The middle class—­the piccolo mondo—­that shares Italian dialect with the poor are more strictly local in their manners than either the opulent or the indigent of the same city.  They have moreover the busy intelligence (which is the intellect of patois) at its keenest.  Their speech keeps them a sequestered place which is Italian, Italian beyond the ken of the traveller, and beyond the reach of alteration.  And—­what is pretty to observe—­the speakers are well conscious of the characters of this intimate language.  An Italian countryman who has known no other climate will vaunt, in fervent platitudes, his Italian sun; in like manner he is conscious of the local character of his language, and tucks himself within it at home, whatever Tuscan he may speak abroad.  A properly spelt letter, Swift said, would seem to expose him and Mrs Dingley and Stella to the eyes of the world; but their little language, ill-written, was “snug.”

Lovers have made a little language in all times; finding the nobler language insufficient, do they ensconce themselves in the smaller? discard noble and literary speech as not noble enough, and in despair thus prattle and gibber and stammer?  Rather perhaps this departure from English is but an excursion after gaiety.  The ideal lovers, no doubt, would be so simple as to be grave.  That is a tenable opinion.  Nevertheless, age by age they have been gay; and age by age they have exchanged language imitated from the children they doubtless never studied, and perhaps never loved.  Why so?  They might have chosen broken English of other sorts—­that, for example, which was once thought amusing in farce, as spoken by the Frenchman conceived by the Englishman—­a complication of humour fictitious enough, one might think, to please anyone; or else a fragment of negro dialect; or the style of telegrams; or the masterly adaptation of the simple savage’s English devised by Mrs Plornish in her intercourse with the Italian.  But none of these found favour.  The choice has always been of the language of children.  Let us suppose that the flock of winged Loves worshipping Venus in the Titian picture, and the noble child that rides his lion erect with a background of Venetian gloomy dusk, may be the inspirers of those prattlings.  “See then thy selfe likewise art lyttle made,” says Spenser’s Venus to her child.

Swift was the best prattler.  He had caught the language, surprised it in Stella when she was veritably a child.  He did not push her clumsily back into a childhood he had not known; he simply prolonged in her a childhood he had loved.  He is “seepy.”  “Nite, dealest dea, nite dealest logue.”  It is a real good-night.  It breathes tenderness from that moody and uneasy bed of projects.

A COUNTERCHANGE