./• . UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. KkOM THI-: I.IBkAkV Ol BENJAMIN PARKE AVERY. GIFT OF MRS. AVERY, f Aiitrusl, t8o6. f -^iitrusi, t»Of). ^ _ ^^ Accessiomhlo.L)37'^^ Oms No. eoO 4? I . /DO ,0\ 130 sol STUDIES IN ENGLISH; OR, GLIMPSES OF THE INNER LIFE OE OUR LANGUAGE. M. SCHELE DE VERE, LL.D. PROFESSOB OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA. Uiri7ERSlTr] NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER AND COMPANY. 1867. ^37f7 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by ChAKLES SCEIBNEB AND COMPANY, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. RivMisn)!, oambeidob: STIRIOTTPBl) AND PRINTBD BT H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANT. PREFACE. The illustrious founder of the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, appreciating with rare foresight, nearly fifty years ago, the importance of a scientific study of the English Language, inserted Anglo-Saxon among the sub- jects on which a course of lectures was to be delivered by the incumbent of the chair of Modern Languages. The author, whose good fortune it has been to fill that chair for many years, has been led to think that the increasing interest in the study of our mother tongue called for some aid and systematic guidance, and he has therefore endeav- ored in the following pages to point out those topics which deserve most attention, and those methods which lead to a profitable study on a historic basis. He hopes that his suggestions will call more general attention to the growing importance of a new science, which can already boast of a Miiller in England and a Marsh in our own country, and to the charms of the inner life of a noble old tongue, which, through the nations who speak it, now rules the world in undisputed supremacy. University of Virginia, November, 1866. ;niri7ERsiTr] CONTENTS. •— CHAPTER I. PAGE INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 1 CHAPTER n. ENGLISH RELATIONS 7 CHAPTER ni. ENGLISH ELEMENTS 16 CHAPTER IV. LATIN IN ENGLISH , . .26 CHAPTER V. ENGLISH SOUNDS ........ 49 CHAPTER VI. ENGLISH ORTHOGRAPHY AND ENGLISH ACCENT . . 67 CHAPTER YII. NAMES OF PLACES 81 CHAPTER VIII. NAMES OF MEN 114 CHAPTER IX. HOW NOUNS ARE MADE . . . . . . 189 CHAPTER X. HOW NOUNS ARE USED . . . . . . .172 VI CONTENTS. CHAPTER XI. rAOB HOW NOUNS ARE ABUSED 196 CHAPTER XU. ^ ADJECTIVES 219 CHAPTER XIH. PRONOUNS 288 CHAPTER XIV. HOW WE COUNT 257 CHAPTER XV. LIVING WORDS 272 CHAPTER XVI. ADVERBS 812 CHAPTER XVH. PARTICLES 828 CHAPTER XVm. SHIFTING LETTERS 846 L '^ or tbm'^:^ STUDIES IN ENGLISH. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. "'AvSp6i XapaK-nip eK AiJyov yvwpiferoi." — Old Comedy. The youngest of all European idioms, our great and noble language has yet spread farthest over the globe and now rules the world without a rival. More than fifty mil- lions of men, forming the most enterprising race upon earth, speak it as their native and only tongue. The elder cousin, staid, precise, and settled, uses it at home in his counting-room ; the younger, bold and adventurous, carries it with him as he roves through the wide world. It has long since become the great instrument of European cul- ture, superseding the Latin, which was once as general, though used mainly by the scholar and the churchman, and the French, the language of courts and the higher circles of the Continent. Even in the early days of Queen Elizabeth, the gentle Daniel, the Atticus of his age, foresaw its future greatness and sang : — " Who knows whither we may vent The treasure of our tongue ? To what strange shores This gain of our best glory may be sent T' enrich unknowing nations with our stores ? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident May come refined with accents that are ours ? " The prophecy has come true, and wherever on this wide earth men may meet, in the merchant's busy marts or on the prairies and pampas of America, amid the nomadic 2 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. tribes of Asia, or in the mysterious heart of the land of Ham, ice-bound in polar regions or becalmed under the tropics, — everywhere they may hear words familiar to their ear and dear to their heart. For our good English has become the language of the world ; and strong with the colonist, cunning with the merchant, and bringing the blessings of the gospel with the missionary, it promises soon to spread the benefits of civilization, and the glory of God over the whole earth. Surely, then, such a language deserves to be well studied, to be thoroughly known by those whose precious birth- right it is, and by all who agree with old Roger Ascham that, " even as a hawke fleeth not hie with one wing, even so a man reacheth not to excellency with one tongue.** Modern science has done much to acquaint us with the form and the nature of our fellow-men. It goes and counts their inches, it weighs them by the pound, it meas- ures their skulls and examines their bumps, it counts the years of their life and the hours of sickness, it knows how many cubic feet of air they breathe and what are their chances of marriage or suicide — and should it not inquire what they tell each other and how they say it? Is not language, daguerreotyped thought as we may well call it, more expressive than manners and customs, law and con- stitution, history and literature? As there is no race among men that possesses a character so sharply defined as the English, so there is no tongue upon earth more clearly expressive of the nation's mind. Boldly and freely the Englishman uses his mother tongue, boldly and freely it proclaims him abroad, by its simple forms, its nervous power, its deep meaning. It never forgets its own dig- nity, its noble descent. For the English has an ancestry unparalleled in the history of languages. It is heir to all the greatness and all the power of the two idioms that represent the two ruling races of Christendom, — the Romance and the Germanic. Here alone they are fused INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 3 together to form a harmonious whole of unsurpassed effi- cacy, in striking contrast with the Roman French and the Gothic German. Flowing from a bold mixture of such elements, freeing itself by the power of its own mighty current of all incumbrance and superfluity, adopting with wise discrimination whatever it finds good and useful in other idioms, as historic events bring it in contact with foreign nations, it has become well-nigh incomparable, the simplest of all languages in form, the most spiritual in its mode of expression. With a just pride, therefore, based on a legitimate ap- preciation of its great beauty and powers. Englishmen and all their descendants have ever loved it dearly and used it freely. It was their affection for it that made them, centuries ago, scorn to pray and to worship their Maker in a foreign tongue when the whole of Europe, un- der the sway of Rome, yet held Latin sacred. They used their vernacular before all their kindred races for prose writing, and thus showed their early mental maturity, since prose requires knowledge and deep thought, whilst poetry may at least and often does content itself with the expres- sion of feelings. Never did foreign idioms play the mas- ter in England, as they did on the Continent ; never did her great writers disgrace their names by a subservient preference for foreign languages. How different is this from the German, which was despised by the great Fred- erick, held in contempt by Leibnitz, the most renowned philosopher of Germany, and, to some extent at least, laid aside even in our day, by the master of modern writers, Alexander von Humboldt, avowedly for the purpose of making his works, written in French, accessible to scholars of all countries. Men who have thus abandoned the tongue of their fathers may have gained individually, but they have lost the pleasure of writing in their mother tongue, inseparable as it needs must be of greater force and stronger individuality; they have abandoned at once all 4 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. hope of the eternal renown of having created a language like the immortal Dante. The same love and pride, which Englishmen thus showed in their strong attachment to their language, and their stub- born resistance to all influence from abroad, has ever pro- tected them against tyranny at home, and they alone of all nations have always enjoyed unrestrained freedom of the press. Already Hermes notices with natural satis- faction, that England never knew an Index Expurgatorius, nor has its genius ever been shackled by an Inquisition. On the contrary, this freedom of speech called forth and fostered a' corresponding spirit of free inquiry and led the way to that prudent enjoyment of liberty, of which the British people have just cause to be proud, amid fallen thrones and shattered democracies. With all these attractions, however, and in spite of the rich reward held out to the diligent student, little has as yet been done for the proper study of English. Much time and labor are bestowed in schools and at home on Greek and Latin ; French and Italian, Spanish and Ger- man, receive their share of attention, but everybody is apparently expected to know English by instinct. Where efforts have been made in the right direction, they have been thwarted by the old scholastic method, which fills our grammars with Latin terms and contents itself with long- winded definitions. We seem to forget entirely that lan- guage consists of two parts, like man himself — of the out- ward form, the word corresponding to our earth-bom body, and of the inner meaning, which represents the immortal soul. The knowledge of words themselves is worth little. It was this view which led the great Polyglot-cardinal to reply peevishly to an indiscreet flatterer : " What am I but an ill-bound dictionary?" To attain a thorough knowl- edge of the meaning of words and of the manner in which at different times and under changing influences they may be made to succeed in expressing it in their out- INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 5 ward form, this is the true object of the study of lan- guage. We must never lose sight of the fact that words are the only medium of the inner life between man and man, and that, as Montaigne already expressed it, " Nous ne sommes hommes et nous ne tenons les uns aiix autres que par la parole." Nor must it be forgotten that, interesting as the history of words is — and Dean Trench surely has convinced his many readers of this fact — there is also a history of lan- guages, which may be studied with profit and pleasure. Their pedigree is as complete and as full of adventure as that of the Rohans, though it may not lead us with them to the door of Noah's Ark. Few subjects in the whole range of human knowledge are fuller of interest and richer in instruction than the gradual development of a national language, exhibiting as in a mirror the many changes going on in the nation's mind. We all have felt this more or less distinctly, when we have marked the^ difference between the virtus of the manly Roman, and the vertu of the degenerate but art-loving Italian of our day, or when the knave of our day recalls by chance to us those lines of the version of the great Wickliffe, in which St. Paul calls himself reverently " a knave of Jesus Christ." It is not accident nor arbitrary power that makes " words, whilom flourishing Pass now no more, but banished from the court, . Dwell with disgrace among the vulgar sort, And those, which eld's strict doom did disallow And damn for bullion, go for current now." What is true of words, is equally true of the whole lan- guage ; it ever bears on its surface the impress of the mind of the people by whom it is spoken, and he who studies it with History by his side and Philosophy coming to his aid, will soon find that it leads him directly to the most retired and inmost parts of the soul of a nation, the secrets of which no other key can unlock. 6 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. It is the purpose of this Essay to throw out some sug- gestions and to furnish some information that may aid in thus studying a language, of which the master of philol- ogy, Grimm, says that " in wealth, wisdom, and strict econ- omy, none of the living languages can vie with it." The richer, the wiser, and the more perfect in its mechanism it is, the greater of course the difficulty of appreciating it fully and of entering deeply into its secret chambers. Noble efforts, however, have been made toward this end in England and abroad, and there is reason to hope that we shall soon be fully acquainted with the private as well as the public history of our language, and then agree with the sentiment of an enthusiastic admirer, who sings, that — " Stronger far than hosts that march With battle-flags unfurled, It goes with Freedom, Thought, and Truth, To rouse and rule the world." r^*^ Of TEW < CHAPTER n. ENGLISH RELATIONS. " Idioms have their kindred as well as men." — Duponceau. When a man rises to eminence in our midst, friend and foe become alike anxious to ascertain who his fore- fathers were and what relations he has now among men. To trace his pedigree back beyond a few generations is generally found a difficult task, which is finally, if not alto- gether abandoned, as is apt to be the case in this country, referred to the Herald's College, where fact and fancy are happily blended. There it is all well ascertained and duly attested, but in spite of shield and motto we do not believe the statement quite as readily and as fully as the ingenious officers would have us do. It is not otherwise with lan- guages. Let one of them become great and powerful, and at once curiosity and genuine interest are eagerly at work, to ascertain the early history of the idiom. Here also easy and complete solutions are freely offered. Now the San- scrit is declared to be the common ancestor of all lan- guages, and now the Hebrew ; some prefer the Celtic, and others again trace all words back to the famous nine sylla- bles of the great Murray. In our day, even, champions take up arms in behalf of the Interjections, and proclaim them to have been the original words from which all others have been derived, somewhat after the manner of Darwin's great theory, and immediately they are met by the advo- cates of the famous Bow-wow theory, as Max Muller calls it, who believe in the cries of animals and the voices of Nature as having taught man his speech. 8 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. In spite of all these varied explanations, however, the first. origin of language is still, to this day, one of those mysteries which a wise Providence has, for some good pur- pose, concealed as yet from our eye, even as our great mother Nature hides the grain in her dark bosom, until it breaks as a tender blade through the clod to greet the light of day. Whether language be a gift granted to man, like all other faculties, at the time of his creation, or whether he be capable to produce and form it by means of his own unaided powers, is a much vexed question. Nor have the wisest among us yet agreed as to the unity of language, for while some admit without doubt or gainsay the simple statement of Holy Writ, from the first moment of man's existence to the confounding of lips at Babel, others insist - upon this view, that as races owe their origin to different pairs of first men, so languages also have arisen from as many different mother tongues. Fortunately, it is not im- possible to understand English well without tracing it back to the creation of the world. We are quite sure that the poor Egyptian boy, who was sent, with a goat for his sole companion, into the Libyan desert to teach Psammitichus by the 'first words he would utter the original tongue of the earth, did not speak English ; and as the Spanish have settled it to their own satisfaction that Castilian is the lan- guage which has ever been used in heaven, we dare not present an equal claim for our English. This only we know, that it had its first origin, as far as is known to history and to tradition, in the Orient. Ex Oriente lux, seems to be true with regard to languages as well as with creeds. For our researches point all to the one great fact, that, if we set aside the comparatively unex-' plored territories of the American and African idioms, to-'*i gether with the Chinese, there are in the whole kingdom of speech but three grammatical families to which every known dialect can be referred with unerring certainty. Each of these families bears its own distinctive marks, so ENGLISH RELATIONS. 9 clearly defined that there is no mingling between them, no possibility of mistaking the allegiance of even the latest descendants. The white, the red, and the black races are not more strikingly different from each other in color and character than the Shemitic, the Aryan, and the nomadic Turanian families of languages. With the first and the last of these groups our English has nothing in common, though the Bible has made some Shemitic terms dear and sacred to us, and trade and commerce have familiarized us with a few Turanian words. But there is neither kindred nor sympathy between those languages and our own. For the English is a child of the great Aryan family, so called from its ancient homestead in Asia, now known as Iran. Thence all the descendants of that most noble family have spread westward, until Asia and Europe formed, as to language, but one great country, and their vast brotherhood became known as the Indo-European. All the members of this family trace back their origin to one great central language, and all of them abandoned their first home in times far earlier than those when Homer sang, when Zoroaster gave his law^s, and the poets of the Vedas wrote their marvelous myths. All, moreover, from the oldest known, the San- scrit, to the youngest born, our English, are but varied forms of the same type, — modifications of the same lan- guage as it was once spoken in Asia. When they dwelt there, and where they ruled, we cannot now ascertain, for their early history goes back far beyond historic chronol- ogy ; and yet that they possess an existence and a reality is proved by inductive evidence beyond all cavil and doubt. But this is not all, for recent discoveries have taught us even more surprising facts regarding these mysterious an- cestors of our English. The most careful researches, the most sifting investigations, have failed to bring to light a single new root that has been added to the first common inheritance of these dialects, or a single new element that has been created in the gradual formation of their grammar 10 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. since their first separation! On the other hand, it has been discovered that many words, which ^vitnessed that early breaking up of the family, are still living in India and Europe alike, and thus bear evidence, now, of the common first origin. The terms for God, house, father and mother, son and daughter, heart and tears, axe and tree, dog and cow, identical in all Indo-European families, have thus been well compared to watchwords of a great army on its solemn march around the globe. For many of these terms, which sprang up more than four thousand years ago at Agra, at Delhi, and Benares, have but quite lately scaled the Rocky Mountains of Western America, and are rapidly filling the forests on the shores of the Pacific. Of the many members of this family, seven have risen to such distinction as to have become, in their turn, found- ers of great and powerful races. Two alone have main- tained themselves at home : 1. The Indie, represented of old by the Sanscrit, which was spoken more than fifteen hundred years before Christ, and yet produced in that hoary antiquity already the far- famed Vedas. Its living forms are the Pracrit and Tali, and another strange, uncouth language, long considered a mere jargon, and then traced back to ancient Egypt or Palestine, but now re-established in its genuine birthright. This is the idiom spoken by the Gypsies, who have at last succeeded in proving their melancholy claim to be consid- ered exiles from Hindostan, their native land. It is they alone who have brought the few strange forms of Sanscrit words we know to Western Europe, as parts of their quaint language, in which the oldest words of ancient idioms min- gle with the latest offspring of modern tongues. 2. The Iranic, famous under the name of Zend, as the language of Zoroaster's great work, Zenda Vesta, and of late much endeared to us by the remarkable discoveries made in the wedge-shaped inscriptions of Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, which so strikingly illustrate and confirm ENGLISH RELATIONS. 11 numerous, hitherto unexplained, statements of the Bible. Both languages, however, are like the pure Sanscrit, now dead languages, and survive only in the slightly altered form of Armenian and the national language of the Per- sian, who could boast already a thousand years before Christ, of an illustrious poet, Ferdusi. The other promi- nent members of this family have, with the races that spoke them, left the cradle of mankind in Central Asia, and, in successive waves, made their way westward. One after another the idioms of the ruling nations of the world, they have each been supreme for a time, and then given way to a successor. The oldest of all these is — 3. The Celtic, which Herodotus already knew as the lan- guage of a people that had passed even beyond the pillars of Hercules, and who are, therefore, commonly looked upon as the oldest settlers in Europe. At the very first dawn of history it is found as the idiom used by the masters of Eu- rope. It was heard alike in England and in Ireland, in France and in Spain, in Switzerland and in the eastern regions as far back as Thracia. But its splendor has de- parted as the sceptre has been wrested from the Celtic race, and now it is spoken by little more than ten mill- ions. But it still bears marks of a strange individuality ;' its double words are so loosely joined together that the original elements may be easily seen and severed, and its mode of inflection differs strangely from that of all other languages, inasmuch as it affects not, as usually, the final, but changes, instead, the initial letters. In Great Britain it has, from of old, exhibited a strict line of division between the Cymric or Old British, and the Gadhelic or Irish. The former is now represented by the Welsh, which alone survives in full vigor. The Cornish can hardly be said to exist any longer except as a written language, for the last person who spoke it as her mother- tongue is reported to have died more than seventy years ago. The Armorican, introduced by fugitive Britons into 12 STUDIES IX ENGLISH- that part of northern France which, from the new settlers, took its name of Little Britanny, resembles the Welsh so nearly that Count de la Yillemarque, a native of Bretagne, who used it in addressing a literary club in Wales, was un- derstood by'all who were present The Gadhelic or Gaelic survives as Erse in Ireland, where it still claims to be considered a national tongue. The Gaelic proper, carried across the channel to Scot- land, is now only heard in the remoter vallej-s of the Grampian Mountains and in some parishes of the country lying between Cairn and Caithness. The Isle of 3Ian en- joys its own Celtic dialect, the Manx, which is, however, mixed with Danish and other Norse elements. Between these dialects and our English there is no other relationship than that of common descent, obscured by an early separation, which dates back to very ancient times. The mechanical admixture of Celtic words and forms of expression is but small, as there seems to have existed a strong, reciprocal repulsion between the Celts and all other European families and their languages. Theirs was the fierce warfere between the Druid and the priest, the mis- tietoe and the palm, and the victorious cross in those days spared not the beaten foe. Even in those counties of Wales, which were last Anglicized, not a dozen words have been adopted by the Saxon from the Celt — his mouth ab- hors their fluent gutturals. After the Celts came those mysterious wanderers, whose sea-faring life marked them early among the nations of the earth, and earned for them the name of Pelasgi. Their idioms now in turn ruled the world, as 4. HeUenic in fair Hellas, after the four dialects of ear- lier days, the Doric, Aeolic. Attic, and Ionic had formed the common language of ancient Greece, and as 5. Italic^ which, in its new home of Latium, became known as Latin. Like the Greek it also arose from a mix- ture of early dialects : the Oscan, spoken by the Samnites, ENGLISH EELATIOXS. 13 and not unknown to Borne as late even as the days of the Caesars, the Umbrian, which could boast of the earliest priestly literature and the renowned seven " Tables of Igu- vium," and the Latin of Latium. In its turn it has, after the hH of Rome and the advent of new races, divided into numerous branches, and bequeathed to our day the beauti- ful dialects, which we know as Romance languages. Its descendants now spoken are the Italian, the TTallachian, a quaint form of Latin mixed with Turkish, Greek, and an- cient Illyrian, the Spanish with its younger son the Portu- guese, the French, and the Provencal. Among these the English finds itself already more at home, and a striking family-likeness may be discovered here and there. The French enters actually into our ver- nacular, and claims, since the days of the Norman Con- quest, a large share of our vocabulary. What makes it more important to us, is the fact that the distribution does not seem to have been left to chance only, and close obser- vation will easily show the remarkable lines that divide the two elements. Where the true Saxon words have to do with the sensible world, the French words deal with the spiritual ; the former stand for things particular and con- crete, the latter for things general and abstract Still, there ever remains something foreign and uncongenial in the descendants of the Romance family, which shows clearly that there is no near kinship between them and the older, dearer part of our English. " English words,** says Hare, " sound best from English lips," and though there are many French terras, which we could not well do without, we still prefer, in £uniliar language and for ordinary pur- poses, the good old Saxon terms. Thus we say rather like than similar, give than present, beg than solicit, kinsman than relation, neighborhood than vicinity, and praise than encomiimi. We feel much more at home with the members of the 6. Teutonic &mily, in whose midst our English stands as 14 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. the fairest and strongest of all. Here it meets above all the High German, the oldest in culture, the richest in pure vowels, euphony and vigor, the greatest in intellectual strength for nearly ten centuries. Inferior by far is the elder brother, who sold his birthright long ago, the Low German, although its oldest branch, the Gothic, was spoken by the conquerors of Imperial Rome, the followers of Alaric, Theodoric, and Attila, and grand old Ulfilas himself, who used it, not four hundred years after Christ, to render the word of God for the first time into a modern tongue. A lowly branch of this family, the Anglo-Saxon, found its way from the Continent and Southern Denmark to the dis- tant shores of England, and there rose slowly and painfully, to become in our day the language of the world. The Old Dutch, which has gained its independence and a literature of its own only since the thirteenth century, is its nearest relation, and together with the old Frisic on the northern coast of Germany, which is unfortunately dying out since the Frisians have been held in subjefction by foreign rulers, furnishes the best illustrations and exhibits the most strik- ing resemblance to our Old English. Of scarcely inferior rank and antiquity with the High and the Low German are the members of the Scandinavian family. The Swedish preserves its oldest spoken forms in a few remote valleys of the interior, whilst the Icelandic, brought from Sweden to the Ultima Thule, can boast of the oldest written forms of these idioms. The Danish and the Norwegian are comparatively modem, and can hardly lay claims to be considered truly national tongues, though the former has a literature worthy of the highly cultivated people by whom it is spoken. These, then, are the nearest relations our English has among the many idioms spoken in Europe. The languages of the first wave of immigration have receded to the far West of the Continent, and barely survive there in daily de- clining vigor and in wholly changed forms. Those of the ENGLISH RELATIONS. 15 second wave, the Germanic, rule now in the centre of Eu- rope, and between them and English the feeling of kindred is strong and the facility of interchange most abundant. The last-comer in Europe, 7. The Sclavonic family has not yet penetrated to the centre, though it is firmly and indefatigably pushing its out- posts farther and farther westward. It holds supreme but somewhat barbarous sway over the gigantic East, and in the form of powerful Russian claims the assistance of its kins- men, the Polish, Bohemian, and others, to aid in establish- ing a vast Panslavism. With them our English has noth' ing in common ; there may even be said to exist a feeling of antagonism, as if the languages, like the races, foresaw that the day cannot be far, when they will have to struggle, as their predecessors have done before them, for the scep- tre of the world. CHAPTER m. ENGLISH ELEMENTS. '' The English, thanks to its yaried elements, ia a veliicle of marvelous power and beauty for the expression of thought." A SCION of the great Germanic family, our English is the direct and legitimate descendant of the Anglo-Saxon, but in the course of its long and prosperous career it has entered into many an alliance with other idioms and taken at least one other language, the French, to its heart and home, fairly dividing with it the rule of Great Britain. It may well be said that in English all the existing nationali- ties of Europe — the Sclavonic alone excepted — meet and mingle together. The Celtic race, the oldest of them all, has nowhere preserved itself so long and so nobly as here ; the Germanic has here borne its earliest fruit, shown its greatest independence, and held its own bravely to this day against foe and rival ; then the Northman vigorously en- tered upon the scene, and though possessing great power of his own blended willingly with the Saxon, and thus added the last elements wanting to national greatness. The Latin of ancient Rome, of the Church, and of Modem Science, brought each its fair offering ; the Greek has sup- plied some recent wants, and hardly a race upon earth but has sent a tribute to the mighty idiom. The immense power of such a mingling of dialects, each endowed with its own peculiar strength, was early seen. The first result was not the adoption of any one prevailing speech, but the formation of a jargon, which not until the fourteenth century adopted a fixed, though degenerate form. And ENGLISH ELEMENTS. 17 yet, but a few generations later this tongue possessed already the greatest poet the human race has ever known, and since then it has become the first of all languages spoken. We would err grievously, however, if we were to con- clude from this variety of elements, which constitute the idiom, that it is a mere farrago of discordant material, or even a mere continuation of one or more of the parent stocks. As a living organism English is an entirely new individual. It is neither Anglo-Saxon in a new garb, nor the offspring of a union between Saxon and Norman French. Both these languages were inflected, and had their rigidly fixed syntax dependent on inflections. In the continued struggle, however, during which the two tongues fought for supremacy, both lost all the looser forms and more changeable modes of expression, retaining little be- yond the essentials of their substance. These the new idiom, English, freed from all inflections, and subjected to entirely new laws of syntax, which now make up its striking and exclusive character among the languages of Europe. Nevertheless it is well worth while to inquire what were the different elements, the amalgamation of which could produce such remarkable results. The very heart of the language is, of course, Anglo-Saxon, but this was already not a simple idiom, but a mixture of various dialects, belonging to different races. The latter belonged, however, all to the one great German people, upon whose lands the increasing power of Imperial Rome encroached from year to year more forcibly. As her victorious legions pressed the unhappy tribes more closely, dislodging and expelling one after another from their native seats, they naturally retreated in the line which offered them the greatest advantages. This was marked out by the great rivers, the Rhine, the Elbe and their tributaries, all flowing in a north-westerly direction, and offering at the same time a 2 18 STUDIES IX ENGLISH. ready means of protection in the rear, and an easy outlet in front toward not far distant lands. Like all rude races, the Germans of those days suffered under the sad effects of jealousies of tribe, of family, and of class, losing thus in their earliest days, as in our own century, by the want of unity, the enjoyment of that vast power to which they are so well entitled by their numbers, their strength, and their intellectual superiority. Hence they did not migrate in large bodies, and when they came to England, they presented neither political nor linguistic unity, but they came in detached numbers, with varied peculiarities and distinct unwritten dialects. When we speak of a conquest by Anglo-Saxons, there- fore, we mean by it a gradual settlement of the British isles by a number of successive and totally distinct bodies of invaders from Germany, representing in unknown pro- portions all the races and tongues, which are found between the Elbe and the Eider, with contributions from other tribes dwelling on the Atlantic and the Baltic. At a time when history is still silent and tradition our only authority, it is difficult to speak with precision. So much only can be stated with certainty, that among these various elements three stood preeminent at the first invasion and have since left their impress unmistakably on the character and the language of the English people. These are the Jutes from southern Denmark, who, pressed upon by their neighbors, the Danes, left their native land and settled in Kent, the Isle of Wight, and part of the opposite coast of Hampshire. Then there were the Saxons proper, from the modem Duchy of Holstein, between the Elbe and the Eider, a race of pirates and marauders, against whom Theodosius fought and triumphed under the • Emperor Valentinian, and thus earned the name of Saxoni- cus. Their inroads became from year to year bolder and soon so frequent, that in the fourth century the sea-coast of England was known as Litus Saxonicum. At last they ENGLISH ELEMENTS. 