_The sea_, With his proud mountain-waters envying heaven, When I say 'still!' _run_ into crystal mirrors. Valentinian, iv. 1. Of others' voices, that my adder's _sense_, To critic and to flatterer stopped _are_. Shakespeare, Son. cxii. This last is the error of the poet, who probably had _ears_ in his mind; yet _sense_ may be a collective: all the others are perhaps to be ascribed to the original printers. The intensive particle _be_ was prefixed to verbs much more frequently than at present. There was also a frequent ellipsis of the first personal pronoun before such verbs as _cry_, _beseech_, _beshrew_, &c.; and finally the habit--still retained by the vulgar--of cutting away the first syllable of a word prevailed to some extent. 14. The pronunciation of Shakespeare's time of course differed in many points from that of the present day. Thus _aspect_ and many other words were accented, and properly, on the last syllable; we also have _obdúrate_, _árchbishop_, _cónfessor_, &c. In words such as _case_, _pace_, _lace_, the French sound of the _a_ seems to have been partially retained--Chaucer writes these words _cas_, _caas_, _paas_, _laas_--along with the ordinary English sound. Chaucer also writes 'made' _maad_, Raleigh 'safe' _sauf_; and as the Master of the Revels wrote Shakespeare's name _Shaxberd_, we may suppose that _shake_ and terms of a similar form were pronounced _shak_, &c. If we do not pronounce _lac'd_ as _last_ in "lac'd mutton" (Two Gent. i. 2), we lose the humour of the passage. When Spenser therefore makes _prepar'd_, for example, rime with _hard_, he was probably doing nothing very unusual; for these double sounds--as we may see by the example of _shew show_, _shrew shrow_, _lese lose_--were by no means uncommon. I suspect that _sea_ may have been one of these, and that besides riming with _see_, as indeed Chaucer always writes it, it retained the sound of the Anglo-Saxon [sæ]; for F. Beaumont in his Poems almost invariably makes it rime with such words as _day_, _lay_, _ray_. Waller, followed by Pope, Gay, and other poets, most improperly made _ea_ rime with _ai_, _ay_, as _tea_ with _obey_, &c. As _haste_, _chaste_, _waist_, &c, constantly rime with _fast_, _last_, &c, they were probably, I think certainly, pronounced as they were written, like them; or they may have had a double pronunciation like the words just quoted. As the more usual orthography was _chaunge_, _raunge_, &c, these words would seem to have been pronounced as in French, and as we still pronounce _daunt_, _haunt_, _avaunt_. In words chiefly from the French, terminating in _ci_, _si_, _ti_ followed by a vowel, as in _nation_, _fashion_, _passion_, &c.--to which we may add _ocean_--the usual sound was _s_, not _sh_ as at present. On the whole, the language seems to