4431. LANGUAGE (English), Dialects.—
It is much to be wished that the publication
of the present county dialects of England
should go on. It will restore to us our
language in all its shades of variation. It will
incorporate into the present one all the riches
of our ancient dialects; and what a store this
will be, may be seen by running the eye over
the county glossaries, and observing the words
we have lost by abandonment and disuse,
which in sound and sense are inferior to nothing
we have retained. When these local vocabularies
are published and digested together
into a single one, it is probable we shall find
that there is not a word in Shakspeare which
is not now in use in some of the counties in
England, and from whence we may obtain its
true sense. And what an exchange will their
recovery be for the volumes of idle commentaries
and conjectures with which that divine
poet has been masked and metamorphosed. We
shall find in him new sublimities which we had
never tasted before, and find beauties in our
ancient poets which are lost to us now. It is
not that I am merely an enthusiast for Palæ
ology. I set equal value on the beautiful engraftments
we have borrowed from Greece and
Rome, and I am equally a friend to the encouragement
of a judicious neology; a language
cannot be too rich.—
To J. Evelyn Denison. Washington ed. vii, 417.
(M.
1825)
