But in his enthusiasm to stamp out the practice of abbreviating, beheading and curtailing polysyllables--a practice which seemed to him a threat to both the elegance and permanence of the language-- he described it as part of a tendency of the English to relapse into their Northern barbarity by multiplying monosyllables and eliding vowels between the rough and frequent consonants of their language. His ignorance of the historical origins of the language and his rather hackneyed remarks on its character do not invalidate the general scheme of his _Proposal_ or his particular criticisms of current linguistic habits, but they did lay him open to the very penetrating and decisive attack of Elizabeth Elstob.
In her reply to Swift she repeats all the stock defenses of the English monosyllables and consonants, but, by presenting them in combination, and in a manner at once scholarly and forceful, she makes the most convincing case against Swift. Unlike most of her predecessors, Miss Elstob is not on the defensive. She is always ready to give a sharp personal turn to her scholarly refutations--as, for instance, when she demonstrates the usefulness of monosyllables in poetry by illustrations from a series of poets beginning with Homer and ending with Swift. There can be little doubt that Swift is decisively worsted in this argument.
It is not known whether Swift ever read Miss Elstob’s _Rudiments_, though it is interesting to notice a marked change of emphasis in his references to the Anglo-Saxon language. In the _Proposal_ he had declared with a pretense of knowledge, that Anglo-Saxon was “excepting some few variations in the orthography... the same in most original words with our present English, as well as with German and other northern dialects.” But in _An Abstract of the History of England_ (probably revised in 1719) he says that the English which came in with the Saxons was “extremely different from what it is now.” The two statements are not incompatible, but the emphasis is remarkably changed. It is possible that some friend had pointed out to Swift that his earlier statement was too gross a simplification, or alternatively that someone had drawn his attention to Elizabeth Elstob’s _Rudiments_.