19 made themselves masters of all the lands south of the Thames. Extending their conquest east, west, and south, they founded the kingdoms of Essex, Wessex, and Sussex, and in the centre of all Middlesex. Great must have been their power and permanent their influence, for to this day the Welsh and the Gaels, following the example of their forefathers, call the English language Saesonaeg, and the Scotch Highlanders speak in like manner of their neigh- bors as Sassenachs. Finally, there came Angles from that part of Slesvic, which still bears their name, between the' Eider and an arm of the Baltic. They took all the rest of the island, founding for their folk the two kingdoms of the north and the south, Norfolk and Suffolk, and extend- ing in Northumberland northward to the Firth and the Clyde. The Britons by no means succumbed at once. On the contrary, they fought a noble battle for their land, their liberty and their faith — a battle which lasted for nearly three centuries. Fate, however, was against them. They had fulfilled the purposes for which their race had been sent to these islands, and at last their Arthur lay buried at Glastonbury, and nothing was left them but the hope, that he will one day come back, rising once more in his might, and restore their former glory. When the struggle was over, the Saxons were masters of the land, but it was not on the battle-field that they had conquered the fierce Celt. Their victory was achieved, slowly and painfully, in the daily battle of life, in a silent but unceasing strife, not by the strong hand and the bloody sv/ord, but by the power of a superior will and a better mind. Their energy and their stubbornness carried the day. The brilliant but unsteady and easily wearied Celt was no match for their unceasing perseverance. For a time, the two races lived apart and yet alongside of each other, the Briton under the shelter of his fortified towns, the legacy of his Roman masters, the Saxon in the open country, where " he loved to 20 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. hear the lark sing." Scanty as their intercourse was, it led, in the order of nature, to a gradual mingling of races and exchange of words. Saxon princes appear under Celtic names, and Celtic tools became known by Saxon titles. After a while the weaker disappeared step by step, whilst the stronger, growing apace, not only spread from district to district, but also worked its way slowly to a common unity. By the time the miscalled Heptarchy came to an end, and the Saxon sovereignties were all united in the person of Egbert, the Saxons had conquered. Their enemies were driven to ;*emote mountains and inaccessible morasses in the far off corners of the land, and with them their speech also disappeared. Even the few Celtic words, that had been temporarily grafted on the Saxon, withered again as they received no more nourishment from the parent stem, and soon Saxon stood alone as the national tongue of England. But the rule of the Saxon, also, did not long remain undisturbed, for as the weak Britons had fallen an easy prey to the bold Saxons, so the disunited Saxons suc- cumbed in their turn to the Normans. Those bold warriors and daring sailors, who according to the Chronicle of St. Gallen had already in the days of Charlemagne passed the Straits of Gibraltar, and whom Charles the Bald had sent out of France, not with steel, which might have kept them away, but with seven thousand pounds of silver, that but served to invite them again, subsequently crossed the channel and won all the fair lands of P^ngland in a single day. They triumphed at Hastings, and without mercy and without ceremony they made themselves masters of the land. The Domesday Book shows us now, how the broad acres, the lofty castles, and even the fair daughters of the Saxon nobles were given away with lavish liberality to Norman knight and Flemish weaver, to the brave in purple born and to the cunning adventurer from foreign lands. But there was that in the Saxon people which made them ENGLISH ELEMENTS. 21 live even when almost crushed by their fierce masters ; there was a spirit in their language which preserved it from destruction, when utter extinction seemed almost inevitable. The nature of the conquest, moreover, aided the process of reconstruction. In the first invasion the Anglo-Saxons had thrown themselves upon the British isles as the object of their hostility, as well as of their cupidity. They had made them their own by the simple process of clearing the land of its occupants, killing those who resisted, and driving away those who preferred flight to destruction. This was the conquest of barbarism. Very different was that of the Normans. They knew too well the value of their colossal booty to expose it to ruin, and they appreciated fully the necessity of preserving the living intelligence and the matured skill which had produced its material wealth. Their conquest consisted simply in the subjugation of the people to a foreign government. There was no barbarism here. Both nations, the conquered and the conquering, were far advanced in civilization ; the English boasting of a literature several centuries old and a church unsurpassed in splendor and in learning, the French, though of more recent date, already famous among the nations of the earth, for their skill in arms and in arts. Besides, the Conqueror had taken care to have his title well established in the minds of many Englishmen even, and to be sanctioned by the express approval of the Church. His friends in Eng- land wei-e probably not less numerous or powerful than the Whigs who brought over his namesake six hundred years later. All these causes combined to rob the conquest of much of its ordinary destructiveness, and to prepare a speedy coalition between the two races thus brought in contact. The only danger that threatened the English race and their language, was the necessity which forced the Con- queror to surrender his new subjects to more or less spolia- 'XJiri7BRSIT7 22 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. tion for the sake of rewarding those who had aided him in his enterprise. Thus the balance of power was at once destroyed, and the small number of foreigners enabled to outweigh the vast majority of native English. The social system of the latter being utterly disorganized, their speech and their culture also went down, while French culture advanced and flourished, liiis was, however, the work of ages only. In the mean time, and before the combination of the two distinct forces could be brought about, the oft- repeated lesson was once more taught, that the strong arm must bend before the strong mind. Triumphant Rome had sat at the feet of enslaved Greece, and the haughty conquerors of Spain had bowed low before the poets of Italy, when they held the land in chains. So here, also, the conqueror soon had to admit the supremacy of the con- quered native, and quietly, without war or rebellion, the parts were exchanged. " In the time of Richard I.," we are told by the greatest historian of our day, " the ordinary imprecation of a Norman gentleman was : May I become an Englishman! His ordinary form of indignant denial was : Do you take me for an Englishman ? The descend- ant of such a gentleman, a hundred years later, was proud of the English name." The fact was that, for a time, there were three distinct languages spoken in England: Latin was the language of the Church, French that of the Court, and Saxon alone was used by the people. The latter never forsook their precious birthright ; they cherished and guarded the tongue of their fathers like a sacred inheritance, and around the hearth not a word was heard, from the beginning, that could remind them of the hated Conqueror. Nunneries, also, were founded, like that of Tavistock, where it was appointed that some should be taught the knowledge of the Saxon tongue on purpose to preserve it and transmit it to posterity by communicating it, man to man and one generation to another. A few centuries passed away and, thanks to Saxon freedom and ENGLISH ELEMENTS. 23 Saxon vigor, the two races sat side by side in the House of Commons, and a new language had been formed, rude yet and unpolished, but already foreshadowing its approaching greatness. These, then, are the two principal elements of our Eng- lish, — the Saxon of our oldest forefathers and the French of our Norman conquerors. But there are other idioms, that have largely contributed to swell the number of our words and to fashion our grammar and syntax. We have already spoken of the Celtic, which has given us but few words, most of which are not found in Anglo-Saxon and must, therefore, have come in at a later period. They are now met with principally in the dialect of Lancashire, where a considerable population of Celts must have remained after the Saxon Conquest, and it is highly interesting to note, that where these terms are still in use, there also the excita- ble and mercurial temper of the Celt still contrasts with the stubborn perseverance and sturdy self-reliance of the German descendant. Sound and syntax were but little affected by the Celtic. It may have given to certain Eng- lish words the exceptional pronunciation which we notice in tough and enough, and in the construction of our sen- tences it has probably bequeathed to us the power to omit the relative pronoun, as when we say. The man I saw, instead of, The man whom I saw, together with the great repugnance to use reflexive pronouns, which characterizes modern English. The Danes, who for a time were masters of England and seated their kings upon the throne, were less civilized than their subjects, and adopted the language of the superior race, so that but few English words can really be traced to Danish influence. The relation between the two idioms was very different from what might have been expected under the circumstances. It showed, a second time in the history of our language, that the pen ever triumphs over the sword, the olive over the laurel, mental culture over 24 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. barbarous violence, the written language over the spoken. The Danes had neither literature nor grammar. Hence their influence on English was only repressive and destruc- tive. They abhorred difficult and subtle inflexions, and thus deprived the Anglo-Saxon of much lumber of that kind. So far from fashioning or affecting in any way the vernacular of their subjects, their own language at home declined from the day on which it came into contact with Saxon. Their court was often in England, their army lay there many years, and all laws and public acts, relating to England, were published in Anglo-Saxon. Thus even their chieftains and nobles could introduce but a single title into the conquered land, that of Earl, from the Danish Yarl, but that nobleman's wife resumed at once the Norman name of Countess. How little the Saxon nobles were willing to sub- mit to such a yoke, may be seen from the spirited resolu- tions they passed immediately after the death of Hardica- nute. No Dane, they agreed, should from that time be permitted to reign over England ; all Danish soldiers in any city, town, or castle should be either killed or banished from the kingdom, and whoever should from that time dare to propose to the people a Danish sovereign should be deemed a traitor to government and an enemy to his coun- try. A people that gave vent to such sentiments was not likely to adopt many words or to borrow many expressions from a hated master whom they no longer obeyed. A few, like forse in the sense of waterfall, and gill for a rocky ravine, have never been used in classical English until Wordsworth made them familiar words. By the side of the unimportant contributions thus made by Celt and Northman, the additions we owe to Latin as- sume gigantic proportions and deserve separate treatment Other idioms also came in to swell the mighty host In the reign of Queen Elizabeth Italian phrases abounded, and old Fortunatus tells us that in 1624 — ENGLISH ELEMENTS. 25 "Fantastic compliment stalks up and down Trick'd in outlandish feathers, all his words, His looks, his oaths, are all ridiculous, All apish, childish, and lialianatey Under James and Charles it was the Spanish which framed the style of courtesy, and left us many allusions to grave dons and mighty grandees. In the days of Charles II. again, the nation and the language became equally French- ified, and our own generation, led by great masters of way- ward taste, borrows more largely from German than pru- dence and patriotism would seem to warrant. On the whole it may be said, however, that every foreign element now has its own domain in English. Latin still furnishes us with theological technicalities, Greek with the majority of metaphysical terms ; German is the language of mineralogy and of parts of geology ; the fashions claim naturally French as their vehicle, and, oddly enough, share it with the science of war, whilst mathematics use Latin, Greek, French, and Arabic in fraternal union. CHAPTER IV. LATIN IN ENGLISH. Latin seems to have been determined, from early times, to obtain a footing in England and to lord it over her sons, as it had done triumphantly in France and in Spain, in Italy and in many an Eastern province. It never found a hearty welcome there, but no sooner was one attack suc- cessfully resisted by the sturdy islanders, than it returned to the charge. It came under all forms and at all times, now armed with the sword and escorted by the invincible legions of ancient Rome ; then, bearing the cross aloft and swelling in anthem and hymn. A few generations later it followed the Conqueror in his victorious march, and for a time ruled supreme ; later it reappeared in the train of fashion or claimed admittance under the guise of deep learning. Our English entered not into bitter warfare, nor did it churlishly close its door against the often unwelcome intruder. It did not submit, however, but quietly resumed its supremacy, admitting so much of the foreign element as was good and useful for its own great national purposes, and rejecting the surplus by the simple force of good taste and common sense. Thus it maintained its independence, gained largely in words and in terms, but never troubled itself to translate, — as the Germans do now with pedantic purism, by which after all but half of the sense is caught, — but rather preferred most sensibly to admit the foreigners and to naturalize them in accordance with their own native sound and use. The first time that Latin touched the shores of the Brit- LATIN IN ENGLISH. 27 ish isles, it entered probably under the auspices of the great Caesar, when he appeared there for a month in the year 55. In the following year he landed once more and remained a longer time, forcing the British leaders to surrender, and carrying off several native princes as hostages. Still, throughout the Augustan era, Roman civilization and re- finement were unknown to Britain, and no trace of their conquest remains visible. It was Claudius who first could glory in conquering the Britons, for " Julius Caesar did no more than show them to the Romans." Even when this Emperor had received the honor of a triumph and the title of Britannicus for his success in the distant islands, the arms of the Romans had not yet penetrated beyond the southern parts of Britain. The subjugation was not com- pleted until the age of Tacitus, when his distinguished father-in-law, Agricola, after having overrun the whole island far beyond the Firth, and after having sailed round it to reduce the Orkneys also, conquered it finally. Then followed the days of Roman rule, during which the country became studded with flourishing cities and with numerous towns and villas, in all of which Latin was spoken and Ro- man arts and civilization were known. Theatres and am- phitheatres abounded, public baths were provided, and the gods of Rome as well as foreign deities had their temples in larger cities. The reaction, it is well known, came sooner than could well have been expected. The great empire was shaken in its foundations ; fierce, mysterious barbarians came from the far East to claim the sceptre of the world for their race, province after province was lost, and the old, tried legions of Rome had to return to pro- tect Italy itself from the invader. Thus Hadrian was already compelled to abandon all the land between the Solway and the Clyde, and between the Tyne and the Frith of Forth, and to build the great wall against the Picts. In 418, the Anglo-Saxon chronicle tells us, there was not a Roman left on the island. 28 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. Whatever may have been, in those days, the success of Latin, on the Continent, it was comparatively powerless in England. There it drove out the Celtic, resisted success- fully its great rival the German, and lived anew in French and Spanish. In England it never superseded the old Gaelic, and, in its turn, readily succumbed to the Saxon. Macaulay explains this striking difference by the opinion, that " it is not probable that the islanders were at any time generally familiar with the language of their Italian rulers." But there were other reasons, besides, which aided the Celtic in holding its own. The Eomans lived almost ex- clusively in fortified towns, many of which bear, to this day, their Latin name; whilst in the country Celtic re- mained prevalent, and, after the withdrawal of the foreign legions, resumed its supremacy. Then it must not be for- gotten, that whilst might and valor were on the side of the Romans, civilization and intelligence were with the Britons. The Irish Celts were not only superior to all others of their race, but actually sent out teachers and missionaries to the adjoining countries. In the beginning of the fifth century Christianity was already prevailing among them all, and had brought with it classic refinement and culture. Little Latin, therefore, in our English, can be traced directly to this first invasion ; the essential and genuine contributions to our words are limited to three : colonia, which survives mainly in local names ; castrum, in castle and Chester ; and stratum, in those compounds in which it is not more clearly traceable to a similar word of the Anglo-Saxon. Far more threatening in its aspect, and infinitely more permanent in its influence, was the introduction of Latin by means of the Church of Rome. The primitive British Church was a branch of the great Celtic Church which, planted as early as the first ages in the South of Gaul, ex- tended rapidly into Ireland, and from there into Wales, the Western Isles, and many parts of Southern Britain. The zeal and the piety of this Celtic Church were so great as LATIN IN ENGLISH. 29 to earn for Ireland the title of Insula Sanctorum, but theii' learning was by no means in proportion, and hence priests and officials generally came from the older churches in Southern ICurope. Thus already, in the sixth century, we find Roman ecclesiastics formally installed in England ; and in the church and the convent, among priests and among laymen, Latin had become the only language in which matters of faith were transacted. Their prayers, their chants, and their books, were, for a time, all in Latin. Un- fortunately, the early Anglo-Saxon Church did not use a Latin taken from the classic authors of Rome, but they sought their words in the Origines of Isidore, and in other writings of the same class. They affected, moreover, es- pecially barbarous compounds from the Greek, like elee- mosynary, which still survives with its seven syllables, though the noun has shrunk, through the Anglo-Saxon form almesse, into the monosyllabic alms. Nor was this un- desirable form of Latin easily gotten rid of; we feel its sad, demoralizing effects, even at this day. For through the overwhelming influence of the Church, and its long, undisputed sway, the whole system of theology in England had become, as it were, incorporated in Latin, and this to such an extent that even the English Reformers could communicate by no other means than Latin with the foun- tain-head at Rome, or with their teachers and brethren on the Continent. The vast mass of monkish literature, the countless religious essays, the fabulous chronicles of those days, and the few interspersed satires that have been handed down to us, all are written in the barbarous Latin found in the Fathers of the Church. This was the more pernicious, as a large number of these so-called Latin terms had themselves not long ago been derived from the Greek, because of the great influence of the Greek Church in the early days of Christianity. Some of these are still in existence, and used in connection with the Church, as — 80 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. Greek. itA^ptKos, Xatm. clericus, Anglo- Saxon cleric, English. clerk. v^aAAfa),. eXe7j/oio veuU " of Parliament, the old idiom of the island is very nearly extinct. These local names are all the more important for our knowledge of Celts and Celtic, as there are but few other traces of their language left in modern English. The yew, anciently spelt eugh and yugh, is commonly considered as still bearing its Celtic name. Ewhurst, near Basingstroke, no doubt received its name from the number of yew-trees, of great antiquity, for which it is famous ; and so did prob- ably Ewridge, a hamlet in the parish of Colerne, in Wilt- shire. With a few such exceptions, however, the number of Celtic words in English is very small, and of little im- portance. This must be mainly attributed to the fact, that there existed no Celtic MSS., because the people never wrote, and the Druids, as Caesar tells us, thought it improper to commit their doctrines to writing. All their myths and songs were handed down orally, and by far the larger part of our knowledge of British Celts is derived exclusively from tradition. Wlien the Romans subsequently con- quered the island, they viewed the Druids as the props and supports of Celtic nationality, which must be destroyed to the very root. They took their measures accordingly, and their efforts were but too successful. Still, there are some Celtic words, which have remained in English mainly because they represent purely Celtic things, as reel, kilty elan, pibroch, and plaid. Ooat, cart, prank, balderdash, hap (ly), pert, and sham, have only lately established their claim to be true Celtic words. Next came the Romans, and threw up their earthworks and roads and walled camps, which still, though long in ruin, tell the tale of the strong hands that raised them, and to which, here and there, a Latin name still clings. They came, they conquered, and left again, exercising, after all, but little influence on our language during their occupation of the British isles. Hence, we find that among local names, also, there are but few, which are with certainty both Old Latin 90 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. and modern English. We know, in fact, but three : castrunif stratum, and colonia. The first survived, perhaps, in a few cases, ■ without any change at all; it was, however, more frequently added by the Saxons to local names, in order to designate a Roman site, and these names are very numer- ous. It remained caster in the Anglican and Danish dis- tricts, whilst in the Saxon districts it changed into cester. The ancient Durohrivae, on the river New, thus survives as Castor ; Ancaster proves its origin by the many Roman coins found there, and Tadcaster, Doncaster, the ancient Danum, and Lancaster, on the river Lune, have the same origin. The Latin word was at an early period changed into Cester, as in Cirencester and Gloucester, the ancient Glevae Castrum, and in Exeter, the great city of Isca, which changed its Roman name into Exan-ceastre, from the river Exe. In Oxfordshire, Bicester and Alcester appear to be Roman sites, a presumption which, in the case of Leicester, has been amply proved by interesting remains of ancient mansions, and fine, tessellated pavements. Manceter, in Warwickshire, formerly Mandressedum, has lost an s, and Wroxeter is a violent contraction of Wreahen Ceaster, a name derived from the neighboring Wrekin Hill. A still later development of the Latin name is the softened Chester, repeated in Chesterholm, the old Vindolena, and Great Cites- ters, on the site of ^sica. It has given us, in like manner, Chichester, founded by Cissa, the son of Ella, and Colchester, the first Roman city, which was made a Colonia ; which, however, may have taken its name from the river Colne. Rochester, on the Medway, and great Manchester, Silchester, whose walls, still to be traced in the northern part of Hamp- shire, once included a circuit of three miles, and Winchester — all bear the impress of their antiquity. The latter cor- responds, in quite a striking manner, to the French Bicetre ; as in Germany the city of Cassel, in Hesse, represents the ancient Castellum, derived from the Latin castruiyi. The second Latin word of great importance for our local NAMES OF PLACES. 91 names is stratum, which recalls to us at once the magnifi- cent roads that traversed the island in many directions, built, no doubt, partly, at least, by the manual labor of our British forefathers, but laid out by Roman engineers and finished under Roman direction and control. Each of the great lines of roads, constructed chiefly, if not exclusively, for the purpose of safe military occupation and control of the country, was called a strata by the Romans of the declining empire, and the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Eng- land adopted the word, which closely resembled a Gothic word of their own, as straet, adding it subsequently to many places situated on the old line of the Roman road. A vil- lage so situated became easily Stratton or Stretham, mean- ing Street Town, or Street Home, and if there was a ford near by, as readily Stratford, so that these and similar names oflen mark for long distances the course of former Roman roads, even where all other traces have disappeared. Ardwick le Street in Yorkshire, Chester le Street in Dur- ham, Stretton, and others, thus tell us of their proximity to a Roman road. Portway, a name that belongs to several places, is in like manner connected with the military lan- guage of the Romans. Cold Harhor is said to occur as the name of seventy places in the neighborhood of the ancient lines of road, and seems to have signified a ruined house or station, where travellers could find shelter, but nothing else, after the manner of the German Kalte Herberge. It thus became a Saxon designation of a Roman locality, while often the idioms of the succeeding races mingle in the same name. Thus it is not a little curious that in Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford upon Avon, we have the three successive masters of England represented jointly; the Celt, in the ancient name of the river, the Roman, in the first part of Stratford, and the Saxon, in the second half. Colonia, the proud title of many a provincial town throughout the vast empire, survives here and there in local names, as in the above-mentioned Colchester, where 92 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. the ponderous masonry of the walls of the ancient city of Camalodunum shows to this day how well the Romans guarded against the recurrence of such a calamity as was sustained there by the surprised and overpowered soldiers of the Ninth Legion, on the revolt under Boadicea. In the North we have Lincoln, once the noble city of Lindum, situated on a lofty hill, and commanding extensive views. Besides these three great sources of modern names, we find not unfrequently other traces of Roman greatness, as in the case of the great wall of the Emperor Hadrian? which stretched from the Solway Firth to the mouth of the Tyne. Traces of the sites and names of Roman towns abound here, beginning with those of Segedunum, now Wallsend, near the eastern end of the gigantic work, now far more celebrated for its mineral treasures than the an- cient Segedunum, the place of which it occupies. Among other local names, derived in like manner, may be men- tioned Chester on the Wale, Walltown, Wallwich and Thirl- wall, where the river passes (drills) through the wall, a locality from which, in all probability, the name of the eminent scholar was originally derived. The familiar name of Wattling Street, still surviving in the heart of the city of London, is one of the etymological mysteries which have not yet been solved. It was the well-known name the Saxons gave to the great Roman road that ran from Dover through Canterbury and Lon- don, across the island to Chester and the coa^t of Wales, and remained one of the principal public thoroughfares long after the Roman rule had ceased. The fact that the Milky Way passed somewhat in the same way across the heavens, led the Anglo-Saxons to transfer the name to the stars, and even Chaucer speaks of it still thus : — " So then, quoth he, cast up thine eye Se yonder, lo, the galaxie The which men yclepe the Milky Way, For it is white and some parfay Ycallen it have Watlinge Strete." NAMES OF PLACES. 93 It is remarkable that no name of the bridges survives, which these magnificent roads must necessarily have had over the rivers they crossed. Undoubted ruins of such bridges have been found, and the ancient names of Roman towns or stations show that they must have been situated near a bridge, but their names have invariably become Saxon. Thus the ancient Pontes on the Thames, near Windsor, survives only as Staines (stones), and the famous Pons Actii on the Tyne has been altogether modernized into New Castle. The derivation of Pontefract and Ponteland from ponty is extremely doubtful, so also that of Bridgeport from partus. Traces of Roman legions survive here and there in local names, as in Lexdon, Legionis Dunum, and Gaerloon, Isca Legionum (?). Other races followed in rapid succession, invading the island on all accessible points, holding some parts of the coast for a generation or two, and then disappearing again. Of these only one, the Frisians, have left behind them really valuable and interesting traces in local names. They came from the country between the Scheldt and the Weser, on both sides of the river Ems, but also from the islands on the eastern coast of Denmark. They were so nearly re- lated, in race and in language, to their successors, the An- glo-Saxons, that Wilfrith, bishop of York, being accidentally thrown upon the coast of Frisia, could preach to the people he found there the gospel of Christ in his own native tongue, the Anglo-Saxon, and baptize not only the princes but many thousands of the people. The Frisians are ill-treated cous- ins of our English, and it is hardly creditable to the latter that they should ignore their relatives merely because they have not succeeded in maintaining their position among the great nations. They were once masters of a large por- tion of the German seaboard, though now they are much broken up and intermixed with other races. Of all ancient 94 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. dialects none has a closer connection with Anglo-Saxon than Old Frisic ; and of all modern dialects perhaps none has such strong points of resemblance with English as New Frisic. Thus on all the Continent they alone use the word woman as we do in English. Like all other races, the Frisians also have left their traces most distinctly in those parts of Great Britain where they dwelt longest. There is, to this day, a remarkable coincidence of local names in Kent with those of Frisia, and especially of Holstein, be- cause this country alone, of all the homes of early invaders, has not been in the hands of foreigners, and thus its lan- guage has been left comparatively undisturbed. The dia- lect of West Somersetshire resembles their language more than any other, and their modern words even correspond so closely to our own that some of Shakespeare's plays have been translated into Frisic, almost word for word. They still hold themselves our kinsmen, and show the like- ness of the two tongues in the conmion saying, — " Good butter and good cheese Is good English and good Friese." With the exception, however, of the diminutive termina- tion kin which we clearly owe to them, it is extremely difficult to separate in modern English what is due to them, and what to the speech of the Angles. For these came themselves from that part of the duchy of Slesvic, which is called Frisia Minor, where the very place is shown at Gun- dern, from whence they embarked, when they went forth finally to take possession of their conquest in Britain (Westfalia I. p. 58). It must also be borne in mind that long before the Romans finally retired from the island a considerable element of Saxon had already obtained pos- session of the southeast coast, and that even Caesar men- tions already the great extent of German immigration into England. These settlements must necessarily have affected the nomenclature of these parts of the island, and it is fair to presume that many, if not most, of the Saxon names are at least as old as the time of Alfred. NAMES OF PLACES. 95 More remarkable is the influence exercised on local names by the conquerors who next can^e to carve out for themselves a new kingdom in England. They formed part of that wonderful race of Scandinavians, whose ships made their way into every creek and inlet in the British islands and in Northern France, and who first landed as pirates, and then seized as conquerors, the sway of hapless Sicily, Normandy, and England. In the latter country they were very generally designated simply as Danes, and first appear under the indefinite name of ^' Pagani, Normanni, sive Dani,^' in Asser's " Life of Alfred." Their proper name, however, was Vikings, not as is very generally believed from any assumption of the title of king, with which the name has nothing to do, but from the word wic or vik, which meant in their own language a place by the sea, and the patronymic ing. From the days of Egbert to those of the Conquest, the annals of England are fast bound to the history of these Norsemen and to their northern kingdoms. Even before the time of Alfred these daring invaders had settled themselves firmly down in Northumberland, and with that great monarch began the fatal system of buying off their hostility by means of yielding up to them large portions of Saxon soil. One sovereign after another fol- lowed this unfortunate and unwise policy, down to Ethelred the Unready, who brought the greatest misfortune of all upon his ill-fated kingdom. After having in vain tried to buy them off, first with ten thousand, and then with thirty thousand pounds weight of gold, he attempted in an evil hour the midnight massacre of St. Boice's day in 1002, and thus delivered England into the hands of the infuriated Danes. Then followed the days of his flight to France, and the subjugation of England by Canute the Great, and Sueno the Blessed, when the laws of the Danes, the Dane- lag, became paramount in England. Thus it remained, even afler the land was reconquered by the Saxons, and at the time of the Conquest England was still more than half 96 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. Scandinavian. Besides the great district of Northumber- land, which reached far across the border into Scotland and the province of Anglia, the nationality reached as far south as Derby and Rugby, in the very heart of Mercia, and all over the land the Saxon language was " laced and patched *' with northern words and idioms. Their language gave, besides, a general and permanent coloring to our English, which now mainly shows in the provincial dialects of the North, and in local names along the coast and the great river-courses, reminding us thus constantly that England owes to the Danes, and not to the Saxons, its fondness for the sea and its ability to " rule the waves." The people, also, with their darker hair, smaller bones, and sterner countenance, betray their descent from a northern race. This applies especially to Northumberland and the North and West Eiding of Yorkshire, with its famous old metrical romance of Havelok the Dane, from which we have derived a name that has been made once more in our day immortal by a son of England, whose heroic deeds have been recounted wherever the English tongue is spoken. Here former Anglian or Saxon occupants had perished in war, or had been expelled from their native seats, unless they submitted to the invaders. Among the different forms of government adopted in this large Scandinavian popula- tion, were not only the usual power of kings and jarls, but also the peculiar one known as the Confederation of the Five Burghs, namely, Lincoln, Leicester, Derby, Notting- ham, and Stamford, with which York and Chester commonly acted in concert. It was here, of course, that the Dene- laga had its fullest sway, and the division of the whole of England into the Dene-laga, Myrcna-laga, and T^e«^*Seaa7^a- laga^ which designated the several districts under Danish, Mercian, and Saxon law, became of such importance that it continued till long after the Norman Conquest. In the laws published under Henry I., (1109-1135,) " the province NAMES OF PLACES. 