[Footnote L:  Everybody remembers how Scaliger illustrated it in the case of the Gascons,—­Felices, quibus vivere est bibere.]

Mr. White speaks of the vowels as having had their “pure sound” in the Elizabethan age.  We are not sure if we understand him rightly; but have they lost it?  We English have the same vowel-sounds with other nations, but indicate them by different signs.  Slight changes in orthoepy we cannot account for, except by pleading the general issue of custom.  Why should foot and boot be sounded differently?  Why food and good?  Why should the Yankee mark the distinction between the two former words, and blur it in the case of the latter, thereby incurring the awful displeasure of the “Autocrat,” who trusses him, falcon-like, before his million readers and adorers?  Why should the Frenchman call his wooden shoe a sabot and his old shoe a savate, both from the same root?  Alas, we must too often in philology take Rabelais’s reason for Friar John’s nose!  With regard to the pronunciation of the vowels in Queen Bess’s days, so much is probable,—­that the a in words from the French had more of the ah sound than now, if rhymes may be trusted.  We find placed rhyming with past; we find the participle saft formed from save.  One relic of this occurs to us as still surviving in that slang which preserves for us so many glossologic treasures,—­chauffer,—­to chafe, (in the sense of angering,)—­to chaff.  The same is true of our Yankee ch[)a]mber, d[)a]nger, and m[)a]nger, cited by Mr. White.

If we have apprehended the bearing of Mr. White’s quotation from Butler’s English Grammar, we think he has misapprehended Butler.  We wish he had not broken the extract off so short, with an etc.  What did Butler mean by “oo short”?  Mr. White draws the inference that Puck was called Pook, and that, since it was made to rhyme with luck, that word and “all of similar orthography” were pronounced with an oo.  Did our ancestors have no short u, answering somewhat to the sound of that vowel in the French un?  We have little doubt of it; and since Mr. White repeats so often that we Yankees have retained the Elizabethan words and sounds, may we not claim their pronunciation of put (like but) and sut for soot, as relics of it?  If they had it not, how soon did it come into the language?  Already we find Lord Herbert of Cherbury using pundonnore, (point d’honneur,) which may supply Dr. Richardson with the link he wants between pun and point, for the next edition of his Dictionary.  Alexander Gill, head-master of St. Paul’s School and Milton’s teacher, published his “Logonomia Anglica” in 1621, a book which throws more light on the contemporary pronunciation of English than any other we know of.