Yankee sound; and it is not uncommon to find after and daughter.  Worse than all, in one of Dodsley’s Old Plays we have onions rhyming with minions,—­I have tears in my eyes while I record it.  And yet what is viler than the universal Misses (Mrs.) for Mistress?  This was once a vulgarism, and in ’The Miseries of Inforced Marriage’ the rhyme (printed as prose in Dodsley’s Old Plays by Collier),

’To make my young mistress
Delighting in kisses,’

is put into the mouth of the clown.  Our people say Injun for Indian.  The tendency to make this change where i follows d is common.  The Italian giorno and French jour from diurnus are familiar examples.  And yet Injun is one of those depravations which the taste challenges peremptorily, though it have the authority of Charles Cotton—­who rhymes ‘Indies’ with ’cringes’—­and four English lexicographers, beginning with Dr. Sheridan, bid us say invidgeous.  Yet after all it is no worse than the debasement which all our terminations in tion and tience have undergone, which yet we hear with resignashun and payshunce, though it might have aroused both impat-i-ence and in-dig-na-ti-on in Shakespeare’s time.  When George Herbert tells us that if the sermon be dull,

‘God takes a text and preacheth patience,’

the prolongation of the word seems to convey some hint at the longanimity of the virtue.  Consider what a poor curtal we have made of Ocean.  There was something of his heave and expanse in o-ce-an, and Fletcher knew how to use it when he wrote so fine a verse as the second of these, the best deep-sea verse I know,—­

  ’In desperate storms stem with a little rudder
  The tumbling ruins of the oceaen.’

Oceanus was not then wholly shorn of his divine proportions, and our modern oshun sounds like the gush of small-beer in comparison.  Some other contractions of ours have a vulgar air about them. More ’n for more than, as one of the worst, may stand for a type of such.  Yet our old dramatists are full of such obscurations (elisions they can hardly be called) of the th, making whe’r of whether, where of whither, here of hither, bro’r of brother, smo’r of smother, mo’r of mother, and so on.  And dear Brer Rabbit, can I forget him?  Indeed, it is this that explains the word rare (which has Dryden’s support), and which we say of meat where an Englishman would use underdone.  I do not believe, with the dictionaries, that it had ever anything to do with the Icelandic hrar (raw), as it plainly has not in rareripe, which means earlier ripe,—­President Lincoln said of a precocious boy that ‘he was a rareripe.’