The lines would probably have been more neatly worded than this, but the flow of improvised blank verse from both sisters was inexhaustible.  The somewhat unusual names of Semolina and Tapioca had been adopted for the heroine and confidante on account of their rhythmical advantages, and a certain pleasant Shakespearean ring about them.

I know another family who from long practice have acquired the habit of addressing each other in flowing periods of Johnsonian English.  They never hesitate for an epithet, and manage to round off all their sentences in Dr. Johnson’s best manner.  I was following the hounds on foot one day, with the eldest daughter of this family, when, as we struggled through a particularly sticky and heavy ploughed field, she panted out, “Pray let us hasten to the summit of yonder commanding eminence, whence we can with greater comfort to ourselves witness the further progress of the chase,” and all this without the tiniest hesitation; a most enviable gift!  A son of this family was once riding in the same steeplechase as a nephew of mine.  The youth had lost his cap, and turning round in his saddle, he shouted to my nephew in the middle of the race, between two fences, “You will perceive that I have already sacrificed my cap, and laid it as a votive offering on the altar of Diana.”  One would hardly have anticipated that a youthful cavalry subaltern, in the middle of a steeplechase, would have been able to lay his hands on such choice flowers of speech.  Unfortunately, owing to the time lost by these well-turned periods, both the speaker and my nephew merely figured as “also ran.”

In the “seventies” some of the curious tricks of pronunciation of the eighteenth century still survived.  My aunts, who had been born with, or before the nineteenth century, invariably pronounced “yellow” as “yaller.”  “Lilac” and “cucumber” became “laylock” and “cowcumber,” and a gold bracelet was referred to as a “goold brasslet.”  They always spoke of “Proosia” and “Roosia,” drank tea out of a “chaney” cup, and the eldest of them was still “much obleeged” for any little service rendered to her, played at “cyards,” and took a stroll in the “gyarden.”  My grandfather, who was born in 1766, insisted to the end of his life on terming the capital of these islands “Lunnon,” in eighteenth-century fashion.

Possibly people were more cultured in those days, or, at all events, more in the habit of using their brains.  Imbecility, whether real or simulated, had not come into fashion.  My mother told me that in her young days a very favourite amusement in country houses was to write imitations or parodies of some well-known poet, and every one took part in this.  Nowadays no one would have read the originals, much less be able to imitate them.  My mother had a commonplace book into which she had copied the cleverest of these skits, and Landseer illustrated it charmingly in pen-and-ink for her.