To come back to the matter in hand.  Our ‘uplandish man’ retains the soft or thin sound of the u in some words, such as rule, truth (sometimes also pronounced tr[)u]th, not trooth), while he says noo for new, and gives to view and few so indescribable a mixture of the two sounds with a slight nasal tincture that it may be called the Yankee shibboleth.  Voltaire says that the English pronounce true as if it rhymed with view, and this is the sound our rustics give to it.  Spenser writes deow (dew) which can only be pronounced with the Yankee nasality.  In rule the least sound of a precedes the u.  I find reule in Pecock’s ‘Repressor.’  He probably pronounced it rayoole, as the old French word from which it is derived was very likely to be sounded at first, with a reminiscence of its original regula.  Tindal has reuler, and the Coventry Plays have preudent.  In the ‘Parlyament of Byrdes’ I find reule.  As for noo, may it not claim some sanction in its derivation, whether from nouveau or neuf, the ancient sound of which may very well have been noof, as nearer novus? Beef would seem more like to have come from buffe than from boeuf, unless the two were mere varieties of spelling.  The Saxon few may have caught enough from its French cousin peu to claim the benefit of the same doubt as to sound; and our slang phrase a few (as ’I licked him a few’) may well appeal to un peu for sense and authority.  Nay, might not lick itself turn out to be the good old word lam in an English disguise, it the latter should claim descent as, perhaps, he fairly might, from the Latin lambere?  The New England ferce for fierce, and perce for pierce (sometimes heard as fairce and pairce), are also Norman.  For its antiquity I cite the rhyme of verse and pierce in Chapman and Donne, and in some commendatory verses by a Mr. Berkenhead before the poems of Francis Beaumont.  Our pairlous for perilous is of the same kind, and is nearer Shakespeare’s parlous than the modern pronunciation.  One other Gallicism survives in our pronunciation.  Perhaps I should rather call it a semi-Gallicism, for it is the result of a futile effort to reproduce a French sound with English lips.  Thus for joint, employ, royal, we have jynt, emply, r[)y]le, the last differing only from rile (roil) in a prolongation of the y sound.  I find royal so pronounced in the ‘Mirror for Magistrates.’  In Walter de Biblesworth I find solives Englished by gistes.  This, it is true, may have been pronounced jeests, but the pronunciation jystes must have preceded the present spelling, which was no doubt adopted after