97 of the Danes*" is especially mentioned as one of the three parts of England. They were, however, by no means con- fined to these districts, for we find, e. g., that the Orkneys as well as Shetland are in name, manners, and language true Norse. Sodor reminds us yet of the Danish for Souther, and Sutherland itself was so called because this northernmost county of Scotland was nevertheless to the south of Norway. As would naturally be expected, the Danes have left behind them a vast number of names of places which they bestowed, and which are still preserved. Of these the most important and the most frequent are hy, meaning originally a farm, and then a village or town ; thorpe, a hamlet ; thwaite^ a piece of cleared land ; ey, an isle, together with a few similar endings like holmes top, heck, ness, &c. The most frequent of these is by, which forms at least one fourth of all the names of towns in Lincolnshire. The Danes were fond of adding it to the names of their gods, and thus made Thoreshy and Baldershy, justifying the poet when he sings of the Northmen, that they " gave their gods the land they won." Other Danish names of the same kind make it, however, plain that these were mere reminiscences of home, and that Christianity was the religion of the people when they gave these names. Kirhhy-\m^Qvd2\e and Kirkhy- moorside, Kirkby in Lonsdale and Orossby show that long since the Christian bishop had driven out the heathen priest, and the Christian Church and Cross had succeeded to the pagan altar. Where neither God nor Church stood sponsor, the name of the owner of the place served instead, and thus were formed Rolleshy (Rolf s-by), Ormshy (Gorm's- by), Grimsby, (whose vessels, when they enter a Danish port, can even now claim the exemptions derived from the Danish founder,) Haconby, Swainsby, Ingersby and Osgodby. Even persons who were not Danes supplied occasionally their names to the place, as in Saxby, Frankby, Scotby, and Flemingby, which must at least have been situated near 7 98 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. large Danish settlements, so that the final hy could be fa- miliar to the people around. Nor did the favorite termina- tion disdain to enter into an alliance .with common nouns ; thus Derweniby^ Appleby, and Netherby, are easily understood, and Coningshy is the Danish form of our English Cun- ningham, meaning literally King's Home. J^igby is Dike Town, and the only southern place thus named is old Rokeby, now famous Rugby. The spelling is Anglicized in Battersbee, Ashbee, and Hornsbee, The " Rape of Bramber " in Sussex preserves to this day the memory of the old Ice- landic division of lands by Hreppar, from which the Danish word rehe is derived, meaning to measure, from the in- strument employed, a rep (rope), — very much as we speak in modern English of a " hide " of land, from its being measured by a thong. Our word By-Jaw owes its origin to the same Danish word by. The common error which regards a by-law as one of inferior importance, arises from a confusion in the mind of the people, produced by the idea which we connect with the preposition by. The Danes, on the contrary, used the word to designate the laws of byes or towns, as dis- tinguished from the general laws of the kingdom. It may be mentioned in this connection, that a few such Danish names bear record of political changes in the state of the kingdom, by their own verbal changes. Thus the Anglo- Saxon town of Streoneshalch was rebaptized by the Danes as Whitby, the White Town, and Northwearthig as Derby or Deer Town, in analogy with Derwent and Deerhurst. Thorpe has in like manner furnished a large number of local names in those districts which were most frequented by the Danes. Ullesthorpe reminds us again of a Scan- dinavian deity, whilst Bassingthorpe and Shillingthorpe are probably the only two out of all the names in Lincolnshire, compounded with thorpe, which are derived from family names. Bishopthorpe and Nunthorpe tell their own tale. How very important these names may be for historical NAMES OF PLACES. 99 researches, appears strikingly in the Isle of Man, where curiously enough, the names which denote places of Chris- tian worship are all of Norwegian origin, and thus clearly prove the late date up to which heathenism must have pre- vailed there. The word ea for our Island, is not only Danish but also Frisic, and may, therefore, occasionally belong to the latter language. It is at least as suggestive of historic changes as hy. Thus when the island of Mona, of classic an- tiquity, which had already once changed its British name into the Saxon Maenige or island of Maen, was overrun by king Egbert, it was called Angles-ey, the Englishman's island, and has ever since retained its name as Anglesea. The older Celtic name has, however, not entirely dis- appeared with the Saxon conquest, but survives in the Menai Hundred, the Menai Strait, and Menai Bridge, and in the name of the parish Penmon, the Head of Mon. Sheppy and Mersey are, from of old, the islands of Sheep, and of the Mere or sea. Roodey, the name of a meadow near Chester, now used as a race-course, was originally the island of the Holy Rood or Cross, lying as it did between the walls of the ancient town and the banks of the river Dee. Bardsey was called the Bards' island, as being the last retreat of "Welsh bards. My has its name of eel-island from the abundance of that fish in the neighborhood, 100,000 of which were annually paid to the lord of the manor as rent ; Elmore and Ellesmere are said to have the same derivation. Jersey, however, with its apparent identity with these names, ought to be a warning to overhasty etymolo- gists, as it is derived from Caesarea and has nothing to do with Dane or Saxon. Besides these names of localities the Danes have given us also some words for mere features of landscape, as hiUow, gar and elding. Gil is from the old Norse, and means a small ravine ; it enters into the formation of the proper names of Gilbert and Gilmore ; whilst /cwse, a waterfall, has helped 100 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. to form the famous name of Wilherforce. A hungry sand- piper is called knot from king Canute, as we find in Camden's " Britannia," (p. 971,) and as Drayton's " Polyolbion " con- firms it in these lines . — " The knot that called was Canutus' bird of old, Of that great king of Danes his name that still doth hold, His appetite to please that far and near was sought For him, as some have said, from Denmark hither brought." As Canute still lives in Knutsford, the great Hacon may possibly survive in Hacon's island. Hackney, and the chil- dren of God, Aesbjorn, in our Osborne. In Danish times, moreover, their own northern habit of counting not by days but by nights, from sunset to sunset, prevailed in England, an evidence of which survives in our sennight, fortnight and Twelfth Night. Among less frequent evidences of this Danish influence may be mentioned occasional allu- sions to the national standard, the Raven, which occur in some local names. Thus in Ravenhill, in the North Riding of York, which claims to be the place on which the Danes planted the Reafn (raven) on landing under Inguar in 876, whilst in other places it may simply recall the worship of Odin, on whom the raven attended, as the eagle on Jupiter. Hence names like Havenstone, Ravensioorth, and Ravenspur, which has since been swallowed up by the sea, like the master of Ravenswood himself. As the Devil plays an important part in English local names, calling bridges, caves, and causeways after his name, so the Danes also have bequeathed to us the name of at least one evil spirit, a wild and rough being who played the part of Satyr or Faun in their gloomy mythology. The Old Norse called him Scratte, and hence Scratby and Scratta, on the borders of Derbyshire, which is still so firmly believed to be haunted that no house is built there. The sprite survives even in America as Old Scratch, a polite designation for the Devil, taken from Scandinavian mythol- ogy, as Old Nick is for the same purpose borrowed from the water sprite of Old-High German. NAMES OF PLACES. 101 A much more important relic, however, of Danish man- ners and customs which survives in our local names, is found in the word thing. This was derived from the name the Danes gave to the assemblies which they held, in com- mon with all Scandinavians and Germans, in the open air, and in some place of peculiar sanctity. It survives to this day in the Scandinavian Storthing, the Great Court or National Assembly. It is thus that Thingwall in Cheshire obtained its name, from being a place of meeting of the Thing ; so also are formed the names of Dingwall, in the north of Scotland, Tingwall in the Shetland Islands, and the slightly modified Tynewald in the Isle of Man. Some of the petty courts of this kind, moreover, seem not to have been held in the open air, like the larger assemblies, but in the house, and hence were known under the name of Hust- ings. Such a judicial tribunal met in the cities of York and Lincoln, in a few smaller places, and in London, where it has been preserved down to our own times. It has been suggested, and not without great plausibility, by the great Danish scholar, Warsaae, that traces of these Things may be found in the triple division of Yorkshire and Lincoln- shire into Ridings. Whilst the word is generally traced back to the Saxon thrithings or thirdlings, it must not be overlooked that in Scandinavia the division of provinces into thirds, tredinger, is quite common and corresponds exactly to the North English trithing. Every now and then some new Norse word makes its appearance in English writers, but few have become perma- nently at home there. Among the latter are some which the English soldiers in the Thirty Years' War learnt from their comrades, whilst they served under the great Swede, Gustavus Adolphus. Thus we obtained plunder and life- guard, which comes, not from the English word life, but from the Swedish lif, (German leih^ meaning body, and thus is identical with body-guard. Furlough also was introduced at the same time from the Swedish forlof, 102 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. spelt sometimes furloofe. Among English words recently claimed by Mr. Coleridge for the Danish or Norse we find bait^ Jrray^ dish, dock, dwell, Jiimsy, jiing, gust, ransack, rap and whim. A great change was produced in British nomenclatm"e, and hence, in English names generally, when the Saxons came into the land. A conquering people, who subdue an indigenous population and reduce them to serfdom, catch only with an ill-will and great reluctance, the names of objects around them. They repeat them as well as they can, and retain them more from haughty indolence than from choice. But when they form themselves new objects of the kind, when they make an inclosure or erect a for- tress, they take the elements of the new name, not from the language of the conquered land but from their own. This was the case with the Anglo-Saxon idiom, for the set- tlers who spoke it gained possession, not of a sudden, in one day, as the Normans did afterwards, but step by step, during an obstinate conflict which lasted for centuries. Besides, they remained long without any centralization of power, and exterminated or expelled a large proportion of the British race before they themselves united under a common ruler. In this fierce conflict they rooted out the British language, as well as the British people, and drove both to the extremities of the island, there to linger and to pine away in helpless isolation. Hence it is that the Saxons have left by far the strongest impress of all on the land and its names. The race itself shows its blood to this day in those por- tions of England where their settlements were most numer- ous ; in the midland counties, in inland dales, in all remoter regions, their large frame, muscular and massive now as of old, their fair hair and blue eyes, are easily recognized. The ancient blood is heard in the broad, loud speech of these men, and they can read their title clearly in the names of all leading localities. NAMES OF PLACES. 103 " In ford, in ham, in ley, and tun TJie most of English surnames run," says an old cl,itty, and recent researches have confirmed the fact that these syllables belong to one fourth of all local names mentioned in Saxon charters. Ford is, of course, the present word of the same meaning, but it was by so much more common then, as fords were more numerous than bridges. It is now mostly attached in local names to common words, as in Bradford, the broad ford ; in Herford, the ford fit for an army ; and in Oxford, not the ford for oxen, but the ford over the river Ouse. At other times it is added to the names of great leaders, who have made cer- tain fords historical, as in the case of Uffa, in Suffolk, from whom Ufford bears its name ; and in Knutsford, from Canute, the Dane. Bridgford, in Nottinghamshire, combines the new and the old regime. Ham is our modern home, the word so peculiarly dear to all Saxon hearts, because it is really the most sacred, the most intimately felt, of all the words by which the dwelling of man is distinguished. By its historic associations, it gains, in local names, an addi- tional hold upon our sympathies. Thus the memory of the first Christian Queen of England, Ebba, lives still in Ebba's home, now Epsom ; nor is it quite unimportant that in the' South of England it should always have its full form, home, whilst the sterner North has as invariably shortened it into ham. St. Keyna, a saint of whom otherwise few would know, has left his memory in Keynsham ; and Horsa, the companion of Hengist, protests, by his town of Horsham, against being treated as a simple banner, with a horse for its emblem. Farnham still abounds in ferns ; and Denham lies in a snug and cozy den ; Langham and Higham, Shore- ham and Cohham, explain themselves, while the diminutive hamlet applies with peculiar appropriateness to the well- named Waltham, the home in the woods or the weald. Hampden and Hampton have admitted an intruding p, which loves to slip in between labials and dentals; and 104 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. the State of New York boasts in its great city of the Goat's home, Gotham, of the father of modern hmnbugs, Bamum, whose home is not a barn, but an Eastern palace. It is very evident, from many of the examples mentioned, that our Anglo-Saxon fathers were peculiarly fond of con- necting their family names with their dwelling-places. They remind us uncomfortably of the words of the Psalm- ist: — "Their inward thought is, that their houses shall continue for ever, and their dwelling places to all genera- tions ; they call their lands after their own names." (Ps. xlix. 11.) But the same habit, still so characteristic of the Saxon race at home and abroad, has prevailed in most ages and in most countries of the world. Great kings and con- querors applied their name to countries and cities as we do to farms and villas. Philip of Macedon gave his to Philippi, so famous in the history of Brutus and Cassius, and dearer to us all, because here tidings of the Gospel seem first to have been received with gladness by European listeners. Alexander and Antiochus left behind them Alex- andria and Antioch. The Caesars are remembered by name in Autun, once Augustodunum, Saragossa (Caesarea Au- gusta), Adrianople, and Chnstantinople. In the United States the name of the founder of the Republic was bestowed upon the capital city, Washington, and the name of the British Queen has been given to Victoria, in her great Aus- tralian empire. These examples of the rulers of the world have been very generally followed by the Dei Mnores, and England, especially, abounds with local names of this nat- ure. These designations are generally recognized by their termination in -ing or -ling, and are not unfrequently of venerable antiquity. It has been ascertained that the names of places like Billing, Tarring, Sterling, Twining, and Basing, with their derivatives, were originally settle- ments of several members of the same family. In some instances, it is well known, this connection between a place and its ancient owner has never been severed through all NAMES OF PLACES. 105 the intervening centuries, as in High Legh, in Cheshire, which has been inhabited from time immemorial by branches of the same old family. Even Buckingham, so long called the Home of the Beeches, is no longer allowed its poetical origin, but traced back to an ancient family of Bucks and Buckings, from whose residence the name is said to have been transferred to the surrounding shire. The sweet name of Leigh is the most recent and fullest form of the Saxon lea or ley, which still survives unchanged in words familiar to every English farmer — the pasture ley, the clover lea, and even the sainfoin lea. Local names in ley abound in all Saxon regions, especially in Cheshire, where there are " as many Leighs as fleas," as the proverb bluntly says. Offley, near Hitchley, recalls the great OfFa, king of Essex ; Netley, so little creditable to farmers who generally abhor nettles, makes amends by its beautiful abbey, and Berkley conjures up before the mind's eye fair fields surrounded by birches. Of all Saxon names, however, those that denote an in- closure are by far the most numerous. This appears very natural when it is borne in mind that for more than a thousand years England has been known abroad as the land of inclosures of well-protected property. Hence the numerous words the English use to denote something hedged or walled in or inclosed, arising from the love of privacy and the exclusiveness of the English character. Those constantly recurring terminations, ton, ham, worth, fold, parJc, hurgh, all convey this one prominent notion of inclosure and protection. Tun is, of this class, again by far the most frequent, be- cause its meaning adapts itself most readily to a great variety of habitations. Originally derived from an Anglo- Saxon verb, tynan, which meant simply to close or inclose, it was soon adapted to various purposes, now helping to count, when as ten, it meant the closed hands, and then as tyning, an inclosure, giving a name to a farm which still 106 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. survives in many counties. Its use became all the more general, as the Celts had already, a fact little known among us, those regular and beautiful hedgerows, which are so striking a feature in English landscapes. These the Saxons readily adopted, giving the name of tun to every regularly hedged in, or fenced in, settlement, from whence it came finally to designate a town. This is well illustrated in Wickliffe's translation of the Bible, where the invited guest excuses himself with the words, " I have bought a toivn^ and I have nede to go out and se it," (St. Luke xiv. 18,) and in the reference to it : " But they dispisiden and wenten forth, oon to his town, another to his merchandize." (St. Matt. xxii. 5.) In both places, town is used for the modern farm, whilst the word wyrt-tun, (St. Luke xiii. 19,) is employed for "garden of herbs." Its latest and most peculiar meaning is found in tunnel, as an inclosed and covered way. Tunhridge is one of the few names in which its ancient form is fully preserved ; generally it has been either lengthened into town and toun, as in Hopetoun, or shortened into ton, as in Stratton, Leighton and Leaming- ton. Acton, in Middlesex, requires the aid of its neighbor- hood abounding in oaks, and of its once noble " Old Oak Common," as part of the parish is still called, to remind us in its reduced form of the original Oaktown. Almost every county, however, has its Norton (North), Sutton (South), and its Newton. Local names, like the last men- tioned, were readily transferred to men, and thus we see in Milton the mill, in Burton and Warburion the burg, in Wal- ton the wall, and in Wotton the wold, in Staunton the stone, and the moor in Morton. Closely connected with this word, and yet different in origin and meaning, is our dun, and its many forms, all derived from the Anglo-Saxon dun, an eminence stretching out in a gentle slope, and hence applied to the sea-shore sands as downs. It is the same as the dunes of the Conti- nent, and the first part of famous Dunquerque, the French- NAMES OF PLACES. 107 ified Kirk on the Downs. We use it likewise in our South Downs, in Landsdowne, Huntingdon, and Farringdon. The Scotch prefer placing it first, hence they say Dunbar, Dun- keM, Dunrohin and Dumbarton, Its shortest form appears in Maiden and Hampden. Such are some of the more prominent local names which have come down to us directly from our Saxon fathers. There is only one other of almost equal frequency, that of wic or wich, which, however, is not found in German, but exists only in old English and Frisic, so that it ought per- haps to be more properly credited to the latter. The Ice- landic and Swedish also have wik, and etymologists have been fond of tracing its connection with the Latin vicus and the Greek oTkc?. Lord Coke tells us, that it means a place on the sea-shore or on the banks of a river, and generally this definition is justified by the local position of places that bear such names. Alnewich, pronounced Annick, lies on the banks of the Alne, and Berwick is named after the Celtic Aber. Kerwick, Warwick, and Sedgwick, all remind us, by their hard final letter, of North of England speech, whilst in southern counties the softer ivich prevails, as in Sandwich, Greenwich, Ipswich, Droitwich and Harwich. Careful researches have led to the discovery that the inland wicks are generally of Saxon origin, while those on the coast are as constantly derived from stations used by the sea rovers of Scandinavia. Those inland towns, how- ever, which end in wich, may have less to do with the Anglo-Saxon wic, than with the Norse vik ; for they are all noted for the production of salt, which was formerly obtained by evaporating salt water in shallow pans, called wyches. Hence a place for making salt came very nat- urally to be called a wych-house, and Nantwich and Dort- wich, and other places where rocksalt was found, took their names from such wych-houses, around which they were built. Hence Drayton says : — " The bracky fountains are those two renowned wythes, The Nantwich and the North" (Norwich). 108 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. The first part of Nantwich is still pure Celtic, and the same which forms the French names Nantes, Nanteuil, and Nanterre, which thus preserve, in name at least, the old family connection long after every other trace of it has disappeared. The ancient name of hurgf so frequent in all Germanic countries, is of course not wanting in England. It assumes there under varied circumstances varied names, changing from the full Scarborough to the shortened Edinhoro% and occasionally appearing as bury in Salisbury and other names. Aldborough, near York, corresponds thus, in its meaning of Old Town, to the Palaeocastro and Castelvecchio, which throughout modern Greece, Asia Minor, and the islands of the ^gean Sea, are so generally applied to any ancient site. Brought in Westmoreland, has retained its simple, original meaning, and the same root prevails, but slightly altered, in the more familiar Brougham (Burgham). There are, finally, numerous local names derived from proper names of the Anglo-Saxons. We need not remind even the general reader of the Saxon element in Essex, Wes- sex, Sussex, and Middlesex, or of the many Jutish designations lefl in the Isle of Wight, and on the opposite coast of Hampshire. The Angle's folk survive clearly enough, to the North and to the South, in Norfolk and Suffolk, and became finally sufficiently powerful to impart their name to the whole land under the national denomination of Angle- land or England. But individuals also made their name thus immortal. Thus, to mention but one example, the memory of the great and pious Ella survives in this manner in the parishes of Ellakirk and EUaburn, in the townships of Ella East, Ella West, and Ellerbech, and in the chapelry of Ellard, all in Yorkshire. The Norman French, who were the next masters of England, have lefl us comparatively few names. This is mainly due to the fact, that they by no means conquered the Anglo-Saxon. It is true the language of the invaded NAMES OF PLACES. 109 kingdom fled to the open country, to the fields and the woods, but there it stubbornly maintained its ground, vul- gar but strong, degraded but hearty, and, above all, reso- lutely determined not to be overcome. The Norman- French, in the mean time, led but a sickly, artificially pro- longed life in walled towers and gloomy castles. All the efforts of the Normans to impose their manners and their language on the conquered race remained wholly ineffec- tive. The mass of the people clung to their old habits and old words with wonderful energy. Hence, although the sixty thousand followers of the Conqueror were at once ennobled by the simple fact of their victory at Hastings, and large portions of the lands of England were at once appropriated to them as the reward of past, and an incite- ment to future, services, this change was not perceptible in the local names of any but smaller localities. To the latter belonged first of all the manors, into which the greater part of the country was parcelled out. Not a few of these manor-houses survive, though we can now hardly imagine the effect of ten thousand such man- sions suddenly appearing as so many marks of the con- quest, impressed in effect on every separate locality throughout the country. Along with these manors the Normans introduced into the local nomenclature of England numerous castles, which the Conqueror and his immediate successors caused to be erected in all parts of the land. They were needed to enable a handful of hated foreigners to overawe a large and rebellious population ; hence they were walled with stone and designed for resi- dence as well as for defence. The king himself owned many ; his barons followed the example, and thus the Earl of Mortaine built Montague in Somersetshire, and another Norman noble Beauvoir Castle. Frequently the Norman castle took its name from the neighboring locality, and so there still exist parishes called Castle Hedingham, Castle Gary, Castle Acre, &c. Most of the castles erected at a 110 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. later period, and which had frequently served as mere dens of robbers, were subsequently destroyed under Henry 11. In some instances, however, their names survive their ex- istence. Thus, Castle Baynard and Castle Mountfichet^ which stood upon the banks of the Thames, near the cathedral of St. Paul, have ceased to exist since the great fire of Lon- don in 1666; hut Baynard Castle is still the name of the city ward, in which that castle was once situated. As the Norman noble, even when willing to call his town or vil- lage by its old Saxon name, was yet not always able to lay aside altogether his early predilections, we find not un- frequently very eccentric French additions, as Adwick-/e- Street, Bolton-^e-Moor and Thornton-Ze-Moor, Laughten-e??.- Ze-Morthen, Poulton-Ze-Sand, Poulton-Ze-Tylde, and Buck- Xondi'tout- Saints, with many others. In very ^QVf cases only were entirely new names bestowed, as in Battle, Beaudesert, Beaumanoir, Bellasis, Belsise, and Belleau. A mixture of old and new produced often not unpleasant effects. Thus Beaumaris, in the isle of Anglesea, looks French, but sounds as Bomorris like fair Anglo-Saxon. The old town of Ashhy, the bye or town of the Essi, is but slightly disguised by its foreign owner's name, de la Zouche, who seems to have been desirous to impress upon posterity that he was " of the genuine stock." It was also a common custom simply to add the new owner's name to the Saxon name of the place, and already Camden has Hurst Pierpoint, and Hurst Monceaux, and Tarring Neville, and Tarring Peverell. Similar names are Aston- Turville, ^MYton-Segrave, Burton- Latimer, '^leMon-Mowhray, and many others. There is in the County of Essex a place of great natural strength on a small river, which gave it anciently the name of Depen- beck — the deep brook. The French conquerors, finding the castle renowned in many a ballad, called it 3falpas, and as such it became famous in the annals of later Welsh wars. Other localities have fared worse and suffered sad mutila- tion of their once fair names. The famous T Widdzug, NAMES OF PLACES. Ill Conspicuous Mountain, in Wales, was surnamed Monthault by the Normans, and has sunk into inglorious Mold. More unfortunate still was the high-sounding Leiton Beau Desart, the grassy ground near the beautiful wooded land, which soon appears in public documents as Leiton Busart, and now has ignominiously subsided into Leighton Buzzard ! Occasionally we find, moreover, among local names in England, not uninteresting allusions to certain striking features of the rule of the Normans. Such are the many names formed with forest, which did not mean wood, but indicated privileged localities, created mainly for, and en- joyed by, men of Norman blood. On the sea-coast the Cinque Ports are still known by their collective name, though their individual names of Sandwich, Hastings, Do- ver, New Komney, and Hythe, are of a much earlier date. The Church has, of course, also left a strong impress of its power under Norman rule on numerous localities. They are easily recognized by their ecclesiastical titles, as Abhas- Combe, Ahhotshury, Priors Hardwick, Leamington-Pnors, Monh-W e^vmouth, MonMand, To^-Monachorum, and Toller- Fratrum, by way of antithesis to ToWqv- PorcorvAn, the ad- joining parish. On the Tweed the stately rule of the monks of Melrose still lives in the well-known name of Ahhotsford. Bishop's Lynn became subsequently by ex- change King's Lynn, whilst Kingsbury passed into Kings- hury-Bpiscopi ; so also P/5^0/?- Auckland, Bishop-%tokQ, and with double emphasis Bishop-Monhion. Nor ought we to omit, finally, the Knights-Templars, whose large possessions in England are still traceable in local names, and add to the Norman element. They are generally known by the addition of Temple, as at Temple in Cornwall, Temple- Bruer in Lincolnshire, 7^ew_p^e-Newsam in Yorkshire, &c. The head-quarters of these soldiers of Christ were in Lon- don, and the locality is still known as The Temple^ now long in the possession of another profession — Cedunt arma togm. The slight impression which Norman-French has pro- 112 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. duced on English local names is easily explained by the peculiar nature of the Conquest itself. The new ruler had acquired the kingdom by a single victory ; he claimed to succeed lawfully to a kinsman's crown, and promised solemnly to observe the laws granted by Edward the Con- fessor. The conquered nation remained on their native soil ; the nationality was not broken up and destroyed, as that of the Britons had been by the Saxon conquest. Only slight and rare changes have, therefore, taken place in the local names of the island since the Norman con- quest, and England is still, as she promises to remain for many a century to come, in name and in deed the cham- pion of the Saxon race. The case of American local names is entirely different from that of the names in Great Britain. There, succeed- ing races left their impress on hill and dale, city and vil- lage, river and lake, now in rude and uncouth terms, and then again in modem speech, but always intelligible, always in some way connected with the life of the people, and never wanting a historic basis. Here, on the contrary, a body of civilized men, who had already learnt to appreciate the advantage of an established nomenclature, came to a new country, and felt few wants more urgent than that of giving proper names to their future dwelling-places and the prominent objects that surrounded it. Now it seems to be beyond the power of man, under such circumstances, to invent new names. The Greeks, with all their fertility of invention and a wondrously pliant language, proved this in their colonies. In America, certainly, the poverty of imagination and the awkwardness in applying English names to new localities is perfectly astonishing, and has led to countless inconveniences and frequent ambiguities. The Canadians once had the matter made a subject of official complaint. A member of the House of Commons, we are told, who was born in the colonies, stated with much feeling, that the ill-treatment of her dependencies by NAMES OF PLACES. 