mutton was a vulgar way of pronouncing the word, like pudden' for pudding; so she set out with her new grand pronunciation; and one day rather astonished our butcher by telling him she wanted a small leg of mutting. I think this vulgarism is heard among the English peasantry too: though we have the honour and glory of evolving it independently.
All over Ireland you will hear the words vault and fault sounded vaut and faut. 'If I don't be able to shine it will be none of my faut.' (Carleton, as cited by Hume.) We have retained this sound from old English:
- Let him not dare to vent his dangerous thought:
- A noble fool was never in a fault [faut].
- (Pope, cited by Hume.)
Goldsmith uses this pronunciation more than once; but whether he brought it from Ireland or took it from classical English writers, by whom it was used (as by Pope) almost down to his time, it is hard to say. For instance in 'The Deserted Village' he says of the Village Master:—
- ‘Yet he was kind, or if severe in aught
- The love he bore to learning was in fault’ [faut].
I remember reading many years ago a criticism of Goldsmith by a well-known Irish professor of English literature, in which the professor makes great fun, as a 'superior person,' of the Hibernicism in the above couplet, evidently ignorant of the fact, which Dr. Hume has well brought out, that it is classical English.
