flavour of brogue, is delightful. Any dialect is classic that has
conveyed beautiful thoughts. Who that ever talked with the poet
Tennyson, when he let himself go, over the pipes, would miss the
savour of his broad-rolling Lincolnshire vowels, now heightening the
humour, now deepening the pathos, of his genuine manly speech?
There are many good stories lingering in the memories of those who
knew Dr. James McCosh, the late president of Princeton University,--
stories too good, I fear, to get into a biography; but the best of
them, in print, would not have the snap and vigour of the poorest of
them, in talk, with his own inimitable Scotch-Irish brogue to set it
forth.

A brogue is not a fault. It is a beauty, an heirloom, a
distinction. A local accent is like a landed inheritance; it marks
a man's place in the world, tells where he comes from. Of course it
is possible to have too much of it. A man does not need to carry
the soil of his whole farm around with him on his boots. But,
within limits, the accent of a native region is delightful. 'T is
the flavour of heather in the grouse, the taste of wild herbs and
evergreen-buds in the venison. I like the maple-sugar tang of the
Vermonter's sharp-edged speech; the round, full-waisted r's of
Pennsylvania and Ohio; the soft, indolent vowels of the South. One
of the best talkers now living is a schoolmaster from Virginia,
Colonel Gordon McCabe. I once crossed the ocean with him on a
stream of stories that reached from Liverpool to New York. He did
not talk in the least like a book. He talked like a Virginian.

When Montaigne mentions GAYETY as the third clement of satisfying
discourse, I fancy he does not mean mere fun, though that has its
value at the right time and place. But there is another quality