113 the mother country had gone so far as to induce a governor of Canada to name four new townships after his wife's pet dogs, and that two of them, called Flos and Tiny, still re- mained there ! In the United States things are infinitely worse. The census of 1860 shows an overwhelming num- ber of Athens and Spartas, thirteen Romes, and as many Rochesters. A facetious Englishman expressed lately in an American paper his doubts whether the name of Wash- ington appeared on the lips of Americans as frequently now as formerly, when there were more than 133 towns called after the great founder of the Republic. This might be pardoned on the score of patriotism, but what shall we say to the taste that made nineteen Browns and ten Smiths, to say nothing of the trouble this must give to postmasters ! There were at the same time more than fifty places or townships called Centre, over seventy that bore the name of Liberty, and nearly one hundred and twenty named Union ; but this number also may pos- sibly hereafter be diminished. CHAPTER Vin. NAMES OF MEN. " Bonum nomen, bonum omen." Throughout the whole of antiquity, from the first records of the Bible down to the accounts of the early Greeks and Romans, there appears to have existed a mys- terious connection between names and their meaning. It is well known that this correspondence is so striking in many instances as to have induced the belief of an inspired or at least unconscious expression of the future fate of persons in their first naming. Thus the fathers of the Church saw in the words, " God called the light day and the darkness he called night," an evidence of the inability of man to name these things or anything else without the aid of the Creator, and others distinctly ascribe man's power of first naming the animals to a prophetic gift. Greek authors abound with instances of the vast impor- tance their countrymen attached to the meaning of proper names, from ^schylus's " Agamemnon," in which Helena is alluded to as having both Hell and Heaven in her name, to Herodotus, who mentions the encouragement which the accidental omen in the name of Begesistratus, the leader of an army, gave at a critical moment. The Roman creed on this subject is boldly stated in the lines of Ausonius — '' Nam divinare est nomen componere, quod sit FortuniE, morum vel necis indicium." Cicero tells us that the rolls of Roman levies were sure to begin with favorable names like Victor^ Felix^ Fausttis, NAMES OF MEN. I iilf^^ or Sectmdus, and if they could obtain a Salvius Valerius to stand at the head of the list, the omen was hailed with delight. An obscure Scipio once obtained the command in Spain merely upon the strength of his name ; while the great Scipio, as Livy tells us, reproached his mutinous soldiers for having obeyed an Atrius Umher, whom he calls a " dux abominandi nominisJ^ The superstition was natural enough when we remember that originally all names had a meaning suggestive of some peculiarity of the bearer, or of some remarkable incident connected with his history. Thus the oldest known to us, Adam, meant Red, probably indicating that man's sub- stance was taken from the red ground ; and Moses, drawn from the water. In like manner were all our Saxon names once significant, and no doubt they also were frequently given to children with an open conviction or a secret hope that the meaning of the word might in some mys- terious manner influence the future destiny of the infant. Alfred is thus all-peace (Germ. Friede) ; Egbert, eye- bright ; Bernard, the great bear ; Biddulph, the slayer of wolves ; Edward, the guardian of truth, like Gertrude, which has the same meaning ; and Bertha, the bright. These simple names, however, naturally soon became so common to many owners as to fail in conveying individuality, and this led to the addition of other designations now known to us as surnames. The oldest of these with which we are familiar, are again those of the Bible, which in their earliest form represent invariably true patronymics. We read of Caleb, the son of Jephunneh, and of Joshua, the son of Nun. For the father's name was soon substituted an ordinary word. Thus dying Rachel had called her child Benoni, the son of my sorrow, but Jacob gave him the name of Benjamin, the son of my strength. The same custom prevailed in Greek, where we read of "iKapos rov AatSaAov, and of AatSa- A.OS rov BvTrdXfxov, The custom survives in our Isaac Jacob- son or Stephen Fitzherbert. 116 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. Such names were the rule in England before the Con- quest, when as yet proper names, in the modern sense of the word, were as little known as they were even in the last century in Wales. Only about a thousand surnames began to be taken up by the most noble families in France and in England, when the language was gradually Frenchi- fied, about the time of Edward the Confessor. The lower nobility did not follow this example before the twelfth, and citizens and husbandmen had no names of their families before the fourteenth century. It is probable, though not absolutely certain, that surnames were at first always writ- ten, "not in a direct line after the Christian name, but above it, between the lines," as Ducange says, and thus were literally " supranomina,'' or surnames. Our English names, most of which have arisen subse- quently to the Norman Conquest, have recruits among them from almost all races and languages known upon earth. The Hebrew itself is largely represented in its ancient Ben, which means son. It has given us Benjamin and the shorter Benson, Bendigo, and Benari, Bendavid, and Benoni. The corresponding word in Syriac, Bar, is of less frequent occurrence, and mostly modernized, as in Barron, which now stands for Baruch ; and in Bartholomew and its descendants. This tendency to disguise old testamentary names has led to much ludicrous sham-work, both in the attempt to conceal and to discover the ancient forms. Abraham is shortened into Braham, and Moses into Mose- ley or Moss. Solomon becomes, according to fancy and taste, Salmon or Sloman ; Levi is transformed into French Lewis, and Elias into Ellis, Our Frepch neighbors are as skillful as we are in this operation. Few readers of history will recognize in the great Republican Manuel, the sweet name of Emmanuel, or in the famous banker Wires, the simple German-Hebrew Meyers. Valiant Manasseh proves its valor on Italian battle-fields as modernized Massena, and the vain composer, Herz Adam Levy, adds his initials to NAMES OF MEN. 117 his father's name, and calls himself Halevi. This tendency is pleasingly illustrated in the great novelist DTsraeli, who loves to convert every great man of our day into a descend- ant of the chosen people, as the Irish aifirm, with great good faith, no doubt, that all the heroes of recent date belong to the favored isle. Cavaignac is, in their eyes, but bad French for Kavanagh ; Felissier, of Crimean fame, be- longed to the Palissers, and even Garibaldi was originally Garry Baldwin. Dutch names are but rare in English families, and more frequently to be met with in those parts of the United States where eai-ly Dutch settlers acquired large tracts of land, and left numbers of Van JRenselaers, Van Schaiks, and Van Benthuysens behind them. The three most numerous patronymics of Celtic origin, now in use among the English and their descendants, are, of course, the 0, the Mac, and the Ap, of the three Celtic branches settled in the United Kingdom. The Irish 0, or Oy, is said by their own writers to have originally meant grandson; it is certain that the old Irish Ui was formerly quite frequent, though it must now be considered extinct. Mr. Lower, in his charming book on surnames, tells us of an old Scotch dame, who boasted that " she had trod the world's stage long enough to possess a hundred Oyes'' It cannot be denied, that the unhappy differences between the Emerald Isle and the ruling island have frequently led to very unjust prejudices against this 0. Thus Pinkerton, who argued so vehemently the inferiority of the Celtic race, said contemptuously, " Show me a great O and I am done." The prejudice, however, is gradually wearing away, as the itself is disappearing more and more ; while, on the other side, more careful researches lead constantly to the dis- covery of facts highly creditable to the ill-treated race. The most interesting among them is, perhaps, Mr. Marsh's ingenious interpretation of an expression in the Elder Pliny, from which it would appear that the Celts had reaping ma- 118 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. chines, a fact which certainly overthrows the presumed inferiority to Roman or Anglo-Saxon civilization. Nor ought it to be overlooked, that the O Conneh and O Con- nors have made their mark in English history, and the O'Donohue is still ever heard where Erin's wrongs are rehearsed. In France their has been slyly incorporated into the name, and a son of the O'Dillons has there become famous as Odilon Barrot. That the itself is gradually becoming rarer, is partly due to the voluntary action of many Irishmen, but mainly to certain violent acts of the British Government, which in Ireland as in Scotland did its best to destroy the nation- ality of the subjugated race. The crudest act of all was passed by the Irish Parliament in the fifth year of Edward IV., and is entitled : " An Act that the Irishmen dwelling in the counties of Dublin, Meath, Uriel, and Kildare, shall go appareled like Englishmen, wear their beards after the English manner, swear allegiance, and take English sur- names'^ Each such Irishman was to " take to him an Eng- lish surname of one town, as Sutton, Chester, Trim, Skrym (sic), Cork,'Kinsale ; or color, as White, Black, Brown; or art or science, as Smith or Carpenter ; or office, as Cooke, or Butler, and that he and his issue shall use the name under pain of forfeiting of his goods yearly till the prem- ises be done." It was then the McGowans became Smiths, and the Mclntyres Carpenters. For it need not here be explained that the Irish use fre- quently the cognate Mac, so that there was, in former days at least, much truth in the well-known lines : " Per Mac atque O tu veros cognoscis Hibernos, His duobus deinptis nuUus Hibernus adest" This Mac, now generally looked upon as Scotch, meant also, originally, nothing more than son, or male descendant Macaulay and MCalloch have made the prefix renowned all over the world, whilst poor McGowan, once famous, has sunk into obscure Smithson, to rise once more in NAMES OF MEN. 119 America, through his munificent endowment of the Si;nith- sonian Institute at the seat of government. McPriest, Mb Bride, and Mo Queen, look like evidences of a sad dis- regard of the vows of celibacy, but fortunately their first meaning is rarely present to the mind. Mc Quaker, a name of more recent origin, has a spice of the ludicrous. McNahb meant, after the same manner, the son of the Abbot, and the origin of the name McPherson has been historically ascertained. During the reign of David I., king of Scot- land, we are told, a younger son of the powerful clan of Chattan, became Abbot of Kingussie. The elder brother died afterwards childless, and the chieftainship fell to the share of the venerable father. He procured the necessary dispensation from Rome, and married the fair daughter of the Thane of Calder. A swarm of little Kingussies fol- lowed, and the good people of Inverness-shire, in their quaint, straightforward way, called them McPhersons, the sons of the parson. This instance stands by no means alone, but similar vicissitudes led more than once to the same results. Thus we find that the uncommon name of Archbishop arose in a like manner. It originated in the person of the well-known Frenchman, Hugh de Lusignan, who was an archbishop. By the death of one of his brothers he became the heir to the family estates and the lordship, and applied to the Pope for a license to marry, in order that the noble family might not be doomed to become extinguished. The per- mission was granted, but coupled with the condition that his descendants should bear the surname of Archevesque and a mitre over their arms. The family is quite numerous in France, and still use the prescribed crest. Occasionally the word Mac gives way to the more pre- tentious Clan, the Gaelic for offspring or descendants, and this furnishes illustrious names like that of Glanricarde. The Welsh Ap is the Celtic word Mdb, meaning son. Mr. Lower tells us that its earliest form known in names 120 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. was Vap or Jlab, as it is written in the days of Henry VI. Under the seventh Henry we find it used thus: (15 Henry VII.) ** Morgano Philip alias dido Morgano Vap David Vap Philip." Subsequently the first letter being lost it became simply Ah or Ap, and was, first in pedigrees, placed between the son and the father's name, by which means it gradually came to serve as a surname. This survives in modem names as in Thomas Ap Thomas. But since the Welsh have taken to the use of surnames, after the manner of their English neighbors, they generally drop the a and con- nect the b or p with the father's name, thus producing reg- ular family names. In this manner : — Ap Evan is now Bevan, Beavin or Bevins. Ap Henry " Penry, Perry, Bany or Parry. Ap Howel " Powell, though the same name may have been derived from Paul, as we find it spelt in Chau- cer (7229) thus: "After the text of Christ, and Powel and Jon." Ap Hugh " Pugh and later Pye, as « in Welsh often has the sound of y. Ap Lewis " Blewis, Blues. Ap Llwd (Lloyd) is now Blewitt, Blood or Floyd. Ap Llewllen has early become Fluellen — a name which actually existed in Stratford during the lifetime of Shake- speare. Ap Owen is Bowen. Ap Richard Prichard, and probably also Pickett^ unless the latter is derived from the French Picot^. Ap Roderick is Broderick and Brodie, Ap Roger, Prodger, Ap Ross, Prosser, Ap Rhys (Rees) Pryce, Brice, and Breese, and Ap Watkin Gwatkin. The exaggerated importance which Welshmen are re- ported to attach to their patronymics has given rise to many an unfair jest at their expense, which the weakness of a few of their race would hardly seem to justify. Already in the reign of Henry VIII. a judge, to whose question how he was called, an ancient worshipful Welshman gravely replied : " Thomas Ap William, Ap Thomas, Ap Richard, Ap Hoel, Ap Evan," &c., suggested to the irate owner of the endless name the propriety of contenting himself with NAMES OF MEN. , 121 the name of Mostyn, after his chief residence. A like advice might have benefited the happy man who deduced the name of Apollo, to his own satisfaction at least, from Ap Haul, the son of the Sun. Hence the bitter lines — *' Cheese, Adonis' own cousin-german by birth Ap Curds, ap Milk, ap Cow, ap Grass, ap Earth." In the year 1299, we find there was a proud Welshman summoned to Parliament, by the name and title of Lord Ap Adam, though it is not stated whether he traced his descent in an unbroken line. This baron of so ancient a family left a son, but neither he nor any of his descendants seem ever after to have been summoned again. Later descendants, however, have carefully noted every step in the pedigree of the Ap Adams, and may yet establish their claim to a seat among their post-diluvian brethren. There is another a occasionally prefixed to names which must be carefully distinguished from its Welsh namesake. It occurs much among the humbler classes in Cumberland and Westmoreland ; as in William a Bills, John a Toms, Billy a Luke, where it seems to stand simply for the Eng- lish of, with the father's name. In other cases it appears to have been used, after the fashion of the Norman de, for the Latin ab, as in John a Gaunt (ab Ghent), and in the name of the first grand-master of the Teutonic order, whom Fuller calls Henry a Walpole (Holy War. II. ch. 16). We are all familiar with Thomas a Becket, Anthony a Wood, and Thomas a Kempis, though few may be aware that the fictitious name of John a Nokes and Tom a Styles have been handed down to us from "Jack Noakes and Tom Styles," who formerly served as representatives of the profanum vidyus or our more fastidious Tom, Dick, and Harry. The Normans added to these three patronymics their own Fitz, the much abused Jilius, (fils,) of the Romans. It is somewhat strange, however, that the use of this word is now unknown in France, and does not occur in the 122 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. ancient chronicles of that country. The name came, we believe, more probably from Flanders, and was only sub- sequently adopted by the Normans, who were strangely proud of names and surnames. Like the old Romans, of whom already Horace said, " Gaudent prcenomine moUes auriculce" (Sat. II. 5-32,) whilst he satirizes one as " Tam- quam habens tria nomina" they loved to add name to name, so that Fitzhamon's daughter could justly complain, as of a great wrong, that the natural son of Henry I., whom he gave to her as husband, had but one name. The king thereupon bestowed on him the proud name of Fitz-Roi, for, says she in the poetical version of the event, — " It were to me great shame To have a lord withouten his twa name." Henry II., to recall his being born in imperial purple, called himself Fitz-Empress ; and at one time it was the fashion among old Anglo-Saxon families to exchange their ancient son for the modern ^te. The Sveynsons thus became Fitz- Swains, the Hardysonnes Fitz-Hardinges and the ancient Ethelwulfs, the noble descendants of the Wolf, whom they called farther south Guelph, became Fitz- Urse. Occasion- ally the process was reversed. Thus King Edward I., who disliked the name of Fitz, ordered the Lord John Fitz- Robert, whose ancestors had for long generations used each his father's Christian name as a surname, to "leave the manner and to be called John of Clavering, which was the capital seat of his barony." Even now the eldest son of the Earl of Malmesbury is by courtesy called Viscount Fitz-Harris. It will be seen from this, how erroneous the general impression is, that Fitz was always a sign of illegitimacy. On the contrary, it was probably not before the times of the later Norman kings that the name was at all applied to bastards. Since that time, however, this custom has been regularly kept up, as in the comparatively recent case of the children of the Duke of Clarence and Mrs. Jordan, who bear the name of Fitz- Clarence. NAMES OF MEN. 123 The very large number of English names which are de- rived from saints, have mainly come down to us from the Normans, though some, no doubt, are derived more directly through the Church. A few have been preserved in their purity ; others are sadly mispronounced, as St. Leger and St. John. The majority, however, have been so fiercely mutilated that but for authentic documents showing the gradual change, their present form would scarcely sug- gest their original formation : — Sampole, Sample, or Semple. Sidney. Tobyn or Dobbin, a degradation due, like so many others, to the desire of certain English settlers in Ireland to become thoroughly Hiber- nicized. Sinclair or Sinkler. Sillinger. Sarapire, Sampler, and even Yampert ! Toly. Tabby or Tebbs. now Samand. " Stydolph. " Simbard. Most of these changes took place as soon as the loss of Normandy cut off English noblemen from their constant intercourse with France, a time at which the Saxon ele- ment began to get the better of the Norman French, and to fashion it to its own laws of euphony. It was then, also, that other French names, not derived from saints, under- went similar mutilations, when La Morte Mer gave us Mor- timer^ and Le Mart Lac our Mortlahe or Mortlock, when Beauchamp began to sound like Beachame, as Troissart spelt it by ear in 1400, Belvoir became Beever, Gholmon- deley, Ghomley, and the French-English word skirmisher, from escrime, appeared first as Scrymgeour ! Among the early Saxons, the good old rule, " One person one name," seems at first to have prevailed, as even before their arrival in England, neither the German hero Herr- mann nor the Celtic Caractacus had been distinguished by Thus St. Paul is now St. Denis u St. Aubin u St. Clara (( St. Leger u St. Pierre (( St. Oly (( St. Ebbe u St. Amandus is St. Edolph St. Barbe 124 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. any additional epithet. Very soon, however, surnames came into fashion among them also, and were probably first taken from some outward peculiarity, as the ancient 3Iucel, big, which has come down to our day as Mitchell. Others were taken from occupations, and form a class so overwhelmingly numerous as to require here no special explanation. It will suffice to quote the quaint words of an old writer on the subject, which cover the whole ground : " Touching such as have their surnames of occupations, as Smith, Taylor, Turner, and such others, it is not to be doubted but their ancestors have first gotten them by using such trades, and the children of such parents being contented to take them upon them, their afler-coming posterity can hardly avoid them, and so in time cometh it rightly to be said, — * From whence came Smith, all be he knight or squire, But from the smith that forgeth at the fire ? ' " Neither can it be disgraceful to any that now live in very worshipful estate and reputation, that their ancestors in former ages have been, by their honest trades of life, good and necessary members in the Commonwealth, seeing all gentry hath first taken issue from commonalty." Cer- tainly a Chaucer had no cause to blush for his descent from a hosier, as Camden calls his ancestor, from its being the same as Ghausier, the name of the man, who made the chausse or hose, which in those days served to clothe both the leg and the foot. This tendency toward the addition of a surname seems to have been occasionally exaggerated, else Lord Coke would not have felt called upon to say, " that special heed was to be taken to the name of baptism, because a man cannot have two names of baptism, as he may have divers surnames." Modern usage is apt to sin in the opposite direction. Together with these fertile sources of surnames, patrony- mics also were employed by the Saxon race to obviate, the difficulty. It is held by many, that the oldest of this stock is kin, a Flemish or Frisic termination, but probably so NAMES OF MEN-. 125 closely connected with the pure Saxon hin as to make it almost impossible, at this period, to decide to which source each name is due. From the occurrence of the same words on the continent, we may presume that especially the abbre- viated names are of Frisic origin, such as Watkin, Sitnkin, Jenkin, Perkin, and Hodghin, from Walter, Simon, John, Peter, and Roger. The most fertile of all is, of course, the good old Anglo- Saxon son, and mixed up with it, now inseparably, the characteristic letter of the genitive, our s. Thus we have obtained from Harry : Harrison, Harris, Herries, Hawes, and, with the aid of kin, Hawkins; Andrew : Anderson, Andrews, Henderson ; Michael: Mixon (Mike's son) and Oldmixon; Walter : Walson, Watts, Watkins ; David : Davidson, Davies, Dawson, Daws ; Hodge : Hodgson, Hodges, Hutchins, Hutchkinson ; W'lr • i Williamson, Williams, Wilson, Wills; ( Wilkin, Wilkinson, Wilkes; ■p. i^„_j. I Richardson, Richards; I Dixon (Dick's son), Dickens, Dickenson; Adam : Adamson, Adams, Atkin, Atkins, Atkinson ; Elias : EUyson, Ellis, Ellice, Elliot ; Anna: Anson ; — Nelly : Nelson ;— Patty : Patterson. A similar contraction led to the derivation of Megson and Mixon from Meg (Margaret), of Lawson from Law (Lawrence), Jackson from Jack (James), Watson from Wat (Walter), Gregson from Gregg (Gregory), Gibson from Gibb (Gilbert), and Samson from Sam (Samuel). Philip, which in a similar manner appear as Phillips, has been contracted into Phipps, a name of aristocratic import in spite of its extreme brevity ; whilst in another direction it has expanded into Philipot, and thus furnishes the name of the well-known Bishop, Dr. Philpotts. Occasionally, however, the termination son is rather due to Danish and Norse influence, numerous names of this kind being distinctly traceable to Northern men, as Swain- son (Sveyn-sen), Ericson and Andersen. It must, also, be 126 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. borne in mind, that the final s frequently does not repre- sent the genitive of the father's name, but the plural of some outward peculiarity, from which the name is derived. Bones thus belongs not inappropriately to a medical practi- tioner of some fame, and Shanks seems to have the power of attracting public attention in an uncommon degree, if we may judge from the number of Shanks, Longshanks, Cruik- shanks, and Sheepshanks we meet with in history and in ac- tual life. Common people, it is well known, have a strange partiality for this plural form in s, adding it even to the verb in the vulgar " says I." To this tendency we are probably in- debted for names like Flowers, Grapes, Crosskeys, Briggs or Bridges, Banks, Boys, Brothers, Cousins, and Children. A different process has led in Italian to the designation of whole families from some peculiarity of appearance or some profession, as in the case of the Medici, who had long ceased to be physicians, when they were still so called after an ancestor of fame, and of the charming Bello or Rosso, who left behind them families of Rossi and Belli, and little Rossini and Bellini. The old Saxon derivation ing has lefl us unfortunately but a small variety of proper names in daily use, such as Manning and Dunning ; still it is said that there are up- wards of two thousand names which contain this pure Anglo-Saxon patronymic. Sometimes it becomes the ter- mination of a local name, but generally it is placed before the part which signifies dwelling, as in Kensington and Islington. In Harlington, for instance, it means the town or the settlement of the Harlings, the descendants of an an- cient Harl or Jarl (Earl), and it has already been mentioned that the Billings, one of the royal races, have in all prob- ability lefl their name attached to Billingsgate. The expressive hin is much more largely represented. Derived from the ancient cyn, it meant originally race, and hence gave us cyning, now king, the descendants of the race by eminence, as the sons of the French king were NAMES OF MEN. 127 with like exclusiveness long known as Jils de France, the children of France. Thence came also cyned, now hind, com- prising all who belong to the same race or class. This is the true meaning to be given to the biblical expression of " trees bearing each after its own hind ; " and to Hamlet's words, " a little more than kin and less than hindJ' In its second- ary meaning we find the suggestion, that what is of the same race and blood must needs feel affectionately one to another, and thus hindness became equivalent to benevo- lence, brotherly love, &c. Added to the father's name, it has, from the earliest times, served to designate the de- scendants, and thus we have obtained Wilhin, Tomhin, Per- kin (Peterkin), and their derivatives Wilhins, Wilhinson, &c. Of equal antiquity, but of much rarer occurrence, are the names obtained by means of the Saxon termination, och, as in FoUoch, from Paul, and contracted into Folh, which is oflen connected with the first name by an inserted c, as in Wilcox (Will-c-ock's) and Fhilcox. It speaks well for the religious sense of the people, that names derived from the Creator are so much less frequent in English than in other languages. Nothing exists among us like the French Dieu, which occurs in the history of France from the oldest times down to the Crimean war, or the Ger- man Herrgott (Lord God), the name of a well-known author. Spain and Italy abound, besides, in Jesus, Gesu, and Gesu Maria. Our Goddard, Godfrey, and Godwin have all come to us from Germany, and hardly convey, in their present form, any suggestion of irreverence. It is questionable if our Old English Bigod has any thing to do with the habit of the first owner to take the name of the Lord in vain, although it is well established that the Normans obtained this name from the French on account of the frequency of their oaths, as the English are still occasionally called God- dams, or Jean Gottam, for a similar reason. The true origin of the name is probably identical with that of bigot. We make more free with the names of Pagan gods, and 128 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. borrow especially largely from Scandinavian mythology. Wodan gives us thus not only our Wednesdays, but also Wodnesheorg, now called Wanhorough and Wanshorough as a surname. Thor, from which we have Thursday, occurs quite frequently, as Thorcshy, Thurshy, and Thurlow. The ancient goddess Freia, to whom we owe Friday, reappears fully in Fridaythorpe, and in the surname Frewin it is found analogous to Godwin. The god Saster, preserved in Sat- urday, has given his name in like manner to several local- ities, and to Satterthwaite. It is not our purpose here to enter into a full explanation of the host of English surnames. The work has been ad- mirably done by men of great learning and research, and yet, as a matter of course, but a small proportion of the thirty or forty thousand surnames in our language have been fully explained. They are derived from almost every possible condition of personal qualities, natural objects, oc- cupations and pursuits, localities, and ft-om mere caprice and fancy. We will here only allude to a few peculiarities connected with certain classes of names, which deserve fuller investigation. The Norman-French brought with them a large number of names which were either derived from places on the continent, and marked as such by having a de prefixed, as De Quincey and De Vere ; or, not being local, they were characterized by Le, as Le Marshall, Le Latimer, Le Bas- tard, Le Strange, Le Vert, and Le Fevre, the most aristo- cratic form of the universal Smith which we possess. A large ^ number of both of these classes have lost, in the course of being Anglicized, both in form and meaning so much that it is not always easy to retrace them now to their first origin. Thus, Le Dispensier, subsequently known as Le Spencer, was originally the " dispensator " or steward to the household. The officer, who accompanied the Conqueror became of course a great baron in England, and at the same time the NAMES OF MEN. 129 father of the illustrious house of Spenser, now represented by the Duke of Marlborough. Le Gros Veneur, anciently the great huntsman to the Dukes of Normandy, founded in like manner the house of Grosvenor. Le Naper, now known as Napier, was the officer who took charge of the Duke's " napery," his table-linen, &c. This derivation of the noble house of Napier, is certainly less romantic than that which ascribes it to the grateful monarch's eulogy of " No Peer," but, on the other hand, far more authentic. He was the officer who had charge of the Duke's table-linen, and especially of the " nappe " used in washing hands before and after meals, which it was his especial privilege to present to his Lord. Another part of his duty in the royal household was to hand over to the king's almoner the old linen of the king's table for distri- bution among the poor. De la Chambre, the first Chamberlain known to England by that name, soon dwindled into Chambers in England, and the corresponding Chalmers in Scotland. Summoner became curt Sumner ; the Falconer, simple Faulkner ; and other French names were treated still worse. The heroic Taillefer, who marched before the Conqueror's host, singing ancient war-songs, survives now only as Telfair with us, whilst in Italy his name has been softened into Tagliaferro, which they pronounce in the Southern States as if it were written Toliver. The fair De Champ is now ill-sounding Shands ; Belle Chere, taken from what Chau- cer means when he says, — " For cosynage and eke for bele cheer," (4820) is now unpleasantly suggestive as Belcher. Molyneux, in humble life, is written, as well as pronounced, Mullnicks ; and saintly Theobald, as Tipple ! Many Norman names, taken from the bearer's native land or town, have suffered in a way to make us tremble for the future fate of many of our own names. The Paga- 130 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. nus became first a Painini, and then, shorter still, Payne ; the Genoese is now a Janeway, and the man from Hog- stepe' calls himself Huchstep, or even Huck. In like man- ner the man from Bretagne became a Bret or De Brett,, Debrett ; he from Bourgoyne, a Burgogne or Burgwin ; from Gascoyne, a Gascogne or Gashin ; from Hainault, a Hane- way ; from Lorraine a Loring, and from the East gen- erally, a Sterling, through Easterling. But the worst fate befell three unlucky wights, who came over from three little towns in Normandy. One was called de Ath, and is now Death ; another, de Ville, and became briefly Devil; and a third, from Scardeville, branched off into two lines of de- scendants, peaceful Scarjields, and terrible Scaredevils. This process of changing foreign names is actively going on in our midst, thanks to the variety of European elements which flow into the great mass of our people. Occasion- ally, the change can be clearly traced, as in local names. Thus we find the river de la feve, as the French settlers called the tributary of the Mississippi, which passes by Ga- lena, soon changed into the more familiar name of Fever River. The same takes place among our Canadian neigh- bors, where a French population is slowly giving way to English settlers, and the old French names undergo strange alterations. Thus, a place on the Ottawa, formerly called Les Cheneaux, or The Channels, has become in pronuncia- tion The Snows, and the spelling will probably soon follow the sound. Another settlement, which for some reason or other was called Les Chats, is rapidly changing into TTie Shaws ; and a third, Les Joaquins, is altogether transformed into The Swashings. A hill near the Bay of Fundy, once poetically designated by the Acadians as Ghapeau de Dieu (God's hat), is now called Shepody Mountain ! Nor are these changes confined to French names under English rule only, but foreign words of any kind, when used by ignorant men, have suffered in like manner. Thus the Indian name of a river in New Brunswick, Pekantediac NAMES OF MEN. 131 (river in white birch land), is there popularly known as Tom Kedgewich, and numerous instances of like transfor- mations are found in every section of the United States. By the side of such unmerciful treatment, the most vio- lent contractions in sound appear but trifling injuries done to a name. The noble owners of Cholmondeley, Marjori- banks, and Tollemache may, after that, well bear their curtailment into Chumley, Marchhanhs, and Talmash ; and even the descendant of the Danish monarch's cup-bearer, originally known as Schenhe, and so called by Shakespeare and Dryden, might be reconciled to his modern appellation of Skinker. Families, moreover, were not the only sufferers by such violence. The names of towns and places, of public and private houses, even though of good English origin, were in like manner ill-treated and changed beyond all power of recognition. It might be pardonable, from the truth- fulness of the description, to change St. Dacre into Sandy Acre, a parish in Derbyshire ; and the Chartreuse, a former Carthusian monastery of great renown, suppressed during the Reformation, into Charter- House. There is no harm in turning Boulogne Mouth, the sign of a tavern much fre- quented by sailors from that locality, into Bull and Mouth ; or La Belle Sauvage, the name of another inn, the lease of which had been granted to Mrs. Isabella Savage, into Bell and Savage, although the pictorial illustrations which accompany the names are enigmatic enough to puzzle the most cunning antiquarian. The frequenters of the ale- house of the Cat and Wheel, will be little disposed to quar- rel with the owner because he substituted those simple words for the more pretentious Catharine on the Wlieel, of his predecessor ; and the Bag of Nails of a well-known public-house in Pimlico is deservedly more popular now than it was under its classic name of Bachanalia. But we think we have a right to complain when St. Mary on the Bourne, ^. e., on the river, is travestied into Marylehone, 132 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. as Old Bourne was into Holhorne ; and when the memory of the gentle nuns of St. Helena, whom our forefathers revered as Mincheons, is drowned in the change from Mincheons' Lane, which passed their ancient house, into Mincing Lane. Few of us would recognize in the sign of George and Cannon, a tribute to the fame of George Can- ning ; in the Plum and Feather, the Prince of Wales's Plume of Feathers ; in the Bull and Gate, the Boulogne Gate, a trophy taken by Henry VII. ; and still less is it suspected by many admirers of that ancient play, Punch and Judy, that the names represent nothing less than Pontius cum Judceis, a relic of an ancient Mystery taken from St. Mat- thew xxvii. V. 19. The derivation of the oft-quoted sign of the Goat and Compasses, from the supposed Puritan inscription, " God encompasseth us," has fortunately given way to a more simple and more correct explanation. It has been ascer- tained that a company of wine-coopers in Cologne bore in its arms a pair of compasses in allusion to their craft, and two goats as supporters. Now it is but fair to suppose that these arms were branded on casks containing Rhenish wine, as is the custom to this day, and that they were, very natu- rally, transferred thence to the sign-board of an inn or a vintner's house. Compound surnames are plentiful, and often ludicrous enough, when looked upon apart from the time and the circumstances which first suggested their formation. Mas- singer