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GRAMMAR AND PRONUNCIATION.

Shall and Will. It has been pretty clearly shown that the somewhat anomalous and complicated niceties in the English use of shall and will have been developed within the last 300 years or so. It is of course well known that our Irish popular manner of using these two particles is not in accordance with the present correct English standard; yet most of our shall-and-will Hibernianisms represent the classical usage of two or three centuries ago: so that this is one of those Irish 'vulgarisms' that are really survivals in Ireland of the correct old English usages, which in England have been superseded by other and often incorrect forms. On this point I received, some years ago, a contribution from an English gentleman who resided long in Ireland, Mr. Marlow Woollett, a man of wide reading, great culture, and sound judgment. He gives several old examples in illustration, of which one is so much to the point—in the use of will—that you might imagine the words were spoken by an Irish peasant of the present day. Hamlet says:

'I will win for him an (if) I can; if not I will gain nothing but my shame and the odd hits.' ('Hamlet,' Act v., scene ii.)

This (the second will) exactly corresponds with what many of us in Ireland would say now:—'I will win the race if I can; if not I will get some discredit': 'If I go without my umbrella I am afraid I will get wet.' So also in regard to shall; modern English custom has departed from correct ancient usage and etymology, which in many cases we in Ireland have retained. The old and correct sense of shall indicated obligation or duty (as in Chaucer:—'The faith I shal to God') being derived from A.S. sceal 'I owe' or 'ought': this has been discarded in England, while we still retain it in our usage in Ireland. You say to an attentive Irish waiter, 'Please have breakfast for me at 8 o'clock to-morrow morning'; and he answers, 'I shall sir.' When I was a boy I was present in the chapel of Ardpatrick one Sunday, when Father Dan O'Kennedy, after Mass, called on the two schoolmasters—candidates for a school vacancy—to come forward to him from where they stood at the lower end of the chapel; when one of them, Mat Rea, a good scholar but a terrible pedant, called out magniloquently, 'Yes, doctor, we SHALL go to your reverence,' unconsciously following in the footsteps of Shakespeare.

The language both of the waiter and of Mat Rea is exactly according to the old English usage.

'Lady Macbeth (to Macbeth):—Be bright and jovial among your guests to-night.

'Macbeth:—So shall I, love.' ('Macbeth,' Act iii. scene ii.)

'Second Murderer:—We shall, my lord,

Perform what you command us.' (Ibid., Act iii. scene i.)

But the Irish waiter's answer would now seem strange to an Englishman. To him, instead of being a dutiful assent, as it is intended to be, and as it would be in England in old times, it would look too emphatic and assertive, something like as if it were an answer to a command not to do it. (Woollett.)

The use of shall in such locutions was however not universal in Shakespearian times, as it would be easy to show; but the above quotations—and others that might be brought forward—prove that this usage then prevailed and was correct, which is sufficient for my purpose. Perhaps it might rather be said that shall and will were used in such cases indifferently:—