any direction to hear maysure and playsure.  How long did this pronunciation last in England? to how many words did it extend? and did it infect any of Saxon root?  It is impossible to say.  Was beat called bate?  One of Mr. White’s variations from the Folio is “bull-baiting” for “bold-beating.”  The mistake could have arisen only from the identity in sound of the ea in the one with ai in the other.  Butler, too, rhymes drum-beat with combat.  But beat is from the French.  When we find least, (Saxon,) then, rhyming with feast, (French,) and also with best, (Shakspeare has beast and blest,) which is more probable, that best took the sound of beest, or that we have a slightly imperfect rhyme, with the [=a] somewhat shorter in one word than the other?  We think the latter.  One of the very words adduced by Mr. White (yeasty) is spelt yesty in the Folio.  But will rhymes help us?  Let us see.  Sir Thomas Wyat rhymes heares and hairs; Sir Walter Raleigh, teares and despairs; Chapman, tear (verb) with ear and appear; Shakspeare, ear with hair and fear, tears with hairs, and sea with play; Bishop Hall, years with rehearse and expires, and meales with quailes.  Will Mr. White decide how the ea was sounded?  We think the stronger case is made out for the [=a] than for the ee,—­for swears as we now pronounce it, than for sweers; though we fear our tired readers may be tempted to perform the ceremony implied by the verb without much regard to its orthoepy.

Mr. White tells us that on and one were pronounced alike, because Speed puns upon their assonance.  He inclines to the opinion that o had commonly the long sound, as in tone, and supposes both words to have been pronounced like own.  But was absolute identity in sound ever necessary to a pun, especially in those simpler and happier days?  Puttenham, in his “English Poesy,” gives as a specimen of the art in those days a play upon the words lubber and lover, appreciable now only by Ethiopian minstrels, but interesting as showing that the tendency of b and v to run together was more sensible then than now.[L] But Shakspeare unfortunately rhymes on with man, in which case we must either give the one word the Scotch pronunciation of mon, or Hibernicize the other into ahn.  So we find son, which according to Mr. White would be pronounced sone, coquetting with sun; and Dr. Donne, who ought to have called himself Doane, was ignorant enough to remain all his life Dr. Dunn.  But the fact is, that rhymes are no safe guides, for they were not so perfect as Mr. White would have us believe.  Shakspeare rhymed broken with open, sentinel with kill, and downs with hounds,—­to go no farther.  Did he, (dreadful thought!) in that imperfect rhyme of leap and swept, (Merry Wives,) call the former lape and the latter (Yankice) swep’?  This would jump with Mr. White’s often-recurring suggestion of the Elizabethanism of our provincial dialect.