ought ever to be a Catholic, to sing masses, and Shakelady would hardly be admitted into good society, if he should presume to make his name good. How Doolittles get along in life is a mystery ; a greater one yet the pa- tience with which men submit, generation after generation, to be called Gotohed, Popki^s, or Stabback. Total abstjnence seems to have been in vogue from of old, if we may judge from the fondness of all nations for the name of Drink- water, which has given us Bevilacquas in Italy, and Boileaus NAMES OF MEN. 133 in France. Sir Thomas Leatherhreeches had weight enough to carry his uncomfortable name into the best company, and whilst Winspear has become a great name in Naples, Shakespeare is immortal. Our Puritan fathers, it is well known, indulged in a sad fancy for Scriptural names, which became unpardonable when extended to whole phrases. On Hume's roll of a Sussex jury, we find, among others, Mr. " Fight-the-good-jight-of-Faith White,'' of Ewen, and Mr. " Kill Sin Pimple,'' of Witham. The most unfortu- nate of all was, perhaps, the brother of the famous dealer in leather who presided over the Rump-Parliament. His pious parents had had him christened as " If- God-had-not- died-for-thee-thou-hadst-heen-damned ; " and, as no mortal man could utter the whole each time that he spoke of or to the good man, he was universally known as '' Damned Barebones." Such vagaries, however, are by no means of recent ori- gin. The great dialectician, Diodorus, in order to show that language was the result of an arbitrary choice of words, and not a living organism, pointed in triumph to his slaves, to whom he had given new names, calling one "Os, and another 'AAXct/xr/i/, in order to prove that any word might be made significative at will. There was, of course, as lit- tle connection here between such names and the owners, as there is between the poor slave and his name, chosen by ca- price from those of free and famous Romans. A German author of considerable fame, imposed, in similar manner, his pseudonym of Posgaru for many years on the world, which admired his works and believed in his name. He was enjoying much reputation, even in England, as the suc- cessful translator of Manfred, before it was discovered that he had hidden himself behind the question " IIojs yap ov ? " Double names are not frequent among us. They occur mostly when Norman names have been Anglicized ; we have thus d' Anton and Danton ; d'Auhry and Dohree ; d^Auheny and Dauheny. Other foreign names have been 134 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. translated and modified. The French Le Blond reappears as English Fairfax, and mutilated Blount and Eland. The German Schwarz is now Black, and now Swart or Smarts ; Klein is Little or Small or Kline. A curious class of dou- ble names belong to families who bear them on the pretext of an alias. Documents abound in which the same name occurs not once, which might have been accident, but con- tinually accompanied by its shadow. Thus, under the date of 1535 already we meet with a " Ricardus Jackson, alias Kenerden." In Scotland the custom prevailed for some time to use the Gaelic name with the English transla- tion superadded. Men called themselves McTavish alias Thomson, McCalmon alias Dorr, or Gow alias Smith. Hence, probably, arose the eccentric, and other^vise inex- plicable custom of some families to write themselves by one name and to call themselves by another, as with the En- roughty's, who are called Derby. The alias was gradually omitted, and the two names remained to be used for two distinct purposes. As the oldest coats of arms in the nobility of almost all countries are the simplest, consisting generally but of a single device, so the oldest names, also, may be presumed to have been extremely simple. " Nomen olim apud omnes fere gentes simplex^*^ says an excellent authority on the sub- ject. Notwithstanding this prestige, however, there seems to have prevailed, from olden times, a dislike to very short and simple names. Lucian tells us of a man called Simon, who, " having now gotten a little wealth, changed his name into Simonides, for that there were so many beggars of his kin, and set his house on fire, in which he was born, so that nobody could point at it." A slave, Pyrrhius or Dromo, on succeeding to a rich inheritance, changed his name to Megacles, just as Diodes, upon becoming Emperor, ffelt called upon to lengthen his to Dioclesian. Early French history tells us of Bruna, who became Queen of France, when it was thought proper to convey something of regal NAMES OF MEN. 135 pomp in her name, and so she was called Brunehault. A somewhat similar reason induces the popes to change their name as soon as the fisherman's ring is placed upon their forefinger, a custom they have observed ever since the name of one of their number, Sergius, which meant Hog's Mouth or Groin, made it necessary for decency's sake. Louis XI. had an even better reason for changing the name of his favorite, Olivier le Diable, which he first altered to Olivier le Mauvais, and when that also suggested the truth still too forcibly, to Olivier le Daim, forbidding at the same time the former names ever to be mentioned ! It is quite a comfort to compare with this the change of a man as great and virtuous as Olivier was mean and wicked. Maria Theresa had an excellent minister, who suffered under the misfortune of an ill-omened name, Thunichtgut, Do-no-good ; the great Empress, in acknowledgment of his virtues and his signal services, ordered it to be changed into Thugut^ our Dogood. In England also the change is not rare, though a happy excuse was made for short names by worthy John Cuts, an opulent citizen of London, to whose house and care the Spanish ambassador had been assigned. The proud Span- iard complained officially of the " shortness of name " of his host, which he thought disparaging to his honor. "But," says Fuller, "when he found that his hospitality had nothing monosyllabic in it, he groaned only at the utterance of the name of his host." An entire change of name was not unknown to our fore- fathers. Even Camden tells us that this was quite fre- quently done in his time " to modify the ridiculous, lest the bearer should be vilified by them." This wish to get rid of a vulgar or ill-sounding name created, at an early period, the habit of giving Latin and Greek forms, which meet us so frequently in history. The great theologian Schwarzerd, Luther's friend, became thus familiarly known to us as Melancthon (Black Earth) ; and the great Neander 136 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. of our day was, before he became a convert to Christianity, known as the Jew Neumann, just as a former Hosemann (man .of hose) called himself Osiander. The English physician Key, in like manner, Latinized his name into Caius, suggestive of some relationship to the great Roman jurist, and perpetuated it handsomely in the College of Gonville and Caius of Cambridge, although everybody now calls it, regardless of the founder's pardonable vanity, simply Key's College. The same period gave birth to the two names of Caius and Magnus, both still famous in England and Germany. It is less easy to account for the wish of Lord Byron to be called, not by his English name, but by that of the French family of Biron, than to appreciate the reasons which induced Napoleon, at the very beginning of his mar- velous career, to denationalize his Italian name of Buona- parte, and to make it French as Bonaparte. We can under- stand, also, why the O'Briens of Ireland should be willing, in our day, to exchange their name for that of Stafford, since the famous conspiracy in the cabbage-garden has given an unenviable notoriety to the former. We all know why our friend Smith writes himself Smythe or Smeeth, or even Smijthe, and when driven to the wall has been known to change it into Furnace. This recalls to us Swift's sneer : " I know a citizen who adds or changes a letter in his name with every plum he acquires ; he now wants only a change of a vowel to be allied to a sovereign prince (Farnese) in Italy." The Taylors, in the same way, are apt to become Tay- leursy of whom Mr. Lower tells the following good story : A Mr. Tayleur, who had been thus modified, asked a farmer somewhat haughtily the name of his dog. The answer was, *' Why, sir, his proper name is Jowler ; but since he 's a consequential kind of a puppy we calls him Jowleure." If Plato was right in recommending parents to give happy names to their children, because the minds. NAMES OF MEN. 137 actions, and successes of men depended not on their genius and fate only, but also on their names, then we can cer- tainly not blame those who desire to rid themselves of an ill-omened name. They may remember what befell the unlucky princess of Spain, whose name cost her a throne. For when the good King Philip of France had determined to seat a queen by his side, he sent ambassadors to his neighbor the King of Spain, and gave them license to choose one of his two daughters for their sovereign. They were struck with the beauty of the elder sister, and decided among themselves that both on account of her age and her charms she would be a fit bride for their master. But of a sudden their opinion was changed. They had been informed that the beauty was called Uracca, whilst her younger and less attractive sister's name was Blanca. That name of Uracca destroyed all other charms ; they gave up their own preference and led the younger princess back with them to rule over France. History has more than one such answer to the ofl-quoted "What's in a name ? " Perhaps parents would be more guarded in naming their children if they thought how much more pleasing Mary^ Anna, and Lucy sound, even to the unedu- cated ear, than barbarous Barbara, the little bear Ursula^ or the heathen Apollonia, to say nothing of American eccentricities. It is not too much to say that men might possibly even guard their names more jealously from every stain and .bad repute if they gave more attention to their meaning and their history. But as we have, unfortunately, little to say when our names are given us, we ought at least be permitted to change them when they are too atro- cious and prove intolerable burdens. First names can generally be hidden under mysterious initials, but the family name asserts its rights, and may prejudice all the world against the unfortunate owner. We cannot help sympathizing, therefore, with poor Mr. Death of Massachusetts, who petitioned the legislative body 138 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. of his State to change his name to Dickinson, and we do so all the more because malicious Fate would have it that the member who presented his petition was a Mr. Graves. A Mr. Wormwood supported his more ambitious desire to assume the name of Washington by the argument that " no member of taste would oppose his request," and that " the intense sufferings of so many years of wormwood existence deserved the compensation of a great and glo- CHAPTER IX. HOW NOUNS ARE MADE. ♦' Non enim ut fuligi nascuntiir Tocabula." — Uure, Words share the dualism that seems to pertain not to human nature alone, but to pervade the whole creation. As man consists of a heaven-born mind and a body, of the earth, earthy, so words also have their immortal part, an idea, and their perishing, changeable body, the outward form and its sound. The ever-active mind of man creates incessantly new ideas, and the frail and subtle material in which they are clothed and of which the body of all words consist, the air we breathe, suffers a thousand varying influ- ences from outside. Thus words have a physical history which explains the growth of their form, as well as a men- tal history belonging to the idea they represent. Both go, of course, hand in hand, though but too often the clumsy, awkward body remains far behind the subtle idea, and is not unfrequently left in the end an empty shell, a mere sign and symbol. Of no class of words is this more true than of the names of objects, as they are necessarily the oldest, and, with the verb, the only essential part of speech ; these two, noun and verb, sufficing to constitute language. To name an object, by a noun, and to affirm something con- cerning that object, by a verb, is all that is needed to convey thought from one mind to another. The other parts of speech are mere luxuries and asses' bridges ; they grow in number and importance, as articles of luxury grow with prospering nations ; but when passion drives our thoughts 140 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. at a tempest's pace, or terror chills our tongue, the master- words alone appear and are found amply sufficient. Fortunately we have in English the rare opportunity of tracing nouns from infancy to full manhood ; we can follow the varying fate of some with unfailing certainty and in unbroken line, from the cradle to the grave. Our language is just pliant enough now to form new nouns as the ne- cessity arises, and to allow us to watch their success in life. Some come upon the stage with a dash and an air of triumph which soon gives way to utter discomfiture, and they are seen no more ; others creep in stealthily ; they have no famous poet or brilliant essayist for their godfather, but they do their duty so well, and are such useful hewers of wood and drawers of water that, before we are well aware of it, they are admitted to every house, and finally hold their own among the oldest and proudest of words. If we go back, for the purpose of thus tracing the his- tory of nouns to the oldest forms of English, we will there find the method of forming them from the first and sim- plest elements. A single vowel, a, served in primitive times to convey the idea of eternity ; it has since grown up with our people, it has spread out and is now known as aye (for ever and aye), still bearing its striking resemblance to the Greek dct. Two vowels joined show already some progress, as in the ancient word ce for law ; then a consonant was added to a vowel, and we have ac, our modern oak^ but still surviving in many a name, as in Acland and Acton, the town and the land of oaks. It is not to be presumed that these most simple words should have long existed alone, or even been allowed to retain their primitive forms. Some were lengthened out ; in other cases, from rapidity of utterance, convenience or inattention, two were run together so as to form one word. The latter process is still continually going on. When we first hear a foreign language spoken, the most striking im- pression is that it seems to be all one word, and nothing is HOW NOUNS ARE MADE. 141 more difficult for the ear than to learn how to divide the continued sound correctly into words and syllables. Even in English, certain words now written in one were carefully separated as late as the days of Byron, and others are now in the very act of being contracted. We derive from this experience the simple law that every English noun consist- ing of more than one syllable has no longer its first form, but has had other words or particles added to the original root of one syllable. We may follow, in like manner, the mental process by which nouns were formed, in our vernacular. The first use of language was always and everywhere to give names to material, sensible objects, as the five senses are after all the one great inlet of human knowledge. " Nihil in oratione quod non prius in sensu" is a dogma of practical truth. Adam proceeds in this manner in the Bible narration, and every newborn infant does it afresh. Gradually, however, the mind becomes more active in itself and more deeply interested in the nature of these tangible objects, first ob- serves qualities, color, size, life, &c., in them, then thinks of them abstractly, aside from the object which first suggested them, and finally gives them names. Last of all come abstract nouns, the names of ideas, which have neither a substance of their own nor any connection with the tangi- ble world. Rude, barbarous races are almost altogether without this class of nouns ; speculative nations admit them in burdensome numbers. This process of forming nouns is by no means exhausted in the modern form of languages ; in none perhaps is it completely ended. We judge so not from abstract reason- ing but from the very evident fact that the three classes we have mentioned are, even in English, not yet absolutely defined and separated from each other. Many nouns have yet, with us also, to answer for an abstract idea, and at the same time for its special representative. Youth is a time of life, and a young man ; acauaintance is a state and a 142 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. person ; witness means as much the evidence given as the person from whom it is elicited. Every now and then we can trace the gradual transition, as in the word fairy, which was formerly used only like its parent /eene, whilst now it is also employed for what of old was called a /ay, a middle- being of Gothic mythology, as in " Delightedly dwells he 'mong fays and talismans And spirits." The stock of English nouns in use at present compre- hends every class and kind of words, from the simplest to the doubly compound, from the original form to one which has not a single letter left. One of the most striking pe- culiarities of our language in this respect is, that it can use any word, any part of speech, as a noun. Large numbers of verbs like hate, love, fear, turn, draw, &c., are, without any change, used as nouns also. University men have made us familiar with " the little yo," and modern authors, espe- cially in this country, have multiplied the number of sub- stantives drawn from verbs with almost appalling license. Thus we read of a hard freeze, a fine swim, a long run, a good haul, a long pull, a big scare, a bold dash, a long talk, a regular flare-up, a ride, 2i stroll, and a saunter, and even of a soapy /ee/ in Mineralogy. The wealthy of the land show us " a splendid turn-out^* whether it be a Brougham, a Clarence, or a swift Han- som, We speak familiarly of Philippics, as if we had a Demosthenes to thunder against Philip of Macedon, of simony, bequeathed to us by Simon Magus, of dunces, the unworthy representatives of worthy Duns Scotus, of an orreryj so called after their first patron, the Earl of Orrery and Cork, of rhodomontades after the famous hero of Ariosto, of Spensers, Mackintoshes, and d ' Oyleys, showing us that proper names furnish an abundance of common nouns, to which they have been godfathers. This is especially the case with the names of foreign countries and cities, which have added largely to the class HOW NOUNS ARE MADE. > 143 of nouns used to designate materials or manufactured arti- cles. Thus the towns of Calicut (Calcutta) and Damascus have given us Calico and Damask ; from Moussul in Asia Minor we have Muslin in its various forms of spelling, and from Gaza, probably Gauze. Dimity does not come, as is generally stated, from Damiette, but from a Greek word, which originally meant "two threads." For Du Cange quotes an ancient writer on the affairs of Sicily, who men- tions a factory in the island which produced " Aniita, Dim- ita, and Trimita," as also " Exhimita,". made thick by an abundance of thread, and thus explains to us the different stuffs made up respectively of one, two, three, and many threads. While chintz finds its origin in the Hindustanee word cheent or cheet, which means a spotted stuff, cambric comes from the town of Cambray, diaper from d'Ypres, and arras from the city of that name. Cordova in Spain has given us our cordwainers, Armenia our ermine, Cyprus our copper, China our porcelain of that name, and Creta our crayon. Indigo is so called as an Indian dye through Indi- cus, as the cherry came from Cerasus, and the peach from Persicum (malum). Pergamum in Asia gave us, indirectly, the word parchment, and Phasis the name of the Phasian bird, a pheasant. To Morocco we owe the best leather, to Lazarus, through the Italian, our but half-naturalized laza- retto, to Livorno the Anglicized Leghorn hats, and to the Croats of the seventeenth century, through the French, our cravats. Baldaquin comes to us through a series of changes from the city of Bagdad, known to the Italians at one time as Baldacca, and in the adjective form Baldacchino, be- cause canopies were generally made of a costly stuff, manu- factured in that Eastern city, and known even in England as Baldach. Varnish is traced back either to the golden hair of Berenice, or to the city of that name, where a pecu- liarly beautiful, amber-colored nitre was found. Worsted is derived from no foreign country, but from the English town of Worstead, where woolen goods were largely manu- 144 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. factured. Weapons, also, take their names from places famous for producing the first or the best of their kind, as Damascus and Toledo blades, bayonets from Bayonne, and pistols from Pistoja. Velvet traces its origin to the Italian word velluto, descriptive of the peculiar nature of its sur- face, and satin from the Latin seta, which subsequently formed setinus. The word dollar has an obscure beginning in the mines of the little town of Joachimsthal (Valley of St. Joachim), in the heart of Germany, as the productive silver mines of that region led to the coining of a large silver coin, which from the place was called the Joachims- thaler. The uncouth word was speedily reduced, in Ger- man, to Thaler, which is now the name of the coin through- out German}', and then Anglicized into dollar. "With greater license still the English takes up words of any kind and class, and transforms them, at will, into nouns. Thus Shakespeare, using his language with masterly indif- ference, says in King Lear : — " Thou losest here, a better where to find," and elsewhere " Henceforth my wooing shall be expressed In russet yeas and honest kersey noesJ'^ There is, however, some limit in this apparently un- checked freedom, for good taste and established usage become in language as arbitrary tyrants as fashion in society. Adjectives, for instance, cannot be promiscuously raised to the dignity of nouns. We speak of the black, the white, and the native, but only with regard to man ; " the grey I own " can only be said of a horse, and the main means only the ocean. Others again are limited to a plural meaning, no other reason being perceptible than the dictates of usage. The good and the bad, the rich and the poor, the wise and the learned, the quick and the dead, all are singular forms applied only to numbers of men. In the ancients and HOW NOUNS ARE MADE. 145 the moderns, the noUes and the commons, the form goes with the meaning. The last is used already by Shakespeare when he says, — " Let but the Commons hear this testament," where he means, of course, the commonalty, the common people and not the House of Commons. In a still more whimsical manner we find some adjectives, when used as nouns, invariably accompanied by the possessive pronouns ; thus we only speak of my or his superior and inferior, junior, senior, and equal. Better also is most frequently thus escorted, although not, as is commonly imagined, lim- ited to a plural meaning, for we read in Shakespeare : — " The Cardinal is not my better in the field ; " and " His better does not breathe upon the earth ; " as well as " If our betters play at that game." — Timon, I. 2. Some again do not venture forth, as nouns, without the pro- tection of an additional one, as when we mention our little ones and our dear ones. Still more strictly limited is the meaning of a numerous class, each of which is but applied to a special subdivision ; such are greens, sweets, bitters, eatables and drinkables, movables, odds, &c. Ben Jonson already says — *' Contraries are not mixed." (741.) And in the " Spectator " we find — " Not to confine itself to the usual objects of eatables and drinkables.''^ If we regard, on the other hand, the different stages of development in which we find our present nouns, it ap- pears at a glance that they still represent the three stages through which all nouns have to pass. There are our sim- ple nouns, consisting of nothing but a simple root, as man. day, or house. Then we have derivatives, which boast of a root adorned by a little syllable added before or after, as ufiversity) 146 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. in become and winter. We have, lastly, compound nouns, in which two distinct roots have combined to form one word, as the two ideas they respectively represent have coalesced into one. Such are housewife, wristband, &c. Simple nouns, which have really no element but a single radical, are comparatively few in number. There are many nouns, however, which appear very innocent of any con- nection with particles, and which still, when examined more closely, have to acknowledge their borrowed feathers. For of all languages the English has allowed its derivative nouns to be most obscured and contracted, thanks to the general tendency of our language to shorten and curtail all apparent superfluities. "Words like sail, fair, soul, main, and stair, seem to be quite simple until we compare them with their ancient forms, which generally still survive in modem German, and then find them to consist truly of two sylla- bles, viz : saegel, faeger, savol, magen, and staeger. Very rarely the full and the contracted form continue in use, side by side, as in our havoc and hawk, if they really are the same word. The most fertile of derivative syllables, which thus serve to make new nouns, is probably er, the remnant of the Anglo-Saxon noun wer, sl man, and thence conveying the idea of male sex and male agency in addition to that ex- pressed by the root. The word seems to have belonged alike to almost all languages ; the Sanscrit virah reappears in the Armorican air as well as in the Celtic fear. Ver is universal throughout the North, and, as Rask tells us, found in Runic inscriptions and the oldest writings. The syllable er, therefore, occurs in all Northern European languages now, and so great and so evident is its convenience, that it holds its ground in our own idiom in spite of the strong tendency of the latter to rid itself of all grammatical char- acteristics. The very fact that it existed in all the idioms, Celtic, Saxon, and French, from which the English has drawn, has enabled it to adapt itself to so many different HOW NOUNS ARE MADE. 147 classes of words. It must not be overlooked, however, that on account of this very circumstance it has not always preserved its pure form, but yielded often to the influence of the foreign element, with which it has been combined. In Scotland we meet occasionally with the full form of the originally wer^ as in lawwer. Then the w softened into y and we read already in the " Chevy Chase : " — " And long before high noon they had An hundred fat buckes slaine, Then having din'd, the drovyers went To rouze the deere againe." Our own lawyer, Sawyer and Bowyer, bear evidence of the same change. Reader and writer, Jisher and fowler, glover and hatter, hearer, and seer with its special, beautiful mean- ing, are old Saxon words so formed. In our day there pre- vails a fashion to make such nouns from verbs, and maker, founder, and doer, are of comparatively modern origin. Beggar and sailor are due to the same process. The Latin tor having undergone a frequent change into eur in French, words derived from that language present a strange variety of spelling, which is due to the fact, that er has since been continually confounded with the French eur or er. Thus we have now actor and sponsor, but also volunteer, auctioneer, mutineer, mountaineer, muleteer, huC' caneer, and pioneer (from the Spanish peon, originally pedone, men on foot who cleared the way before an army of knights) ; but engineer is from ingenieur (ingeniator), and chanticleer from chante clair. In other words we spell it or, as in bachelor from hachelier, savior from sauveur (sal- vator), and wrongly, in sailor. Glazier, hosier and spurrier, are Saxon words with French terminations, whilst harrier, carrier, courtier, and courier, have nothing at all to do with the Saxon er. Soldier has assumed it, w^ know not how, although it comes originally from solidariuSf the man who received for his fighting-wages a solidus (nummus), the standard coin of the Romans. Collier, on the other hand. 148 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. looks quite foreign, and is yet nothing but good Saxon coal and wer, coalman, just as we say milkman ; it was in old writings called colger, and hence the contraction. In the same relation to each other stand hostler^ from the ancient hospitaller, a word sadly reduced alike in form and in mean- ing, and the curious word brother^ literally one of the same brood. It is not to be wondered at, that in the course of time, especially under Norman influence, the force and meaning of this little syllable should have often been for- gotten, a circumstance which led to its occasional repetition in the same word. Thus we have fruiter-er, and sorcerer from the French sorcier (sortiarius). Shakespeare uses for our poulterer the simple form poulter ; and when Henry VIII. was visited by Charles V., the accounts had it : — " Item, to appoint four pullers to serve for the said persons of all manner of pultryP The same word occurs in Stat. 2 and 3 Edward VI. ch. 25, and Henry VIII. incorporated the " Poulters' Company." Caterer is a mere mis-pronunciation of the word acheter in days when ch was sounded like k, and Rocheby was the name of modem Rugby, Saunterer only looks like a word derived in this manner, but it really comes from Sainte Terre, and was a name given to those who, after the Crusades, went to the Holy Land without any definite business, which finally became equal to going no where in particular. In other words the er is purely French, as in : — barber, from barbier, from barbarius ; river, u riviere, (( ripuaria; prayer, (( prifere, u precaria ; danger, (( danger, (( damnuarium ; manner, u mani^re, (( maneries ; matter, u mati6re, (( materia. gardener, it jardinier. Draper comes to us from the French for cloth, drap, which we preserve in drab, the original color of cloth. Grocer was at first grosser, from gros, meaning a man who sold by the gross, although curiously enough they were formerly called pep- HOW NOUNS ARE MADE. 149 ' perers. Statutes, prescribing that English merchants must choose one ware or merchandise and deal in no other, say, " De ceo que les Marchaundy nomer Grossers engrossent totes manieres des marchandises vendahles'^ Stationers had at first nothing to do with paper or printing, but derived their name from their regular station, which distinguished them from the mass of itinerant vendors. Butchers, from the French touchers, were long called hochers. " A hocher that selleth swyne's flesh that is anywise mesele, corrupt or in morrayne " is threatened by law (Stowe, Vol. II. page 445), and WicklifFe says, " Al thing that is seeld in the hocheri,'' (1 Cor. x. 25,) using it for our " shambles." Skel- ton prefers the French form and says — " For drede of the Boucher''s dog Wold worry them like a hog." We ought not to forget that the name of Boucher is derived in a far more honorable way, for Saintfoix tells us in his " Historical Essays," that " anciently Le Boucher was a glorious surname given to a general after a victory in acknowledgment of the carnage which he had caused." It is a pity the fact should have been forgotten, whilst on the other hand we are more grateful for such oblivion in the case of Fletcher, the original form of which was in England Flesher. The origin of the name of Tucker is quite peculiar. It is derived from the town of Toucques in Normandy, near Abbeville, whence the manufacture of cloth was first brought to Bristol and the West of England. In Stat. 2 and 3 Philip and Mary, ch. 12, 1555, the cloth workers are called tuckers and the mills tucking mills. Currier comes from the French cuir (corium), and so it is spelt in Stowe. " Also the assize of a coryour is that he cory no manner of ledder," and Wickliffe has *' This is herboride at a man symount couriour^ Acts x. 6. Usher is the Anglicized huissier, and among proper names we find Jenner, the old form of joiner, Butler or Boteler from bottler, and Milner from the Anglo-Saxon miln, our mill. Nothing but the for- 150 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. cible law of analogy, the power of the majority to coerce the minority in language, can explain why the Latin charta should be charter and the Spanish daga our dagger. It is a clear abuse, on the other hand, where the truly masculine er has been added to feminine nouns, as in drake from andrake, the German enterich, in gander from Gans, now goose, and in widower. In many words the syllable er has met very strange company ; and thus it can hardly feel quite at home by the side of a Latin subjunctive or the name of a Spanish city. Still, such is its fate in Sumner and cordwainer. The former is derived from suhmoneas (thou shalt summon), the order given to a certain officer to cite delinquents before an ecclesiastical court. From the first word of his order, used like the lawyer's Ji. fa. or the statesman's haheas cor- pus, he was probably once called a suhnoneas-er, though the earliest mention in the Coventry Mysteries gives him already a more modern name — " Sir Somnor in hast wend thou thi way Byd Josef and his wyff be name At the coorte to apper this day," ■ whilst Chaucer writes it sumptuously Sompnoure. The other word, cordwainer, takes its origin from the city of Cordova and its celebrated goatskin-leather. The same Mysteries say — " Of ffine Cordewan a goodly peyre of long pikyd schon, Hosyn enclosyd of the most costlyous cloth of crenscyn." As the famous material is now only manufactured in Morocco, that city in its turn gives its present name to this kind of leather. Another city gave us anciently Eoamer, a man who makes a pilgrimage to Rome, the same as the Italian Rom(5o, which still survives in our verb to roam. A ludicrous mistake is hidden in the word bumper. Once upon a time the great toast of every feast was le hon pere, meaning of course the Holy Father, and as it was generally the final toast it was considered that the glasses would be HOW NOUNS ARE MADE. 151 desecrated by being ever again used. The contraction of Bon Pere into Bumper hardly requires the apology of a protracted feast; but being accompanied by this general smash it was as frequently designated as la Brise Generate^ the ancestor of that " General Breese " to whom, as to a famous warrior, many an enthusiastic toast has been drunk since the earlier popes. The corresponding feminine termination of our language is the much rarer ster, by some traced back to the Sanscrit stre, meaning woman. Older authors abound in words formed by such means. Sir John Mandeville, and others after him, speak of tomhestres and similar professions, which by charter or monopoly were practised by women only. At a later date, however, men began to invade these branches of industry and yet to retain the female appella- tion for some time. After a time the masculine terms drove the old ones out of the language, even as the men had driven the women out of the employments. The fact is, that in oldest times war prevailed everywhere, and almost constantly, and claimed for the service all able- bodied men. When peace was restored, large numbers of the latter came home and turned out the women who had in the mean time filled their places. Hence we have in modern English the forms in -estre yet, but without the original meaning. This transfer from the feminine to the masculine gender is all the more easily explained, as there are nearly a hundred words in -ter derived from foreign sources, and all masculine, which naturally aided in effacing the original grammatical force inherent to -ster. Thus we find already in " Piers' Ploughman," (434) — " Baksteres and Brewesteres And Bochiers manye ; Wollen Wehbesteres And Weveres of lynnen," without any indication of sex or gender. Songster is one of the few words of this class which, even in our day, may 152 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. be used for both genders, although songstress occurs not unfrequently. To hawk goods about was the privilege of men Who were then called hawkers, and of women who became hawkestres, from which our huckster. In like manner women long monopolized the right to brew beer, and hence tapster is used by Chaucer as another word for hostess, and Shelton says — " A Uippystre like a lady bright." — I. 239. Whether women ever drove teams by the same right is not ascertained, but in the days of Henry VIII. they were certainly still called teamsters. The much abused spinster derives her name from the legal fiction which presumes all elderly unmarried women to spin, as well as all good wives to weave, the words weave, woof, and wife all coming from the same common ancestor. It seems a delicate irony that the bar of the inn should have been transferred to the court- room, and that thus the barrister still bears the feminine ending under his wig and gown. In one word at least the Saxon 'Stre has joined a Danish word. This is the case in Danish svein, the swain of our poets, the boatswain on board ship ; the feminine was made as sweoster, and has given us our modern sister. Large numbers of such words are used as patronymics for men, because these are generally derived from male and not from female ancestors. Thus we have Webster from web and weave, and Brewster, which still survives as a common noun in Hull, where in public court publicans are licensed and advertised by that name. Many of these names, how- ever, are no doubt to be ascribed originally to cases in which the father did not choose to acknowledge the pater- nity, according to the old saying, " Oui pater est populus non habet fatremP In old times it is by no means rare to find names pointing to the conduct or the character of the mother, who founded a family. Thus, William the Conqueror boastfully used his name of Bastard, and even in lower HOW NOUNS ARE MADE. 153 ranks we meet frequently with names like Leeman, some- times changed into Lemon, Hussy, Par amove, and Trollops ; of this kind is also Baxter, which comes from bakestre, the ks being changed into x, just as cockscomb is now coxcomb, and pokkes are now pox in small-pox. Bakestre also is still used in some parts of Scotland for baker. Wboster is from the happy profession of wooing, as Songster from singing ; the humble work of thatching roofs has giv^n us Thaxter ; and, according to Mr. Lower's ingenious suggestion, the still harder work imposed upon women engaging themselves by the day, the name of Dexter from daegestre. Foster is the same as Forster from the fuller forester, though occa- sionally it seems to have been derived from foodster, as in foster-mother. Dempster comes from deeming, the Saxon word for judging ; hence the judges of Jersey and the Isle of Man are still called Deemsters, whilst unfortunately in Scotland the legal name for the common hangman was for- merly Dempster. Occasionally we meet with regular forms, representing both genders. Thus we have Weaver and Webster, Fibber — used by Thackeray in '* Vanity Fair " — and Fibster, and Singer and Songster. The two words Younker and Young- ster, originally standing in the same simple relation to each other, are now used, the first with contempt, the second for a young man, having its meaning transferred from one sex to the other. The Scotch seem to have a peculiar preference for this ending, for we find among them a large number of words in ster, not used in England, such as brandster, bangster (from bang!), dy ester, landmetstre, maw ster, kemster, (wool- carder) and cogster (flax-breaker.) On the other hand we notice, since the days of the " Spectator," which uses roadster, a disposition to use -ster as an expression of contempt, perhaps from an instinctive association with the Latin aster in poetaster. Thus we use punster and fibster, gamester and trickster. 