“Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the _great_, There, stamped with arms, Newcastle shines com_plete_”. Spenser’s constant use of the word a century and a half earlier, leaves no doubt that such was the invariable pronunciation of his time{237}. Again, Pope rhymes ‘obliged’ with ‘beseiged’; and it has only ceased to be ‘obl_ee_ged’ almost in our own time. Who now drinks a cup of ‘tay’? yet there is abundant evidence that this was the fashionable pronunciation in the first half of the last century; the word, that is, was still regarded as French: Locke writes it ‘thé’; and in Pope’s time, though no longer written, it was still pronounced so. Take this couplet of his in proof: “Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms _obey_, Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes _tea_”. So too a pronunciation which still survives, though scarcely among well-educated persons, I mean ‘Room’ for ‘Rome’, must have been in Shakespeare’s time the predominant one, else there would have been no point in that play on words where in _Julius Cæsar_ Cassius, complaining that in all _Rome_ there was not _room_ for a single man, exclaims, “Now is it _Rome_ indeed, and _room_ enough”. Samuel Rogers too assures us that in his youth “everybody said ‘Lonnon’{238} not ‘London’; that Fox said ‘Lonnon’ to the last”. The following quotation from Swift will prove to you that I have been only employing here an argument, which he employed long ago against the phonographers of his time. He exposes thus the futility of their scheme{239}: “Another cause which has contributed not a little to the maiming of our language, is a foolish opinion advanced of late years that we ought to spell exactly as we speak: which, besides the obvious inconvenience of utterly destroying our etymology, would be a thing we should never see an end of. Not only the several towns and counties of England have a different way of pronouncing, but even here in London they clip their words after one manner about the court, another in the city, and a third in the suburbs; and in a few years, it is probable, will all differ from themselves, as fancy or fashion shall direct; all which, reduced to writing, would entirely confound orthography”.