A striking contrast is observable among those who by their secluded position have held little intercourse with their neighbours, and have contracted an overweening estimation of themselves, and a provincial pride in their customs, manners, and language. Norfolk, surrounded on three sides by the sea, remains unaltered to this day, and still designates as "Shiremen" all who are born out of Norfolk, not without "some little expression of contempt." There is "a narrowness and tenuity in their pronunciation," such as we may fancy--for it is but a fancy--would steal out of the lips of reserved, proudful men, and who, as their neighbours of Suffolk run their common talk into strange melancholy cadences, have characterised their peculiar intonation as "the Suffolk whine!" In Derbyshire the pronunciation is broad, and they change the G into K. The Lancashire folk speak quick and curt, omit letters, or sound three or four words all together; thus, _I wou'didd'n_, or _I woudyedd'd_, is a cacophony which stands for _I wish you would_! When the editor of a Devonshire dialect found that it was aspersed as the most uncouth jargon in England, he appealed to the Lancashire.[4] But such vile rustic dissonance or mere balderdash concerns not our vernacular literature, though it seems that even such agrestic rubbish may have its utility in a provincial vocabulary; for the glossary to the "Exmoor language" was drawn up for the use of lawyers on the western circuit, who frequently mistook the evidence of a rustic witness for want of an interpretation of his words. Some ludicrous misconceptions of equivocal terms or some ridiculous phraseology have been recorded in other counties, among the judges and the bar at a county assize. But it is among our provincial dialects that we discover many beautiful archaisms, scattered remnants of our language, which explain those obscurities of our more ancient writers, singularities of phrase, or lingual peculiarities, which have so often bewildered the most acute of our commentators. After all their voluminous research and their conjectural temerity, a villager in Devonshire or in Suffolk, and, more than either, the remoter native of the North Countree, with their common speech, might have recovered the baffled commentators from their agony. The corrections of modern editors have often been discovered to be only ingenious corruptions of their own whenever the original provincial idiom has started up.