154 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. As soon as the original meaning of -ster was lost to the perception of the mass of the people, there arose a ten- dency to add another feminine termination for the better expression of the gender. Although, therefore, Ben Jon- son still uses both seamster and songster of women, we find the French termination esse added to the former, as seam- stress, as early as 1699, and Thompson speaks already of a songstress. Upholster, from upholder, is an older form than either. This same termination, -ess, the representative of the Latin -ix, and surviving in executrix and the rare directrix, is, of course, a gift of our Norman masters, but never very freely used in English, and applied to but few Saxon roots. In some words it has almost vanished in the process of being Anglicized, as in nourrice (nutrix), which we now call nurse ; in others, even in foreign words, it has been entirely dropped, as in the once generally used cousiness. We find it, therefore, although an important feminine end- ing of our language, most frequently in pure Latin and French words, as in peeress, heiress, lioness, and princess, which, by the way, is by some learned men considered the only word in English with an accent not on its legitimate syllable, the radical. ' The exception is made, it is said, in order to distinguish it from the plural of prince. It is not quite clear why this syllable, among so many of its kind, should have been so particularly unfortunate as not to harmonize with the Saxon character of the language. It cannot be denied, however, that older authors used it fre- quently and fondly in cases in which it is now utterly unknown. In Wickliffe's New Testament, we find spou' sesse, cosinesse, synneress, friendess, servantess, and leperess. Bishop Fisher's works abound with saintesses. Milton has auditress, cateress, chantress, and tyranness, whilst in Shake- speare we meet with cloisteress, and fornicatress. Sterne uses deaness, and Addison detractress. All these forms are unknown to our generation. A curious word of this class HOW NOUNS ARE MADE. 155 is derived from the French lavandiere, a washer-woman, which first gave us lavender; from this a new feminine was made, in a contracted form, belonging to the days when V and u were written alike, the modern laundress, and from this again an artificial masculine launderer. From negro and votary we obtain, with a loss of the final vowel, our negress and votaress, and some will have it that lad made, once upon a time, a feminine lad'dess, which subsequently shrunk into simple lass. A still rarer termination of this class is the ancient -in, commonly traced back to the Northern cvin, a woman, from which our forefathers' quean, and our own queen. It was formerly much employed, and is in German still used, as the principal feminine ending ; in modern English it is, how- ever, scarcely ever met with. The Scotch carlin, the fem- inine of carl or churl, is well known through Burns' — " There were five carlins in the South, That fell upon a scheme, To send a lad to London town, To bring them tidings heme." The gyre-carline of Scotland is nothing less than the mother of witches, of whom the Ballad of Glenfinlas sings : " Thair dwelt ane grit Gyre- Carline in auld Betokio-bour, That livit upoun Christiane mene's flesche." It is curious that this strange-sounding word is, in reality, the same word as our familiar girl, the latter leing nothing more than the contracted form of ceorl-in, cin-in, i. e., a lit- tle churl, and originally in old English, of both genders. We are unfortunately more familiar with a vixen, a name which hides to the superficial observer its connection with fox, from which it is derived by a change of vowel asjilli/ is from foal. Maiden is suspected of being formed by the aid of -in, as maegd was in Anglo-Saxon used for both genders. The adopted titles of Margravine, Palsgravine, and Landgravine have, however, nothing to do with the derivative syllable ; they are merely English imitations of the German Grafinn, 156 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. whilst heroine, which is often counted in under this head, is pure Greek {rjpioLvrj.) Intimately connected with these means of forming nouns expressive of sex, are similar ones employed to convey the idea of diminution. Unfortunately, the English language possesses but few of these, which deprives it of the many charms and endearing expressions, for which German and especially the Sclavonic languages are so famous. It seems as if the Englishman's national reluctance to let the world become aware of his inward feelings — that apparent cold- ness which makes him in the eyes of foreigners the most reserved and least amiable of men — had affected the lan- guage also. Those that we possess are chiefly of Saxon origin; there are a few we owe to the French, but not one has survived from the Latin. The oldest of all, if we may judge from its absence in Scotch, and most probably of Frisian origin, is the word kin, closely connected, though probably not identical with the ancient cyn, our modern kith and km. The transition from that which is not the thing itself but only akin to it, to the idea of diminution, is common to all languages. Thus we use lambkin and catkin. Mannikin is both the lay figure of the artist and the dwarf in actual life, which latter meaning agrees with the Latin homunciones and the Italian name Piccoluomini, famous in history. Minnikin does not, like the former, come from man, but from the same root with Latin minus and German minder, which reappears in minx and minion. As we have obtained Alaric from the German Ulrich, so we take their word Gurke and make from it our diminutive gerkin. Jerkin, on the other hand, is from the Frisian-Dutch jurk, a frock or short jacket ; bumpkin, from the Dutch boo7n, our beam, means not only a man of small sense, whom, substituting block for boom, we oflen call a blockhead, as the Spaniards call him a Juez de palo, but is even now used in its original signification, as a naval term to designate a bar of timber. Pipkin is a little pipe, such HOW NOUNS ARE MADE. 157 as contains madeira, and hence often, in the descending scale, nothing more than a little pot ; finikin comes in like manner from fine, ^i\& firkin from four, meaning the fourth of a barrel, as farthing meant originally the fourth of a penny. Monikin is a malformation from monkey, as Malkin is from Mary, whilst the diminutive of Lady in the sense of the Holy Virgin, has given rise to the oath " By our Lakin.'' In like manner arose " God's hodykin " or " Ods hodikins" and even " Ods pitykins" as we find it in Shakespeare. The only important case in which kin has been added to a foreign word is napkin, which contains the old Frisian word tacked on to the French la nappe, from the Latin mappa, which originally meant any cloth, and hence is still the common name for handkerchief in Scotland, in the same manner in which it is used by Shakespeare in " Othello." Perhaps quite as old is our y, which appears in Scotch exclusively as ie, and hence has produced so great and un- pleasant variety in the spelling of proper names. We have Betty and Betsey, Billy and Barney, (from Bernard,) Molly and Fanny, Sally and Sadie, the latter already pure Scotch. The Scotch have many more, and add to Willie, Davie, Peg- gie, Tibbie and Annie, also lassie and laddie, daddie and wifie, even stemie, coatie, and housie. Occasionally they love, we know not why, to insert an uk before the ie, and thus Whitelaw among his Scotch songs has one called " The wee wifukie ; " and Burns uses droppukie, housukie, and Bessukie. Their number in English is much smaller, and some seem to have been lost more recently, for in Shakespeare we find repeat- edly county, for little count (Romeo, IIL 5, and alias), which is now no longer in use. Ninny and noddy occurs but rarely now in comparison with older authors ; dummy is from thumb, and granny from grandame, formed like beldame. Baby is of course from babe, but its meaning is modern ; for formerly it meant pictures in books as in these lines : — 168 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. " We gaze but on babies and the cover, The gaudy and flowered edges painted over, And never further for our lesson look Within the volume of this various book." Sylvester Dubarlas, ed. London 1621, p. 285. Another diminutive, which is much more popular on the northern side of the Tweed than south of it, is -och^ which occurs hut in a few words in English. Thus we have hill- ock and bullock ; paddock means both a small enclosure and a toad, derived in the latter case from the Dutch padde, the Anglo-Saxon pada. Hummock is from hump, buttock from the French bout, the end, and ruddock represents the little red one, viz : Robin Red-breast. In Scotland, on the con- trary, ock is still used as a common diminutive, and occurs in wifock and mannock, in laddock and lassock, in willock and mannock. It is not improbable that this same termina- tion, so fertile in names like Davock, Jamock, Bessock, and Jeanock, may have softened into the above-mentioned uk under the influence of the affectionate -le, which has been added. Names in -ock are more common ; Baldwin has given us Baldock, Paul, as has been mentioned before. Poll- ock, and finally Polk ; Matthew is often Mattock. Care must be had, however, not to attribute all similar names to the same origin, for Bowcock, which resembles the class very much, is the Anglicized Beau Coq of the Normans ; Have- lok is a pure Danish name, and Gavelok is derived from the Anglo-Saxon gaveluce, as in the verse — " Gavelickes also thike flowe So gnattes, ichich avowe." Arthour and Merlin, p. 338. Our Anglo-Saxon fathers have bequeathed us their favor- ite -ing, which originally expressed descent, as in the great name of their Aethelings, the sons of the noble, and only secondarily acquired the power of diminution. The Ger- mans also have their kindred -ung, and the connection of this syllable with our young is not to be doubted. In ancient times it often meant simply son, and already, in HOW NOUNS ARE MADE. 159 824, we read of ^'•Eadherht Eadgaring'' (son of Edgar), and " Aethelheah JSsm7ig " (son of Esna). Hence it served often to form patronymics, many of which survive, like Manning, Dunning, Browning, Whiting, Waring, and Bering. Herring is derived from here, the German Heer, a host, and ex- pressive of the number and order in which the enormous shoals of herrings arrive in English waters. It is curious to notice how this syllable has been used in the names of English coins. Penning, from which our penny, may be from pan, the form of the ancient Bractata, which resembled hollow pans, and were first known in the lands of Ina, king of Wessex, in 688. Four of them made a shilling, literally a small shield or coat of arms, exactly as the French ecu comes from the Latin scutum, still called in Italian a scudo. The full word penning has been shortened into penny, and when Edward T. reduced its weight to a standard of thirty- two grains of wheat, taken from the middle of the ear, it gave its name to a pennyweight. Before that king each coin had been marked with a cross so as to admit of its being easily and justly cut into four quarters, and hence the farthing or fourth-ing of those days. To avoid fraud, how- ever, Edward I. caused round pieces to be coined, especially for half and quarter pennies. Hence the sad degradation of the farthing, which is now the fourth part of a penny, whilst formerly it was the same fraction of a gold noble. Stat. 9 Henry V. and Stat. 2, ch. 7 (1421), say, "that the king do to be ordained good and just weight of the noble, the half noble and \h& farthing of noble." This was done, there- fore, precisely in the same manner in which the Roman quadrans was made to express the fourth part of an as. It must not be overlooked, however, that every now and then the termination -ing appears also as a mere augmen- tative, after the manner in which -ain was added to French words. For as mount made mountain, and ia\mi, fountain, so even makes evening, and morn, morning. The diminutive -ling has also passed through two distinct 160 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. stages, expressing at first simply small size, and then pass- ing into the idea of subjection. Words of the former kind are our seedling, nurseling, stripling, and handing, from the band in which children were wont to be swathed- In ani- mals it indicates with smallness also youth, as in yearling, nestling, starling, groundling, (of fishes,) duckling, suckling, firstling, and even of trees, sapling, because it has as yet no heart but only sap. Added to dear, it has become, as darling, an expression of tenderness. The transition from smallness of body to smallness of soul was here also easy enough ; thus we have lordling, underling, and worldling. It is somewhat strange that hireling, which means, just like soldatus, one who serves for coin and not for his love of master or coun- try, should now be used with contempt, and soldier with honor. Fondling has undergone a change for the better. In former days it meant a weak man, a fool, and in this sense it is used in Burton's " Anatomy," III. 3. " We have many such fondlings, that are their wives' pack-horses and slaves." The origin of sterling is curious. It was anciently written Estarling, and meant an Easterling, i. e., a man from the East, especially from the Hanse towns. These thrifty merchants introduced their pure coinage under Richard I., and their coins being called after them, this gave rise to the expression " sterling money." Subsequently the name was transferred to everything in its way excellent and gen- uine. The loss of some of these words in -ling, used by our ancestors, is much to be regretted ; our vagabond is but a poor substitute for the ancient scatterling, and lunatic is much less suggestive than moonling. Besides these diminutives of the German part of our language we have a few that belong to the French addition. Among these the most fertile is -et, the older form of the more frequent -ette, which occurs quite early, as in — " Et se li prend de rire envie Si sagement et si belvie, Qu' elle descrive deux fossettes D'ambedeux parts de ses yoe«es." Roman de la Hose. HOW NOUNS ARE MADE. 161 Being French, and apparently not very easily joined to true Saxon words, this syllable has either come into use only lately, or in other cases lost its first meaning. Instead of the modern pocket, we find that Henry VIII. put a certain "book into his poke,'' and even as late as Shakespeare, melancholy Jaques, in the " Forest of Arden," " Drew a dial from his^o^e And looking on it with lacklustre eye. Says very wisely: It is ten o'clock." Now, the diminutive meaning is entirely lost, for we speak of vast and capacious pockets ; so it is in packet, pullet, trumpet, and lancet from the French words poule, trompe, and lance. In russet from roux, and in owlet, its diminutive power is still felt ; in martinet and islet at least in a moder- ate degree. Varlet is the French valet, which again is the substitute for the older vaslet, the diminutive of vassallus. In the single word linnet it has not only been added to an old Saxon word, but actually superseded the original Saxon diminutive, for before the invasion the word was linece. Our diminutive -el is mainly derived from the o.ld French ending -el, which was subsequently very generally softened into -eau. Our English words having been imported from the French at the time that -el was still in use, they have preserved the old form with us, whilst they have changed on the Continent. Thus we say — mackerel, the old French maqueral, for the modem maquereau; pommel, " pommel, " pommeau; castle, " chatel, " chS,teau; prunel, " prunel, " pruneau. As a true diminutive it is rare in English. We have from cock, cocker, and then cockerel. Thus in Shakespeare : — Ariel. Which of he or Adrian, for a good wager, first begins to crow? Seb. The old cock. Ant The cockrel. Tempest, II. 1. From pike we make pickerel, and from sour, sorrel. Satchel stands alone. Bottle and corbeil in fortifications come to us 11 162 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. from the original German forms Jmtte and k&rh, through the pseudo-Latin diminutives hoticula and corhiculus and the French houteille and corheille. Here also care must be had not to confound with these true diminutives words termi- nating now in -el and now in -le, which are derived from Latin pkirals, such as : — battle, from the French bataille, and the Latin batualia ; entrail, " entraille, " entralia; marvel, " merveille, " mirabilia. Occasionally an additional r is inserted before this -el^ as in mongrel from the Saxon meng, which we have in mingle and in among ; in wastrel from waste, a common, and pro- vincially at least, and in Scotland, hangrel, a small hook, and gangrel, a vagabond. Unlike the before mentioned -et, this syllable combines quite readily with certain old Saxon words, as shovel, bundle from bound, needle, and muzzle from mouth. In fiail, fowl, and nail we see a mere contraction from the original Jlaegel, faegel and naegl, still preserved in the German words Flegel, Vogel and Nagel. The termination -ht, which is occasionally used for similar pur- poses, seems to be nothing else but a combination of -el and -et, such as appears in the French words oiselet and oeillet, and the Italian manteletto, although there is some possibility that it might have originated in the Anglo-Saxon lyt, our little. The old French hamel (now hameau) became thus hamlet; other examples are crosslet, and sparklet and streamlet, in which the foreign termination is added to Saxon words. Diminutive endings of classic origin are found in fernde and chapel, and compound in ret-ic-ule, a very small net, particle, article, and curricle, while vermicelli and viohnceUo have come to us through the Italian. Other diminutive endings of this kind are still so far foreign to our ear and mind that we generally use them without a clear perception of their original meaning. When we speak of a libel, we rarely think of a small book, nor do words like vehicle and obstacle convey to us the idea of dim- HOW NOUNS ARE MADE. J 63 inution. Globule and animalcule^ being scientific terms, are more likely to be correctly appreciated ; circle suggests but a certain figure. Still less are Greek forms of this kind likely to be understood, and few ever think of a little king or a small star, when they use the words basilisk and aster- isk ; nor is obelisk apt to be more suggestive. A third class of such terminations are employed to form augmentatives, and these also are generally of foreign origin. Thus from the French we take mountain from mount, and fountain from fount, standard and bombard; from the Italian trombone from trump, balloon from ball ; and from the Span- ish barracoon. But there is no lack of old Saxon syllables, also, which were once used for this purpose, and can easily be traced back to the word from which they descend. Thus we find that wold, the German wald, enters into com- mon nouns and proper names alike, soon losing, of course, its delicate initial. Threshold meant at first the thresh wold or wooden floor for threshing, which was almost always just before the house door, where it may still be found in many countries. Arnold and Reynold are made in like manner. Then we have wolf, which, however, already of old seems to have lost both its first letter and its original meaning. It now survives only in the mis-spelt names of Bardolph, Marcolph, Randolph, and Adolphus with their inorganic ph. The more frequent termination -ard owes its origin probably to more than one ancestor, as its many different meanings can only be explained by ascribing them to as many differ- ent sources. In some words it is no doubt the same as hard, and was derived from the German through the French. This meaning we find in Bernard, Reynard, and Leonard, from the bear, the fox, and the lion ; in wizard, whom Dr. Angus facetiously describes as too wise by half, from wise, in staggard, a stag of four years old, in buzzard, and in hag- gard, which probably meant looking hard as a hag. Pollard is not yet explained, though it may come from Paul, and dastard is not made of hard, but is only the Anglo-Saxon 164 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. participle of the verb dastrian, once spelt dastrod, although it has -also been explained as a contraction of dared and hard. In other words it may be traced back to our Saxon word ward. This explanation would give a sad blow to some of our finest names, as Hayward would become but the ward or guardian of hay, Stoddard of the stud, Dur- ward, of the door, Kenna7*d of the kennel, and Steward of the (house) stead or the stow. Goddard, the goat-ward, is still at the North pronounced Gotherd, and there means a fool, which adds some probability to the surmise that coward might, in like manner, be simply the cow-ward. Poor Ho- garth would become a hog-ward, and sink still lower, as Swift says of him in his clever satire of the Legion-Club : — *' How I want thee, hura'rous Hogart, Thou, I hear, a pleasant rogue art." Of Bastard nothing more is definitely known than the as- sociation with base birth, as in " King Lear," I. 2 — " Why bastard ? Wherefore base ? " In Old English the termination was frequently used in a depreciatory and contemptuous sense ; thus we find hlinkard in the Homilies, dizzard in Burton's "Anatomy," dvJlard in Shakespeare's " King Lear," puggard and stinkard. The majority of these words are no longer in use ; we still have, however, hraggard and luggard, drunkard and dotard, duUarrd and niggard, which Shakespeare in " Julius Caesar " even uses as a verb, saying of the night, — "Which we will m^r^aj-c? with a little rest." To derive Gifford from " give hard " is probably too violent a presumption, but in changing sweethard, as it originally was, into sweetheart, no great harm seems to have been done to the meaning. French augmentatives can hardly be said to be in use in modern English. The only genuine syllable of the kind is perhaps our -ee, which comes down to us indirectly from the Latin -atm. The latter survives, oddly enough, in some HOW NOUNS ARE MADE. 165 of our words as -ate, even where the same words have been essentially modified in French. We still have state, curate, and advocate, from the corresponding Latin words, where our neighbors have now etat, cure, and avocat. True French terms of this kind are feoffee, referee, legatee, jubilee, and debauchee, retaining, as may be seen, the French accent on the last syllable, with the exception only of committee and apogee. Levee may come from the Latin levata, though it is more commonly derived from the French verb lever ; grandee oWes its last syllable simply to an effort to imitate the Spanish pronunciation of grande. The -ee is not un- frequently exchanged for a simple y, which represents, however, the same Latin -atus, as in country from contrata, duchy from ducatus, journey from diurnata, clergy from clericatus, beauty from bellitatem, city from civitatem, and bounty from bonitatem. The same y, it must not be over- looked, stands quite as oflen for the Romance termination -ie, as in cavalry and infantry, fancy and courtesy. A curi- ous feature of this class of words is, that they often assume an r before the y, for no other ostensible reason than from the force of analogy with some word like artillery, aided by a few Saxon words with a natural r as buttery. Such are, e. g., of Saxon words : fishery, shrubbery, rookery and mid- wifery, and of Norman-French words: peasantry, bravery and debauchery. Besides these three important classes of nouns, which convey, in addition to the meaning of the radical part, the ideas of descent, diminution and augmentation, followed by nicer shades of signification, we find in English certain derivative nouns, in which the addition does not produce so clear a change of meaning. This is especially the case when the suffixes, though once full and significant nouns, are no longer used as such, and now appear only as parts of other words. The Anglo-Saxon had thus from the verb deman to deem, a noun dom, which survives in the mod- ern doom. We speak still of " dooms-day " as the day of 166 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. final judgment, and of a " Domes-day Book," not only of William the Conqueror, but such as King Alfred already made, when he divided his kingdom into hundreds and tithings. The Dooms of Ethelbert are dear to us as first recognizing Christianity and establishing the< Church in Kent. The doo7n of a traitor is still expressive enough ; but nouns made up by the aid of this word do not profit any longer by its special meaning. Freedom and thraldom are old Saxon words ; hirthdom is now rare ; kingdom and earldom are as recent as Christendom and the less fre- quent Heathendom. It will be seen that in most cases dom is added to the names of persons or their peculiar qualities, and thus serves, very generally, to designate the corre- sponding state, office, or dignity. In wisdom and freedom it has been added to adjectives ; dukedom and martyrdom are the offspring of a Saxon and a Norman word united. The curious suffix -ric, derived from the Saxon rican, to rule, bears on its face clear marks of its ancient connec- tion with the Greek and Latin root reg, which we preserve in words like '.-egal or direct. It conveys the idea of rule and of its extent, the former e. g. in Aelfric, he who rules with elf-like wisdom, the latter in Surrey, formerly Southric, the kingdom south of the river Thames. The two words hood and head, which we meet with so frequently in Eng- lish, are alike from the old verb haehban, our to have, and express vaguely the state or condition of things. Its corresponding form in German is heit, and in Bavaria and other parts of Germany, the common people speak even in our day of the good or bad " Heit," or state of affiiirs. In an ancient metrical version of the Athanasian Creed, copied in Hickes' " Thesaurus," (I. 233,) we find " Ne the hodes auht mengande," i. e., neither aught confounding the persons. Priesthood, monkhood, knighthood, and childhood occur very early in our language ; womanhood, neighborhood, and widowhood from nouns, and likelihood, falsehood, and hardihood are comparatively modern. Here also hybrids HOW NOUNS ARE MADE. 167 occur frequently, as in falsehood and squirehood. Head seems to have been employed when the full meaning of the original noun was to be conveyed, for which reason we probably say Godhead and manhood. Maidenhead does not belong to this class, as it refers literally to a head of the Virgin Mary, an image which stood in that locality, as Bagford writes to Hearne. Our modern -ship comes from the Saxon verb scaepan^ to shape, and expresses but rarely any thing more than the general idea of form and fashion. It is, however, interesting to notice how, in the only two instances in which the original spelling of the word is pre- served, the precise meaning also survives. They are land- scape, occasionally written landship, and foolscap, which does not mean, as is generally believed and even conveyed in the water-mark, a fool's cap, but the shape of folio, a large leaf. The term is as old as Queen Anne, whose statute laid a tax on " Genoa foolscap fine and second," in order to protect the home-manufacture of paper against the com- petition of Italian importations. From the same root in fol- ium (the Greek though-from-lingering-illness-often-previous- ly-expected- death of Mr. Burney's wife." CHAPTER X. HOW NOUNS ARE USED. " How many numbers is in Nouns ? Two ! " — Merry Wives^ Act IV. Sc. 1. Our Saxon forefathers had as artistic a fabric of cases for their nouns as Greek grammarian ever recorded. It is true they did not quite rival the accuracy and exuberance with which the Algonquin languages of the North Amer- ican continent form almost as many cases as there can be relations of nouns in a sentence. Still, grammarians differ even now as to their number, and rarely admit less than six. It seems unfortunate enough that we should in our day, and in a living, actively thriving idiom, yet resort to the quaint artifices and the almost childish language of the ancients who knew no grammar. It was all very well for Peripatetics and Stoics to imagine an upright or direct line which was to represent the name of the object, the nominative,, whilst a number of declining lines, {deden- sion,) approaching a horizontal line, were to represent the different relations of one noun to another. These falls, or direct and oblique cases, suggest nothing to our mind, and yet we are set to work, at an age when we are least likely to appreciate the illustration, to learn all the tech- nical terms of early Latin grammarians, and to burden our memory with numerous useless names. Surely, it is high time that a grammar should be written, English not only in name but in spirit. The more refined than useful system of Anglo-Saxon declensions shared the fate of all similar contrivances. It was tacitly and almost universally abandoned, as soon as HOW NOUNS ARE USEDii|jyQ|tP» another language came in contact with our own. As the Latin inflections were disregarded by the barbarous con- querors of Rome, so our Saxon declensions were summarily thrown overboard by our Norman masters. Their ear, familiar only with their own Norman sounds, w^as not easily enabled to catch the nice distinction of vowels and final consonants which constituted the many inflections of Saxon nouns. They were the masters, moreover, and with rude insolence used only so much of their subjects' speech as was absolutely necessary to make them fulfill their com- mands. It was the vassal's duty to guess and supply what might be wanting ; they cared not to take the trouble of learning the numerous varieties of form, which to them had neither life nor interest. Thus the language returned to an almost primitive simplicity, and for the delicate, hardly perceptible modifications of sound at the end of nouns which characterized the highly developed Saxon, were sub- stituted clear, unmistakable words, which were placed before them, prepositions and pronouns. This violence done the language of our fathers was all the more effective as it came at a time when, as the his- tory of all idioms teaches us, certain terminations are losing their precise characteristic sound, and with it their first clear meaning. They become then apparently, if not really, useless and inconvenient to the mass of the people. "What was before the case with the foreigner, is now equally so with the native : they convey no longer any pre- cise idea to his mind, and awaken no interest in his heart. He first neglects, and, after a while, abandons them alto- gether. "Besides," says an unknown author quoted by Dean Trench, " in all languages there is a constant tend- ency to relieve themselves of that precision which chooses a fresh symbol for every shade of meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinctions, and to detect, as it were, a royal road to the interchange of opinion." As the child learns to walk without leading-strings or other assistance, 174 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. SO mea begin to find that they can