Mr. White speaks of the vowels as having had their "pure sound" in the Elizabethan age. We are not sure if we understand him rightly; but have they lost it? We English have the same vowel-sounds with other nations, but indicate them by different signs. Slight changes in orthoëpy we cannot account for, except by pleading the general issue of custom. Why should _foot_ and _boot_ be sounded differently? Why _food_ and _good_? Why should the Yankee mark the distinction between the two former words, and blur it in the case of the latter, thereby incurring the awful displeasure of the "Autocrat," who trusses him, falcon-like, before his million readers and adorers? Why should the Frenchman call his wooden shoe a _sabot_ and his old shoe a _savate_, both from the same root? Alas, we must too often in philology take Rabelais's reason for Friar John's nose! With regard to the pronunciation of the vowels in Queen Bess's days, so much is probable,--that the _a_ in words from the French had more of the _ah_ sound than now, if rhymes may be trusted. We find _placed_ rhyming with _past_; we find the participle _saft_ formed from _save_. One relic of this occurs to us as still surviving in that _slang_ which preserves for us so many glossologic treasures,--_chauffer_,--_to chafe_, (in the sense of angering,)--_to chaff_. The same is true of our Yankee _ch[)a]mber, d[)a]nger_, and _m[)a]nger_, cited by Mr. White. If we have apprehended the bearing of Mr. White's quotation from Butler's English Grammar, we think he has misapprehended Butler. We wish he had not broken the extract off so short, with an _etc_. What did Butler mean by "_oo_ short"? Mr. White draws the inference that _Puck_ was called _Pook_, and that, since it was made to rhyme with _luck_, that word and "all of similar orthography" were pronounced with an _oo_. Did our ancestors have no short _u_, answering somewhat to the sound of that vowel in the French _un_? We have little doubt of it; and since Mr. White repeats so often that we Yankees have retained the Elizabethan words and sounds, may we not claim their pronunciation of _put_ (like _but_) and _sut_ for _soot_, as relics of it? If they had it not, how soon did it come into the language? Already we find Lord Herbert of Cherbury using _pundonnore_, (_point d'honneur_,) which may supply Dr. Richardson with the link he wants between _pun_ and _point_, for the next edition of his Dictionary. Alexander Gill, head-master of St. Paul's School and Milton's teacher, published his "Logonomia Anglica" in 1621, a book which throws more light on the contemporary pronunciation of English than any other we know of. He makes three forms of _u_: the _tenuis_, as in _use_,--the _crassa brevis_, as in _us_,--and the _longa_, as in _ooze_. The Saxons had, doubtless, two sounds of _oo_, a long and a short; and the Normans brought them a third in the French liquid _u_, if they had it not before. We say _if_, because their organs