stains them with its colour, not unlike the Greek which in taking up oriental words, stripped them of their foreign costume, and bid them to appear as native Greeks”{287}. {FOOTNOTES} {228} In proof that it need not be so, I would only refer to a paper, _On Orthographical Expedients_, by Edwin Guest, Esq., in the _Transactions of the Philological Society_, vol. iii. p. 1. {229} [The scientific treatises on Phonetics of Mr. Alexander J. Ellis and Dr. Henry Sweet have surmounted the difficulty of registering sounds with great accuracy.] {230} I have not observed this noticed in our dictionaries as the original form of the phrase. There is no doubt however of the fact; see _Stanihurst’s Ireland_, p. 33, in Holinshed’s _Chronicles_. [Rather from _torvien_, to throw,--Skeat]. {231} _Notes and Queries_, No. 147. {232} See Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_, Croker’s edit. 1848, p. 233. {233} [The _b_ was purposely foisted into these words by bookmen to suggest their Latin derivation; it did not belong to them in earlier English. The same may be said of the _g_, intruded into ‘deign’ and ‘feign’.] {234} A chief phonographer writes to me to deny that this is the present spelling (1856) of ‘Europe’. It was so when this paragraph was written. [Most people would now consider [Yeuroap] as American pronunciation.] {235} Quintilian has expressed himself with the true dignity of a scholar on this matter (_Inst._ 1, 6, 45): Consuetudinem sermonis vocabo _consensum eruditorum_; sicut vivendi consensum bonorum.--How different from innovations like this the changes in the spelling of German which J. Grimm, so far as his own example may reach, _has_ introduced; and the still bolder and more extensive ones which in the _Preface_ to his _Deutsches Wörterbuch_, pp. liv.-lxii., he avows his desire to see introduced;--as the employment of _f_, not merely where it is at present used, but also wherever _v_ is now employed; the substituting of the _v_, which would be thus disengaged, for _w_, and the entire dismissal of _w_. They may be advisable, or they may not; it is not for strangers to offer an opinion; but at any rate they are not a seizing of the fluctuating, superficial accidents of the present, and a seeking to give permanent authority to these, but they all rest on a deep historic study of the language, and of the true genius of the language. {236} Croker’s edit. 1848, pp. 57, 61, 233. {237} [An incorrect conclusion. Almost all ‘ea’ words were pronounced ‘ai’ down to the eighteenth century. Thus ‘great’ was a true rhyme to ‘cheat’ and ‘complete’, their ordinary pronunciation being ‘grait’, ‘chait’, ‘complait’.] {238} [i.e. ‘Lunnun’.] {239} _A proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English Tongue_, 1711, Works, vol. ix, pp. 139-59.