commune with each other without supplying all the little helps to understand- ing which were first required. A hint now supplies an idea, and more is conveyed by suggestion than by fully ex- pressed words. The people gradually find out that they can do as well without a large number of grammatical forms, and therefore cease to employ them. This process is aided and accelerated by the general tendency to greater uniformity. It is true that this leads often to a loss of what had real, intrinsic value, and the greater simplicity, the higher mechanical perfection of an idiom, is but a sorry compensation for the means of setting forth in a more lively, if not a clearer manner, the inner feeling of the speaker. Still, such is the fate of languages, in which, as in all mechanical contrivances, every thing tends toward the one great end, — to obtain the greatest result by the smallest means. Our English, has, therefore, preserved but very few traces of the large number of inflections which trouble us so much in reading the sadly incorrect remnants of Anglo- Saxon literature. The dative plural, for instance, which always terminated in m, survives only in him (originally heom), them, whom, seldom, and whilom, which latter word, however, is now but rarely used, except for some special purpose. Spenser says yet in all sincerity and good earn- est, — " Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers There whilom wont the Templar knights abide." But when we meet with it in a connection like the fol- lowing : — " In Northern clime a valorous knight Did whilom kill his bear in fight And wound a fiddler,^' — Hudibrat. we feel that the waggish poet has adopted it merely for its antiquated sound, and to render the verse more ludicrous. Afler it has thus continued to exist for a time, like some HOW NOUNS ARE USED. 175 fossil among the alluvium of the language, with all its orig- inal characters unobliterated, it seems now to have been entirely worn out with old age. With these exceptions, nothing has come down to us of Anglo-Saxon declensions but a single termination, the s, by means of which we now form all our genitives. It is, moreover, the only sign of a case which we now possess. Even the old form of es in nouns which end in s, z, or x, seems to become burdensome, and, except in a few cases like " the foxes tail," we supply its place now by a simple apostro- phe, as in "Eblis' self" and "Tigris' shore." Shakespeare seems yet to have hesitated about it, for he says now " his mistress' eyebrow," and now " St. Jacques's pilgrim." The apostrophe we insert nowadays before this letter s as an ap- parent note of elision, has no such meaning, but is simply a modern expedient, a late refinement, to distinguish the gen- itive from the plural. What we have thus gained in uniform- ity we have lost in expressiveness ; we are now without the means to convey by the outward form of nouns any sug- gestion as to gender. It was not so of old, when every noun had a different declension according to its significa- tion ; the first effect of this tendency to abolish all such distinctions being noticeable in the days of Chaucer, who uses himself the first feminine genitive in es, in "The Prioresses Tale," 13383, and "with modres pitee," 13253. A similar fate has befallen the variety of forms by which our fathers endeavored to express the plural number. It is well known that this was in almost all languages accom- plished by the addition to the root of a word denoting multitude, folk, etc. Thus in Bengalese the very word loc, which means people, is added to all nouns to make a plural. The Hebrew, in like manner, took im, a multitude, and joined it to the singular in order to make it plural ; hence our English plural of Cherub and Seraph in "Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry," where we use uncon- sciously a Hebrew declension. In other languages, as in 176 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. the Chinese and some of the languages of the north- western Indians, the same end is attained by a mere repeti- tion of the word. Thus the Chinese say, tree-tree for our " trees," but this leaves it undecided whether several trees in their individuality are meant or a whole forest. The same mental process is familiar to most southern races, espe- cially the Italians, who endeavor ' to increase the force of a word by repeating it, as in their " bel bello " or " presto presto." A curious distinction exists in some languages, as in the Persian, between the plural of animate and that of inanimate objects, the one being made in aw, the other in ha. The Anglo-Saxon, like all German dialects, had its strong nouns, that made their plural by a change of the radical vowel, and their weak nouns, that required the aid of an additional syllable for the same purpose. Of the former class but few remain in our day, such as the plurals mice^ lice, feet, geese, men, and women ; for here, also, the Norman conquest made an end to the existing variety of forms. The illiterate masters, at least, did not catch the nice dis- tinctions of sound ; and whefre their ear really caught them, they were unwilling to take the trouble of committing them to memory. They found one very largely used ter- mination, the masculine form of -as ; this appeared simple, and was all the easier to them as it was so much like their own familiar s ; so they adopted it as their favorite end- ing for the plural, and soon, by the force of the principle of analogy, it extended to nearly all nouns. The process was aided by the many new words that were introduced, with which the Saxon forms did not blend readily, and thus all plurals were gradually made in s. The change was, of course, neither violent nor immediate. In our old- est documents, e. g., in the famous proclamation of Henry III. 1258, and in the first political songs, found in Wright's collection, the majority of nouns do not yet make their plural in s, but retain a variety of different forms from the HOW NOUNS ARE USED. 177 Anglo-Saxon. The uniformity of our days begins only to show itself toward the end of the thirteenth and the first part of the fourteenth century. In " Piers Ploughman " it is fully established, with a few exceptions only in addition to those that exist now. This majority begins thus to rule just at the time when French words entered in large num- bers into English, at a period of which Harrison's Chroni- cle says that then " the English tongue grew into such contempt at Court, that most men thought it no small dis- honor to speak any English there ; which bravery took his hold at the last likewise in the country with every plough- man, that even the very carters begun to wax weary of their mother tongue and labored to speak French, which was then counted no small token of gentility." Even in the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century, there is no distinction made between s and es; Shelton has lyppes, huyldynges, princes, and lordes, hartes, and hartis ; and in Taylor's Works (1630) we frnd peares, plumhes, and greene heanes. But soon after these writers the principle of adding a simple s to all nouns, except after sibilants, etc., was fully established, and since that time the once very popular additional e has become daily rarer. After sibilants we prefer, of course, es as an orthographical rem- edy, to avoid the meeting of so many hissing sounds, which already abound in the language beyond the rules of eu- phony. Thus we say churches, ages, foxes, glasses, and horses. But even th takes a simple s, one of the most difficult sounds for all foreigners, except only cloth, which makes clothes for dress or cloths the material. Mandeville says still, without such distinction, both " tentes made of clothes,^' and " clothed in clothes of gold." Nor is this the only in- stance of two plural forms for two different meanings of the same word; for we have staffs for sticks, but staves for the official wand or the musical measure ; peas for the seed, and pease for the species. Peasen, which John Wallis tells us was still used in the seventeenth century, is now quite 12 178 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. obsolete. It is more curious, however, to observe that here the language has made a singular, which originally did not exist. The word was first peas, from the French " pois." vSpenser says in his " Shepherd's Calendar " for the month of October : " Nought worth a peas ; " and Put- tenham has, — " Set shallow brooks to surging seas, An Oriental pearl to a white ^ea«." Our singular pea is formed upon a misconception of peas being a plural, like the blunder of the good mayor of a town, who was so deeply impressed with his own dignity that he always spoke of a " claw of Parliament," and the poet Holmes^s humorous expression of the " One-Hoss Shay" Many an ignorant countryman still uses Chinee as the singular of Chinese; and Milton, in his "Paradise Lost," (III. 437,) sins in the opposite direction, when he says : — " But in his ways lights on the barren plains Of Sericana, where Chineses drive With sails and winds their carry wagons light." We say, finally, pennies for coin, and pence for their value, instead of the Old English pens, so liable to misap- prehension. Mandeville has, (p. 93,) — " There caste Judas the 30 pens before him." A few words of Anglo-Saxon origin, not content with the addition of 5, change besides their final/ into v. This observance is not old, however, for the first instance known of it is the only one that occurs in Mandeville, where he says theves, instead of his ordinary plural, like knyfes, lyfes, and wyfes. We say now lives, loaves, thieves, and wives, but we except all Norman-French words like chiefs, reliefs, briefs, and fiefs, save only beef where the Latin " boves " probably led to the modern form of beeves. We except in like man- ner, for reasons not yet satisfactorily explained, words ter- minating in oof, rf and jf, and therefore do not change the /in roofs, dwarfs, and muffs, which, in contrast to the modem HOW NOUNS ARE USED. 179 wharves, led an irate author to ask, "Why do we say wharves? Do we speak of the chieves of clans and the rooves of houses ? as if the ladies carried mufves to keep their dear little hands warm, or as if Tom Thumb was to be spoken of as big among the dwarves.^* If we preserve the / also in fifes, strifes, and safes, it is for the good reason that without such a mark we could not distinguish the first from fives (5), and the others from the similar forms of the verbs, he strives and he saves. Another peculiarity of our modern plural is the intro- duction of an additional e after the vowels y and o, to pro- tect the long vowel. This necessity seems to have been early felt, for Shakespeare already writes : — " In russet yeas and honest kersey noes.'''' — Love's Labor 's Lost^ V. 2. and — " All yon fiery oes and eyes of light." — Mids. Night's Dream, III. 2. Hence we say now, fites, destinies, and soliloquies; but the necessity ceases where another vowel already precedes the above mentioned, and therefore their integrity is not threatened. This is the reason why we say valleys, keys, rays, boys, chimneys, and monkeys, for the use of vallies, mon- ies, and monkies is in reality incorrect spelling, from a want of attention to the principle which underlies these by no means arbitrary rules. For even in verbs the same law is observed, as may be seen in the difference between he de- nies and he delays. Thus we also say heroes, calicoes, and echoes, but, thanks to the additional vowel, /o/^os and nuncios. The very exceptions which are occasionally quoted against the rule, the words ladies, sympathies, etc., find an easy and satisfactory explanation in the fact that their present form in y is modern, whilst formerly they were written with ie at the end. Our English, like most languages, limits the use of cer- tain nouns to one number alone, whenever the meaning suggests such a regulation. We use no singular of bellows. 180 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. scissors, lungs, spectacles, whiskers, drawers, and small-clothes. because their duality instinctively requires and admits of nothing but a plural form. Others, again, are employed in a collective meaning, and then must needs be singular only ; such are sheep, deer, neat, horse, and swine, a usage which was probably strengthened by the fact that most of these words had no plural in Anglo-Saxon and even in Old English. Mandeville, at least, uses swyn, hors, and scheep for both numbers alike. This does not, of course, exclude their ordinary use ; and thus we find, in Levit. xi. 7, " and the swine though he divide the hoof;" and in Shakespeare, ^' pearl enough for a swine." In like manner are horse and foot used when they stand for infantry and cavalry, and sail in nautical language. A few of our nouns make a nice dis- tinction of meaning in the singular and the plural. 3Ian- ner is a very different thing from manners, as when Ben Jonson already says, " wheresoever manners and fashions are corrupted." The practices of a lawyer are well to be distinguished from the practice he may have in cross-ques- tioning, as the mean or average income is not always within the means of everybody. A lad of good parts may take part in an enterprise ; and color has nothing to do with its plural, as "I must advance the colors of my love." — J/er- ry Wives, III. 4. A minute belongs to time, minutes are written down. The " Spectator " (454) says : " I writ down these minutes^^ which shows the remarkable change this word has undergone since the days of Old English. Then it meant something very different, as may be seen from Wickliffe's Bible, St. Mark xii. 42, where he says, " But whanne a pore widowe was come, sche cast two mynutys, that is a farthing." From this meaning is derived the con- tracted form, mite, of our day, which has since held its place by the side of its richer brother minute, ']\\st as 7nart% has its special meaning alongside of the fuller market. The only other plural termination of our English which claims attention by the side of the almost universal s is en. HOW NOUNS ARE USED. 181 which seems to have given way^ore slowly than the other inflections. It begins to be rare in the fourteenth century, and Spenser uses it together with s, employing eyen when he wishes it to rhyme with, pine, and eyes, when there is no such reason. In Sackville's " Mirror for Magistrates " we read, — " The wrathfull winter, proching on apace With blustering blasts has all ybarde the treen; " and in Fairfax's famous translation of Tasso, (XVII. 49,) which, to be sure, though later in date, follows Spenser very closely, we have, — " While thus the Princess said, his hungry eine Adrastus fed on her sweet beauties' light." Housen, as well as hosen, was used, with other similar forms, as late as the seventeenth century, and in the " Gilderoy Ballad " of that age we find, — " Gilderoy was a bonnie boy Had roses tull his shoone, His stockings were of silken soy Wi' garters hanging doune," and in another place — " Oh sike twa charming een he had, A breath as sweet as rose.'* SJioon is, by the way, a comparatively modem form, fre- quently used by Shakespeare, very common as a provincial term in Cheshire and Leicestershire, and used by Byron in his " Childe Harold : " " He wore his sandal shoon." The south of England is especially fond of these older plurals, and abounds with pleasen (places), sloen, cheesen, and peasen. Oxen is, of course, quite orthodox. Kine comes from the Anglo-Saxon word cu, which, being a strong noun, made its plural in ci/en, although in Percy's " Relics " (III. 120) it appears as kye simply. Macaulay indorses the word by saying ( " Hist, of England," Y. 30) : " His stores of oatmeal were brought out, the kine were slaughtered." A double plural form, arising from the fact that here 182 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. also the original inflectidn no longer conveyed to the people at large a precise meaning, occurs in many modern nouns. We say brethren from the strong plural hrether, with the addition of cw, and mean by it the same as by brothers, but use it only in strong and scriptural language instead of the latter. Thus in Byron, " Call not thy brothers brethren / Call me not mother ! " Child made originally only childer, after the fashion of the Old Norse plural, preserved in German neuters. Percy's " Relics " (n. 94) has, — " It was no childer game." Now we add the ending en, and contract both into children, A few plural forms are now used with a singular mean- ing, — another evidence of the readiness with which in a changing language the first meaning of certain inflections is forgotten by the people. Our word kitten was originally the plural of kit, a diminutive made from cat, according to early Gothic usage, the c being changed into k to preserve its hard sound before the vowel ^, just as we change candle into kindle. In like manner cock makes first chick, and then in the plural chicken, which we now use as a singidar by the side of the former, for " a pretty chick," is still a common expression, and " the old gentleman had neither chick nor child," used by Warren, shows the former mean- ing. It was only about the time of Wallis, as he tells us himself, that chicken began to lose its plural meaning ; and we are told that in Sussex, to this day, the people would as soon think of saying oxe7is as chickens. Twin is the sole remnant in English of the old Saxon dual ; it is the same as our now unfashionable twain from twa. Few of us think of garden as a plural, and yet it belongs as such to gard or yard, as stocking is an ill-treated form of the genuine stocken, as used by Spenser, from the singular stock. Still less is it commonly known that the poetical word welkin, as in Milton's line, — ^' From either end of heav'n the welkin burns With feats of arms," HOW NOUNS ARE USED. 183 is the plural of a now obsolete word welcy the German Wolke, for which we now substitute cloud. In Archbishop Aelfric's Vocabulary, the oldest work of that description in the English language, we find, " nubes : wolc ; " but in the days of Shakespeare even, the plural had already an air of affectation. Hence the Clown in "Twelfth Night" (HI. 1) says to Viola, " Who you are and what you would, are all out of my welkin. I might say, element ; but the word is overworn," where of course, welkin is intended to be even more " overworn." In another place, however, the poet says simply, " She is the weeping welkin, I the earth ; " now its use is confined to the phrase of " making the welkin ring." Nothing appears at first sight simpler than the plural men, made after the manner of strong nouns from man, and yet we find in it a curious historical illustration. Whilst we say regularly women, countryme^i, and horsemen, we employ Germans and 'Normans, not from any difference of origin or nature in these words, but because at the time when they entered the English through the French, the latter were no longer aware and conscious of their derivation from Ger or Wer-man and North-man, and hence treated the whole as a proper name. An apparent plural, also, is found in many English nouns, and has led to serious errors in some of the best of our grammars. Alms is so far from being an English plural, that it is rather a Greek singular ; for the biblical word iXerjfxoa-vvrj was, by our Anglo-Saxon fathers, already contracted into almesse, as in Chaucer, — " This almesse shouldst thou do of thy proper things," and thence into the form now in use. Riches, on the con- trary, is the mutilated form of the French " richesse," and Ben Jonson is incorrect when he says, — " Riches are in fortune a greater good than wisdom is in nature," although now it has so completely usurped the force of a 184 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. plural -that to use it otherwise would appear singular. Bellows^ from the old French " baleys;" has been more for- tunate, for, although frequently treated as a plural, Shakes- peare says, correctly, (" Pericles," I. 2,) " Flattery is the bellows blows up sin," and more recently Longfellow has, — " They watched the laboring bellows And as its panting ceased." Summons is, like alms, an ancient word, being the con- tracted "submoneas," a well-known legal term, made of the verb after the manner of " fieri facias," " habeas," " ca- pias," etc., and hence we can hardly approve of Waller's " Love's first summons Seldom are obeyed," though we ought to be thankful when we are not offended by the worse and vulgar, but by no means unfrequent, form " summonses." Among the doubtful words which even now are found used in both numbers, must be counted News, derived from " nouvelles," and hence of old always a plural. Roger As- cham says, about 1550: "There are many news;" and Milton has, in his " Samson Agonistes " : " Suspense in news is torture, speak them out." But already Shakespeare showed both forms. In "Henry VI.," Part 1. 1. 4, he has: " Whither go these news ; " and in the same play, V. 3 : " This news." The latter is now probably the more gen- eral form, and we hear rarely otherwise than " This is good or bad news," or, as custom, in the words of Trinculo con- cerning necessity, makes words " acquainted with strange bedfellows," even " old news." Tidings are, we ought to say is, in the same predicament, for it also is used by Shakespeare now as a singular and now as a plural, though neither new nor tiding exist in English. A common error limits us in the use of hair to the sin- gular ; the plural has no less authority in its favor. " His hairs are gray," in the " Last Minstrel," and " These hairs of mine," in Byron, are not merely poetical licenses, for we HOW NOUNS ARE USED. 185 have also " His [Cicero's] silver hairs will purchase us a good opinion." Wages and dregs, ashes and pains, belong to the same class of words. The few foreign plural forms which have still held their own in English are all the more interesting because they must have possessed peculiar strength to resist the influence of a languasje which has shown such unsurpassed power of receiving foreign ingre- dients, and of naturalizing and converting them from aliens into useful citizens. This seems a peculiarity not only of the Saxon tongue but of the Saxon race. The most strik- ing evidence of this quality may be seen in the truly mar- velous power of absorption which it shows especially in the Western States of North America. In the Union the German lays aside his Teutonic character, the Celt forgets his own feud, and sees his son assume the garb, the princi- ples, the very name of the Saxon. Here, most striking of all, the Jew even loses his ancient marks, because here alone, on the whole globe, he is not persecuted by the Saxon, and thus is stripped of that strength which is every- where else mainly derived from the ever-pressing necessity of resistance. We have French plurals, as in heaux, messieurs, and mes- dames, and Italian plurals in virtuosi, banditti, and conversa- zioni. The form of the plural is, moreover, frequently a sure sign of the naturalization of a foreign word. When we find that Holland makes " ideae," we may safely assume that it was to him yet a Greek word ; to us it is English, and we make ideas. Hammond has " dogmata " for our dogmas, though the former is still in use, together with mi- asmata and lemnata. Spenser makes, after Greek fashion, three syllables of heroes, where we have but two; and even the metrical accent alone betrays Pope's views on satellites, when he says, — "Why Jove's satellites are less than Jove." When we, in our day, use a foreign word as such, we 186 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. give it the plural it had in its own tongue ; and thus we say errata^ hypotheses^ phenomena^ appendices, vases, bases, formulce, larvce, magi, and data. Where we treat them as naturalized, they have an English plural, as waltzes and bandits. Many are, even now, in a transition state ; our railways have accustomed us to the use of '' terminus " and many say, already, terminuses, while others still adhere to termini. In a few instances we meet with a foreign and an English plural in the same word, attributed to two dif- ferent meanings ; thus indexes are tables of contents, but indices only signs, and geniuses are men of genius, genii fabulous beings. Hardly less important than the consideration of case and number is the gender of nouns, although this feature seems to be fading away entirely from our language. In this disappearance of one of the most striking features lies a marked difference between ancient languages, and with them modern French, on one hand and English on the other. There the gender is permanently fixed and of par- amount importance, here it is barely perceptible and fre- quently changeable at will. The mature and severe character of our English fur- nishes a partial explanation of this remarkable restriction. An abundance of forms of gender, in fact the use of a transferred gender altogether, belongs exclusively to two classes of nations. They are either still so young as to as- cribe, from ignorance and the abundance of their own life, a sex to lifeless objects, as men do in their infancy ; or they are, even in maturity, endowed with such activity of fancy that they live rather in an imaginary than in the real world. The former find their representative in some of the Algonquin tribes, the latter in the German. The English, as a people, are no longer children, nor are they endowed with unnatural liveliness of imagination. Hence they have abandoned gender as they have approached ma- turity. For when the quick fancy of childlike nations HOW NOUNS ARE USED. 187 gradually shrinks back into its legitimate dimensions, and the cooler judgment of fuller knowledge assumes the con- trol, the artificial gender is everywhere seen to disappear by itself or to be discarded as a useless incumbrance. The sensuous element loses its influence, and the power of ab- straction asserts its claims more and more. This does not, by any means, exclude the legitimate use of fancy as one of the powers of the national mind reflected in the lan- guage. Even in English, although we have nearly aban- doned the idea of gender altogether, we are by no means without numerous instances of qualities, limbs, or even agencies, which we daily attribute to lifeless things, espe- cially to features in the landscape that surrounds us. A chair has its legs, a hill a foot, a mountain a shoulder, a head, and a crest, it may even boast of one or several spurs. The needle has an eye, and a sofa two arms ; a saw has its teeth, which it shares with a comb, and a bottle a neck ; the waves have a breast, the ships their ribs, and even cabbage has a head. In like manner we ascribe functions of various kinds to mere helpless instruments, and give them names accordingly. Thus we speak of mon- keys, hydraulic rams, and chevaux-de-frise. We cut figures and letters in the living rock ; the earth breathes ; and mer- cury is to our eye quicksilver. The hungry ocean demands its victims, and the thirsty earth eagerly drinks in the wel- come rain. A lane may be a blind alley, and a trial of swiftness often ends in a dead heat. What would our poetry be without such license and such play of fancy, and how could we, without it, appreciate the beauty of the Psalmist, who makes the hills clap their hands, and the valleys laugh and sing ? Notwithstanding this, our English surpasses in the sim- plicity of gender all other languages, and has established its claim to be considered the most philosophic among idioms. It has, alone, succeeded in freeing itself perfectly of all control in point of gender by the mere form of 188 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. words, -and with it of a genuine incumbrance of speech. For the three personal genders of words conduce neither to perspicuity nor to energy ; the distinction must needs be a purely artificial one, a mere fiction, in a large number of words, that is in all that express inanimate objects, having no real ground in the nature of things. Now our English is a practical, business-like language ; it is not imaginative, like its German sister. It rejects, therefore, all mere me- chanical attributes of gender, without abandoning in any way its clear right to ascribe sex to lifeless objects for special purposes. By means of thus discarding gender as a common rule, it has gained for its poets and orators the right of personifying abstract ideas and giving life to inan- imate objects. Making a sparing use of this power to in- vest them, for the moment, with a gender, they present them far more vividly and impressively to our imagination than can be done in any other language. How graphic and striking is, for instance, the following description of law, by the aid of this power of our language : '* Of law no less can be acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world. All things in heaven and earth do her homage ; the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not excepted from her power." Substitute here its for her, and the beauty and force of the sentence are seriously impaired. This manner of giving gender is far more rational, as will be seen from the simple fact that almost every nation has its own peculiar notions connected with the sex to be attributed to certain lifeless objects. Now mythology sug- gests one, now history another. This is the case, among many others, with the words sun and moon. To Greek and Roman the former was masculine, represented by Phoebus or Sol, and the latter feminine, as Diana or Luna. Euripides, on one occasion, calls them father and mother ; and Virgil makes them brother and sister : — " Nec/rovX\ov, already in Chaucer cloue gilofre, instead of the true French form clou de girofle, was first gilly-flower, and then, on the lips of the ignorant, even July flower. The ©rjpiaKr] of the Greeks un- derwent a strange series of changes in form and in meaning. 206 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. It had its original name from the viper, whose own flesh was long considered the best if not the only remedy for the creature's bite. As such it became soon a famous anti- dote, and as leech was once the common name of all follow- ers of iEsculapius, so this preparation became generally synonymous with medical confection. The French called it then theriaque, which, however, Chaucer already cur- tailed to triacle ; as treacle it now designates simply the sweet syrup of molasses, with a slight hint at its ^n'c^ling propensity. Ignorance transformed tragacant gum into gum dragon, as even now vcKpofxavTia, or necromancy, the art of calling up the dead, etc., is often called black art, as if it had any connection with a pretended iVeyromancy. Our forefathers already mistook the Lydius lapis Graeco- rum, and called it, perhaps with reference to its unusual weight, or because it attracts iron, loadstone, just as they called the North Star the " leading star " or loadstar. The translators of Holy Writ made thus emerods out of hemorr- hoids, associating their infliction with the idea of the rod of the Lord ; at the same time hemicrania was, through the French migraine probably, converted into megrim. We still speak of the tiny grapes of Corinth as currants, as if they were the fruit of our native shrub of that name ; and our common people often say pottercarrier for apoth- ecary, as Jack calls his good ship Bellerophon a Billy Ruffian. Botanical names of Latin origin have led to similar unin- tentional disguises. Asparagus is better known as sparrow- grass, febrifuge as feverfew, and ros marinus as rosemary. A frontispicium is a ivoii\Xspiece ; and since the lanterna of the ancients has been made of thin, split layers of horn, it has become a lanthom. The rachitis of the physician is the rickets of the masses ; the selarium of convents is our salt-ce//ar; and the viridumjus of the dispensary the verjuice of the people. The Latin viride certs, or the French vert et gris, has become verdegris, and vulgarly HOW NOUNS ARE ABUSED. 207 verdigrease. Petrels, or Mother Gary's chickens, are, as it were, little St. Peters, because, like the Apostle, they can walk on the water. The Ligurnum of Italy was changed into Leghorn, precisely as the Italians themselves made their Negroponte out of the Greek name Iv 'EyptVo). We have avenged the old town on the Italians tenfold ; we call their articiocco girasole, a sunflower artichoke which came from Peru to Italy and from thence to us, with utter disregard to geography, but with a willful appropriation of the girasole, Jerusalem artichoke, and even make of it a dish called Palestine soup ; we have, in like manner, changed their renegade, who denied his faith, into a runagate, their lustrino into lutestring, their faruhala into furbelow, and their coasting vessel urea into a simple hooker. The Spanish cayo, used to designate a rock or a sand- bank, we transform into a key ; and the Indian word urican, which has served to make the French ouragan, reappears in English as hurricane (hurry cane). The Spanish call the commander of a fleet with an Arabic word amiral : and Milton still wrote of a tree fit to become " the mast of some great ammiral." But there seems to have early arisen an idea that the name had something to do with admirable, and hence Latin writers of the Middle Ages already are fond of styling the chief naval officer admirabilis or admi- ratus, from which we derive our admiral. German and Dutch words have not been exempted on account of their close relationship. The hysenblas of Holland, meaning the bladder of the fish called hysin, our sturgeon, is now ismglass. The German Weremuth has become bitter wormwood ; the lindwurm of noble Sieg- fried, a mean blind-worm ; a prophetic Weissager, a contempt- ible wiseacre; and the harsh name of the Rhenish town Bacharach is often found in old English plays as Backrag. The farther we go beyond the members of the family of languages to which the English belongs, the more diflicult is it, of course, to trace the nature of this change and natu- 208 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. ralization. The Mount Vidgeon pea of our gardeners* cata- logues reminds, probably, few readers of its Montevidean origin, and the familiar nightmare carries still fewer back to distant Finland, where Mara^ the fearful elf, inflicts that punishment upon the wicked and the scorner. The common demijohn, once upon a time spelt damajan, has an even more remarkable derivation than the popular but apocryphal Dame Jeanne, commonly quoted. The name is the same as that of a city in Persia, in the province of Khorassan, called Damaghan, where formerly a famous kind of glass- ware was manufactured ; the Crusaders were struck with certain articles of this ware, and brought the thing and the name together back to their European homes. The most remarkable feature connected with this process of giving new forms and new meanings to words which are perfectly extraneous and unconnected with their history, is, that even English names should have been made to undergo such a change. This arose, probably, first in names of for- eign origin, though borne by English families. The Flem- ish Tupigny became in English Twopenny, and the Dan- ish names of Asketil, Thurgod, and Guthlac were changed into Ashkettle, Thoroughgood, and Goodluch. There is a place in Norwich now called Goodluck's Close, which in ancient documents is correctly written Guthlac's Close, and thus allows us to trace the gradual change from one generation to another. In the famous name of Wilber- force an attempt is made to substitute a familiar word for one less generally known ; it was anciently Wilburg/os5. From names the process was extended to common nouns. A Welsh rarebit became a Welsh rabbit ; gorseberries were made gooseberries, as gossamer is in many districts called goosesummer; and Saxon meregold, which contained the same old word mere, a marsh or water, which appears in merman and mermaid, became marygold. The diminu- tive kin being no longer effective in connection with the antiquated word culver, (from Lat. columba,) it was mod- HOW NOUNS ARE ABUSED. 