Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/132

It must surely be the familiarity that breeds contempt which tolerates an inexact and feeble standard of scholarship where the folk-speech is concerned. There is a better spirit abroad, not only in America, but in Germany, France, and Denmark. I need only mention here such names as Jusserand, Angellier, Ten Brink, Schippert. A favourite thesis for a German doctorate is some obscure corner of Scottish literature. Before me is a learned and exhaustive academical dissertation on the Scoto-English dialect, publicly defended before the Philosophical Faculty of Lund on 5th March 1862. Another and more recent is a curious philological analysis of verbal and nominal inflexions in Burns. Yet in our educational systems there is no place for such distinctively national studies.