced 'gr_ee_t',
not 'gr_a_te': Pope usually rhymes it with 'cheat', 'complete', and the
like; thus in the _Dunciad_:

"Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the _great_,
There, stamped with arms, Newcastle shines com_plete_".

Spenser's constant use of the word a century and a half earlier, leaves
no doubt that such was the invariable pronunciation of his time{237}.
Again, Pope rhymes 'obliged' with 'beseiged'; and it has only ceased to
be 'obl_ee_ged' almost in our own time. Who now drinks a cup of 'tay'?
yet there is abundant evidence that this was the fashionable
pronunciation in the first half of the last century; the word, that is,
was still regarded as French: Locke writes it 'the'; and in Pope's time,
though no longer written, it was still pronounced so. Take this couplet
of his in proof:

"Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms _obey_,
Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes _tea_".

So too a pronunciation which still survives, though scarcely among
well-educated persons, I mean 'Room' for 'Rome', must have been in
Shakespeare's time the predominant one, else there would have been no
point in that play on words where in _Julius Caesar_ Cassius,
complaining that in all _Rome_ there was not _room_ for a single man,
exclaims,

"Now is it _Rome_ indeed, and _room_ enough".

Samuel Rogers too assures us that in his youth "everybody said
'Lonnon'{238} not 'London'; that Fox said 'Lonnon' to the last".

The following quotation from Swift will prove to you that I have been
only employing here an argument, which he employed long ago against the
phonographers of his time. He exposes thus the futility of their
scheme{239}: "Another cause which has contributed not a little to the
maiming of our language, is a foolish opinion advanced of late years
that we ought to spell exactly as we speak: which, besides the obvious
inconvenience of utterly destroying our etymology, would be a thing we
should