209 ernized and became culverhey. Certain cards in our com- mon games were of old distinguished from others by the long, splendid gown worn by king, queen, etc., according to the gorgeous costumes of the Middle Ages, and hence ob- tained the name of coat cards ; afterwards the origin was forgotten, and then these royal personages suggested another idea, and they are now called court cards. Old Saxon words have especially suffered in this manner. What we now call shamefaced had originally nothing to do with a face, but was shamefast, formed after the manner of stead- fast, and printed thus in Chaucer, Froissart, and the first authorized version of the Bible (1 Tim. ii. 9). The Saxon name of that class of plants which contains absinth was suthewort, or soothing wort; first the latter part became obscure, and gave rise to a change into soothing wood; then the first part also was forgotten, and the people now call it southernwood. A similar now unknown word ord, mean- ing the first beginning, and preserved in the German wr, gave rise to the expression of ord and end, for which we substitute the more familiar sounding but unmeaning odds and ends, as topsy-turvy is but the vulgarized form of top- side the other way. Shuttlecock was not so very long ago used correctly as shuttle cork; but stirrup has long since superseded the Anglo-Saxon stig rap, from stigan, to step up, and rap, a rope, which in Saxon days served the purpose. Sadder, however, by far, and yet clothed with additional interest, is the fate of English nouns that have suffered in meaning what those we have mentioned had only endured in form. Here it is the spirit itself that is maltreated ; and the effect is all the more melancholy as the principle of compensation that affords comfort to many a sufferer in life does not seem to apply in like manner to the fate of words. Many have fallen, few only have risen. Horace is either unjust or not well informed when he says : — 14 210 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. " Multa renascentur quae jam cecidere, cadentque Quse nunc sunt in honore vocabula, si volet nsus Quern pene arbitrium est et jus et norma loquendi." — Ars Poet. 70. It is strange that terms of war should be ahiiost the only examples of nouns that have risen from an humble to a nobler meaning. Thus cavalry comes from the Latin caballusy which meant at first nothing more than a pack- horse, from which, however, was subsequently derived the caballarius, who finally rose to be the French chevalier. Infantry consisted once of the infantes, the boys and ser- vants, who ran, during the Middle Ages, on foot by the side of their masters on horseback; these formed gradually separate corps, known as infanterie, and finally assumed the place of their lords, the knights, in the estimation of great commanders. The humble servant who at first was called in Old German a schalk, and whose sole duty was his attendance upon a mare, became known as mares- calk ; he rose to be the superintendent of the royal stables and obtained one of the high charges at court. It was then he was named marshal, and distinction in the field procured for him the chief command of the forces. Still, we find, in the French army at least, by the side of the field marshal another marechal, who still pursues a pro- fession more akin to the first meaning of the word, for he is a simple farrier. The knight himself had a hard struggle before he obtained the lofly position he still occupies in our language. The first of the name known in historic documents was a menial servant, such as the German knecht remains to this day. Already in Anglo-Saxon writings, however, the word is used frequently for boy, as in the Southern States of America until our day every slave, of whatever age he might be, was called a boy. Thus we meet with a " tynwintra cniht^' a boy of ten years, and in the Anglo-Saxon version of the gospel the Apostles are called " learning cnihts.^* Certain privileged boys were subsequently allowed to bear arms, and as this honorable HOW NOUNS ARE ABUSED. 211 distinction was only sparingly conferred, the word gradu- ally acquired a higher application, and finally settled down, in the days of chivalry, into the grade and style of a knight. Unfortunately, it is but too true, as Robertson says, that " names and words soon lose their meaning. In the process of years and centuries the latter fades off them like the sunlight from the hills. The hills are there ; the color is gone." Generally the process is this : words are unfamiliar and dignified at first, they become gradually more common and with it more indifferent, until many sink at last into trivial and contemptible by-words. Occa- sionally the history of such decay is well authenticated, as in the case of Bridewell. St. Bridget, or shorter St. Bride, was the name bestowed in olden times upon a well in Lon- don, and near it a church of the same name was soon erected. Then a royal palace was added, where King John resided and even Henry VIII. in 1529. After that, how- ever, the mansion was neglected ; and when quite decayed, it was converted into a hospital, always bearing the origi- nal name of aS'^. Bride's Well. This was converted in 1559 into a house of correction, by the agency of Ridley the martyr, then Bishop of London. Ultimately it became a simple prison ; and Bridewell is now applied, wherever English is spoken, to denote a work-house, neither blessed saint nor holy well having any thing more to do with the edifice. A somewhat similar fate was that of a priory in London, known as St. Mary's of Bethlehem, and founded by Simon Fitzmary, in 1247, for the pious purpose of shel- tering and entertaining there the Bishop of Bethlehem whenever he should be in London. Perhaps the fact that such a remarkable visit never actually occurred afterwards, or simpler motives, led Henry VIII. in 1545 to grant it to the city, and thus brought about the conversion of this mansion into a house for the insane. Hence the name of Bedlam now almost universally used to designate a hospital 212 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. for lunatics. As we have mentioned above several military words that had the rare good fate of reaching high honor, we may add here one that has been less fortunate. The noble family of Merode, famous in the history of the Neth- erlands, boasted of one brave member who was unfortu- nately more successful in making forays into the enemy's land than in obtaining great victories. This uncomfortable reputation gave rise to the term of marauders, such as are found hanging upon the flanks and the rear of all armies. Among common nouns there are again many of foreign origin the meaning of which has suffered sadly in the course of time. Giving precedence to the sex, we find that the belle dame of the French was by Spenser al- ready written in shorter English form, but used as yet for "fair lady." Soon after Gallic courtesy transferred the term to grandmothers, and it now appears as beldame, a word which afterwards sank to designate a hag or a witch. We are told a moral lesson, characteristic of the change in manners, by the French word prude, which originally meant a prudent, honest man, and in that signification sur- vives in prud'homme, the title of umpires between me- chanics and tradesmen in France. In the other sex, how- ever, it has changed until it is often used to suggest fallen or at least ill-understood virtue rather than prudence. In this connection we may add respectable, which derived from its Latin elements the idea of looking back or looking twice at an object, and thus came to mean worthy of re- spect. Whilst in the United States the older meaning has been preserved in this as in so many English words, it has fallen in England, and refers now generally to mediocre intellect, or fallen gentility, with which we sympathize. Antique also conveys its lesson ; used at first exclusively for what is old and old-fashioned, it was changed in form and meaning into antics, suggestive of the fact that in an age where the young rule, all that is old is objectionable and liable to ridicule. The haughty superciliousness with HOW NOUNS ARE ABUSED. 213 which the Roman citizen looked down upon the poor emi- grant to foreign shores, gave to his colonus a dash of contempt, which survived for a time in the kindred feeling of Englishmen toward distant colonies, and led to the contraction of the word into clown. The feeling is said to be extinct ; the word survives as a sign of its former preva- lence. There seems to be an invincible tendency for words to become harsher and more sweeping in their condem- natory meaning, if they but contain the germ of such a growth. Is this indicative of the weakness of the human heart to see the mote in the neighbor's eye and to over- look the beam in our own ? Thus we find that hase meant originally nothing more than low or humble, and even in the old Bible version our Lord was said to be " equal to them of greatest baseness ; " now it is used only of the scamp and the criminal. In like manner miscreant was simply an un- believer, such as Joan of Arc is represented by Shakes- peare ; subsequently it became a term of vilest reproach. This leads us to the two words pagan and villain, both of which are now terms of reproach, after having once had reference only to the residence of certain classes of men. For when first the Gospel was proclaimed abroad in Italy, every town from the blue waters of Sicily to the snow- capped Alps in the north seems to have opened its gates wide to the messengers of peace. But in the villages and waste tracts of land which still were found here and there, the rustics went on in the old path, burning incense on their heathen altars, and slaying white bulls in honor of Jove, as their fathers had done before them. About the end of the fourth century, Theodosius finally prohibited the Pagan ceremonial altogether ; from that time no fire was to be lighted in honor of any god, no wine to be poured to the genius, no incense to be offered to the Penates. The sac- rifice of a victim to be offered to the gods was to be consi- dered as high treason, and the decoration of a tree or an altar was punished with confiscation. The persecuted wor- 214 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. shipers of the ancient gods retired from the city and village to dark forests and deserts, from the open country to re- tired valleys. Henceforth the worship of Venus and Ju- piter ceased to be that of the great and the noble, and was gradually more and more confined to the inhabitants of rural districts, pagi. Hence it acquired its name as religio paganorum, and Orosius explains the latter as men " qui ex locorum agrestium compitis et pagis pagani vocanturT From these despised worshipers of graven images the name has come down, with undiminished strength, even to our day. Such is the force of a word, carrying with it on the stream of long centuries some powerful idea; and well has it been said of old, ^^Credunt homines rationem suam verbis imperare, Sed Jit etiam ut verba vim suam super intellectum retorqueant et rejlectant" It is curious to notice, that, whilst paganus has sunk so low, its fellow compaganus has risen to be our modern companion. In like manner, however, fell the name of the Roman master's slave, who was sent to his villa in the country, and hence received the name of villaneus. This was by no means a word of re- proach, and although it may have shared the degradation oi pagan to a certain degree, it was not, even in Old English, used to express more than rusticity or coarseness. At a certain period the word had acquired a highly offensive moral meaning ; but, by one of those strange fluctuations to which words are as subject as the ideas which they repre- sent, it was in Chaucer's time used to express nothing worse than a serf, glebce adscriptus, and, in the general acceptation of a plebeian, a low-born person with low tastes. Thus Chaucer employs it when he translates the French vilonnie of Lorris in the Romaunt de la Rose, v. 2175 : — " VManie at the beginning, I woU, sayd Love, over all thing Thou leave, if thou wolt ne be False and trespace agenst me ; I curse and blame generally All hem that loven villanyy HOW NOUNS ARE ABUSED. 216 For villanit maketh villeine, And by bis deeds a chorle is seine. -These vUlaines are without pitie, Friendship, love, and all bountie." With a somewhat different meaning he uses it, in the Prologue to his " Canterbury Tales," when he says : — " But firste I praie you of your curtesie That ye ne asette it not my vilanie Though that I plainly speke in this matere, Ne though I speek his wordes proprely." It has been mentioned elsewhere how pilgrims to Rome became idle roamers, and those who went to the Holy Land, the Sainte Terre, were suspected of being saunterers. In the same manner the French word purlieu meant in Eng- land what it literally designates, a pur lieu, i. e., lands taken in from the forest for purposes of cultivation, and hence freed from the strict forest laws of those days. Now it is commonly used for a disreputable neighborhood. Two words of Eastern origin have suffered similar decay. When the Tudors and the Stuarts made their court brilliant with gorgeous displays and cunning masks, dances in Turkish costume were much in vogue and known as mahomerias, from their association with Mohammed's followers. Later, the word dwindled down into mummery, which means now a low masquerade, a disgusting disguise. Our word gibberish has a loftier origin : it comes from a famous sage Geber, an Arab, who sought for the philosopher's stone in the eighth century, and perhaps used unintelligible incantations, — a custom which led to the present meaning of the word. English words have naturally not so oflen suffered in this way, as there was always more or less in their sound to re- call the original meaning. Still, examples are here also not wanting of words that have fallen from a high estate. There is the Anglo-Saxon hoer, who tilled the soil and gave his name to the neighbor of our day ; his rustic ways, how- ever, soon became known as boorish, and the coarse, ill- 216 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. mannered man is apt to be called a hoor. Hence, also, through the derivative hoorly, our less obnoxious burly, which refers to external appearance only. The same tran- sition took place in the Saxon word ceorl, which once was a title of honor, meaning emphatically a free man, as it still does in the German form, Kerl, and which is said to survive in our Charles. It is surmised, however, that these free dwellers on their own soil became soon obnoxious to king and nobles alike, and that hence their name soon sank to a lower meaning. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says already of King Charles, that he was a " Ceorla Cyng," a churlish king, and thus a churl has remained to this day a rude boor. The kindred viordi fellow is even now in a state of transition : it still has its original meaning of companionship when we speak of /eZ/otf^-sufferers orye//o«^-citizens, or call a friend a Rne fellow; hut fellow alone is no compliment, and shows the tendency of the word to assume an objectionable ex- pression. Knave, on the contrary, is always a reproach. In its earlier days it served to designate a son or boy, and St. Paul was thus called a " knave of Jesus Christ." This is the meaning of the German Knabe to this day. But when the sister language-made a slightly different word, Knappe, and bestowed this name upon a servant, — even as serf differs from servant, — our English did not follow the sug- gestive example, but used knave for the same purpose. This meaning accounts for our calling the king's servant in a pack of cards the knave, as from the German we have borrowed our knapsack, the boy's sack slung over his shoul- der. Hence the curious difference in meaning of the same word at different periods. Wickliffe translates Exodus i. 1 6 : " If it is a knave child, sle ye him ; if it is a woman, kepe ye,'* and the patient Grisel in the old ballad bore " a knave child " to the cruel Marquis, who had robbed her of her daughter. But already in " llobin Hood " we read ; — ♦' But now I have slaine the master, he says, Let mc goe strike the knave.'^ HOW NOUNS ARE ABUSED. 217 The transition is explained by the historic fact, that the name was, at an early period, generally given to the boys in great lords' kitchens ; these behaved badly and were treated badly, and thus the word became gradually a term of re- proach. Shakespeare shows it to us in a state of transition, using it now for a boy and then for a scamp, whilst in " Ju- lius Caesar," IV., he even says : " Gentle knave, good-night ! " It is hardly necessary to repeat that in our day the word is one of earnest condemnation. Thus it was also with one of the numerous descendants with which the root hred, to breed, has endowed our lan- guage. Besides the words hreed, brood, hide, and brother, it has bequeathed to us the unfortunate brat, which origi- nally meant nothing but offspring, and is used as such in Dean Trench's quotation from Gascoigne's " De Pro- fundis": — " Israel, household of the Lord, O Abraham's brats, brood of blessed seed, O chosen sheep that loved the Lord indeed." Then it became usual to designate an ill-favored child as a brat, and now the word is hardly admissible in polite con- versation. Three names of persons of the fairer sex have had a peculiar fate. Gossip, which is at least but rarely applied to men, has the same high origin as gospel, meaning sib or akin in God, and was originally used to designate all persons who jointly entered into the relation of sponsors for a child about to be baptized. The relation- ship, it is well known, is considered so close as to constitute, in the Catholic church, an insurmountable obstacle to mar- riage. Now, the word bears too pointed an allusion to the talking, slandering propensities of certain persons to be any longer complimentary. It is curious that the corre- sponding word in French, commere, has lost its exalted nature in precisely the same manner. The once noble title of housewife, in its full form still unsurpassed in its sim- ple and approving meaning, has degenerated into the vile 218 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. hiLssy. As if to make amends, we find that the ancient word cwen, once used in contrast with gom, as woman with man, has, from an expression of the mere difference in sex, risen to designate the woman by eminence, the queen, as cyning, of the kin, gave us king, and as the royal children of Spain and France are to this day called, Jils de France and infantes de Espana. CHAPTER Xn. ADJECTIVES. •* Ho for an epithet ! " — Ancient Author. " The English is plenteousne enoughe to expresse our myndes in any thing whereof one man hath nede to speke with another," says Sir Thomas More, who evidently dealt much in matter of fact, or despised epithets as much as modern authors love them by the side of their nouns. For the English is not particularly rich in adjectives, and re- sembles, although it does not go quite as far as, the language of a tribe of North American Indians, the Mohegans, who have no adjectives whatever, if we may rely on the judg- ment of Dr. Jonathan Edwards. It is well known how this statement delighted our democratic philologist. Home Tooke, who found in it a strong proof of his doctrine, that adjec- tives were never original words. They are, at all events, not a separate class of words, not names of persons or things possessing an independent existence. The mental process to which they owe their origin is the naming of qualities, observed in tangible objects but separated from them, so that they may be applied to others also. One con- sequence of this want of substantiality is, that they change their meaning in the process of passing from one language to another more than nouns and verbs. Nouns are always more or less intimately connected with the object they des- ignate, and may easily be traced back to it, even after they have been used figuratively for generations. Adjectives, on the other hand, express only qualities, and qualities assume 220 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. very drfferent aspects as they are applied to different objects. A brave homme is by no means a hrave man with us, and a virtuoso need not at all be a virtuous man ac- cording to our standard of morality. The national respect paid to wealth in England has long since led foreigners to notice the tendency to describe every thing that is praised as a rich thing, — rich colors, a rich saying, or a rich joke, even, — and to condemn what is inferior as a poor thing, — a poor book and a poor statue. Changes of meaning are shown most in those adjectives we have received from the French. By dint of mispronouncing and misspelling, they have often lost both form and meaning. Thus ecrase is now applied to the mind only as crazy; gentil, besides the vulgarized genteel, the pleasing gentle, and the rarer gentile, has produced the offensive jaunty ; puisne, still preserved in our judges, is for all other persons simply puny ; and deshabille has, not without justice, become shabby. Aigre is no longer sharp, as it must once have been, to judge from the line in Chapman's " Iliad : " " Now on the eager razor's edge for life or death we stand." It is only in vine- gar that it has preserved its older meaning of acrid. In other words we find a division of meaning, as in the de- scendants of the Latin captivus, which has given us first captive, and then, from the contempt with which early Sax- ons looked upon the miserable prisoner, the meaner caitiff. In Italian the same word, cattivo, now means all that is bad ; in French, chetif whatever is feeble and fragile. Some of these changes, which are unfortunately but seldom to be traced step by step, are so peculiar as to deserve greater attention than they have obtained heretofore. How came gros to be only gross, petit to be petty, and joli to degenerate into jolly ? The transition has been even more injurious to a number of German adjectives, — a fatality which the learned Dean Trench ascribes to the depression of the Anglo-Saxons after their sad defeat by the Normans. If this can be proved, — and the assertion is well supported, ADJECTIVES. 221 — their moral deterioration has left a permanent and most interesting record in our language. Some changes are in- explicable, as those of German emsig (busy), klein (little), glatt (smooth), and dumm (stupid), into empty, clean, glad, and dumb. Others show a clear demoralization, as when taper, (valiant) sinks into dapper, rasch (active) into rash, and prdchtig (splendid) into pretty. Among these Ger- man adjectives, bleich (pale) also became hleah, although in Fox's " Book of Martyrs " the latter has still the original meaning : " When she came out, she looked as pale and as bleak as one that were laid out dead." The number of adjectives derived from foreign languages is quite large, that of the natives comparatively small. In return, the English exercises, of all living languages, the greatest freedom in using any word, noun or adverb, as an adjective by merely placing it alongside of another noun. The result, with regard to the former part of speech is, that in our day, of two nouns placed side by side, one, as a matter of course, qualifies or characterizes the other, and thus performs the part of an adjective. We are all familiar with a gold watch, a bottle nose, a University man, an evening dress, or a morning draught. Some authors go farther, from Campbell's " Like angel visits few and far between," to Leigh Hunt's "With her in-and-out deliciousness," or Falstaff's advice to Prince Hal, " Go hang yourself in your own heir- apparent garters.^* Original adjectives can, therefore, scarcely be said to exist in English. Even about the simplest of those now in use there hangs a doubt ; our good has been commonly traced to the same root as God, and ill is but a contracted form of evil. Others, of course, cannot be so distinctly traced back to their first origin, and pass, therefore, as original. The number of derivatives is large, and here, as among nouns, we find both Saxon and Norman syllables used for the purpose, although many of them have of late become obsolete. Many Anglo-Saxon and Old English termina- OT TBOI UiriVBRSITT] 222 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. tions, however, are still clearly known as such, and among them especially the ancient -en. Its use must have been very common, for among older writers we meet hundreds of words formed by its aid, which are now no longer in use. Chaucer speaks of rosen chaplet and azurn sheen ; Spenser has, in " Mother Hubberd's Tale," — " Or els by wrestling to wex strong and heedful!, Or his stifFe armes to stretch with eughen bowe; " and in his " Fairy Queen," (V. 5, 30,) — " Let him lodge hard and lie in strawen bed, That may pull downe the courage of his pride." Sir Thomas More makes good use of the syllable when he says : " In their time they had treen chalices and golden prestes, and now we have golden chalices and treen prestes." This word treen seems to have been a favorite with our fathers, for we find, that, not to speak of Wickliffe, who has treen by the side of stonen, hairen, hrichen, and hornen, Milton speaks in " Comus " of treen platters, and Jeremy Taylor recommends a treen cup. With true poetic instinct Wood- worth still sings of " the old oaken bucket " and the noble poem, so full of sweet thoughts of childhood passed in the country, will no doubt preserve the old form as long as Englishmen love English songs. Now we still use brazen and flaxen, woolen and wooden^ golden, and sometimes leaden and siVcen ; but there is a manifest tendency in the language to dispense with this class of adjectives, and to substitute for them the simple form of the noun. Brazen is giving way to brass orna- ments, oaken to oak floor, and oaten to oatmeal. Golden and earthen are still familiar to us, because they are in our Bibles ; but on all other occasions the nouns are employed, and we speak of a gold pin and of earth-vjovks. Woolen holds likewise its own, but its meaning is more limited than be- fore the time when the town of Worstead, in the parish of Norfolk, first established extensive manufactories of worsted. The corresponding forms of Latin words in English are ADJECTIVES. 223 such as ligneous and marine, of Greek, cedrine and petrine. The adjective derived from austere has become somewhat obscured, being shortened into stern ; in the ancient ballad of " Northumberland Betrayed," by Douglas, we find still: — " But who is yond thou lady faire That looketh with sic an austeren face? " The termination -y, simple as it appears at first sight, is of great antiquity and original power. It is the last faint echo of a syllable corresponding to the Greek -lko- " It would not be thee, nuncle," but he goes farther than that, and ventures in his " Twelfth Night" (IL3), upon — " Did you never see the picture of we three ? " Mr. Gilpin, in his " Remarks on Forest Scenes," says that he has " oftener than once met with the following tender elegiacs in churchyards in Hampshire : — ' Him shall never come again to we, But we shall surely one day go to Ae.' " The pronoun of the second person is now used only for 244 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. specrfic purposes, such as to give vigor and solemnity, or in earnest appeals. Thus Pope says in his " Iliad." — " Ah, wretch, no father shall thy corpse compose, Thy dying eyes no tender mother close ! " and elsewhere, — " Clad in Achilles' arms if thou appear Proud Troy may tremble and desist from war." In like manner Milton employs it in " Paradise Lost," where he says : — "And thou, enlightened earth, so fresh and gay! " If we were to venture upon substituting you for thmi, the effect of the whole passage would be, if not lost, at least much diminished and marred. The trite proverb that " Familiarity breeds contempt," finds its practical illustration in this, that we use thou for the lofliest purpose for which language can be employed — for our worship of the Creator — and at the same time for the expression of contempt. As soon as thou ceased to be heard beyond the domestic circle and the intimacy of friends, it became a sign of disregard, because we are apt to treat those with insulting familiarity whom we do not respect. Thus, at Sir Walter Raleigh's trial, when Coke was at a loss for argument and evidence alike, he fell back upon the easier mode of attack, and said insultingly : "All that Lord Cobham did was at thy instiga- tion, thou viper, for I thou thee, thou traitor." When Sir Toby Belch is urging Sir Andrew Aguecheek to send a challenge to Viola, he says : — " Thou elfish-marked, abortive rooting hog, Thou that wast sealed in thy nativity, The slave of Nature and the son of hell ! Thou slander of thy mother's heavy womb, Thou rag of honour, thou detested: " and in " Twelflh Night," " Taunt him with the license of ink ; if thou thou 'st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss." The so-called first person, representing the speaker, and the second person, the person spoken to, must necessarily PRONOUNS. 245 be in presence of each other ; hence, in English at least, their respective pronouns require and have nb designation of sex. In Hebrew, on the contrary, there is also a femi- nine form for the second person. The so-called third per- son, however, of whom something is said and who is spoken of as absent, needs on that account to be more accurately defined. This has led to the only instance in the Eng- lish language in which gender is actually represented in the form of a word ; we have retained for it, in a manner, the Anglo-Saxon participles of the verb haetan, (to call,) he, heo, haet or hit. The masculine has remained unchanged ; the feminine, now she, survives in the hoo of Lancashire ; and the neuter has simply lost its aspirate. He did not reach our age without a struggle for its existence, for at one time, the old dramatists show us, a simple a was threaten- ing to assume its place. Thus we find in " Love's Labor 's Lost" (IV. 1),— " Who ever a' was, a' showed a mounting mind." It still survives among the unlettered, and Goldsmith thus quotes : " A troublesome old blade, but a' keeps as good wines as any in the whole country." She was first substi- tuted by Chaucer for the heo or he, which was in universal use before him, and it is of comparatively recent origin. Like that, what, and similar forms, it represents the true neuter of Old English, to which class may perhaps be as- signed, also, one other English word, athwart, formed after the same fashion. The plural form we has come down to us almost without change, but its " majestic " use for a single person is com- paratively modern. Lord Coke, at least, tells us that it was first so employed by King John, who introduced Nos and Noster into grants, confirmations, &c., or, as some writer has quaintly observed, thus found out the art of multiply- ing himself, whereas his predecessors had been content with ego and meus. Another explanation of this extraordinary substitution is, that kings include in this we all their officers 246 STUDIES IN ENGLISa and'servants, and thus express the collected will of many in one, as editors include all who think like them, and may be charitably supposed to utter not their individual opinions, but those of a party, or at least of many. But what shall we say of our own we ? There is abetter excuse for the substitution of you instead of the old thou. When it was first introduced — probably at the ceremonious, etiquette-loving court of Byzantium -^ it was deemed a courtesy and a sign of uncommon re- spect, thus to treat one as if he were or represented a large number ; as if he were, in fact, a " host in himself." Be- sides, there is in all respectful ways of addressing others a perceptible tendency to avoid the direct personality ; hence the frequent use which the polite French makes of the in- definite on for the direct vous. In our own day there has been superadded to these reasons for the use of you, a third : the desire to be equally courteous to all, which has led to the gradual supremacy of that pronoun, which more than any other savors of republican equality. It has, however, undergone strange changes before it obtained that general recognition. At first you, or rather ye, as it was then ex- clusively written, was considered more polite than thou, and thus often mixed up with the singular. Chaucer uses it thus (2256),— " And if ye will not so, my lady sweete, Than pray I the, give me my love Thou blisful lady dere," and in 842, — " And ye, Sir Clerk, let be your shamefastedness." This use of the plural pronoun instead of the singular was by no means contemporaneous in French, nor in any of the other Northern languages, and hence some have supposed that the English may have borrowed it from the Dutch, where it was already common. For some time, however, the two pronouns remained side by side, and thou was not set aside for religious purposes until a much later date. PRONOUNS. 247 Even in the " Morte d' Arthur " of tlie year 1485, yow and thou occur in the same line and addressed to the same person. You was used regularly for the singular as early as 1503, by Sir Thomas More, who says : — " Farewell my daughter lady Margarete, God wotte full oft it grieved hath my mynde, That ye should go where we should seldom mete. Now I am gone and have left you behynde." But that it cannot yet have obtained fully seems to appear from John Despanter's Latin Grammar, who, in 1517, crit- icizes sharply those who used it, and whom he calls " dos- citatores." In the sixteenth and seventeenth century it is found without exception, we believe, in prefaces to books, where the author addresses his public. Then, however, a change occurred, and it was not considered as quite so re- spectful ; at least, William Lee, bookseller, who published in 1640 a book entitled " Youth's Behaviour ; or Decencie in Conversation among Men," says distinctly : " Tou should be used to persons of lesser rank. Thou and Thee to friends and superiors." It may be, however, that he, like many of his profession, was but a lover of the " good olden times," and preferred stating his wishes and preferences in the shape of actual facts. There arose early, besides, a difference between ^e, the Anglo-Saxon nominative of the pronoun, spelt ge, and you^ derived from the Anglo-Saxon dative and accusative eow. Chaucer observes the distinction with such uniformity, that we may well assume it to have been the rule in his day. At a later time, however, ye gradually usurped the place of the accusative, and gave peculiar force to that case. Thus Shakespeare says in " Henry VIII : " — " The more shame for ye ; holy men I thought f/e," and Milton almost invariably employs it so, e. g, — " His wrath which one day will destroy ye both," and — *' I call ye and declare ye now returned Successful beyond hope, to lead ye forth." 248 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. At the same time ye seems constantly to have been used to express extreme familiarity, and thus it became gradually comic and burlesque. Thus we find it in the Prologue, — " Show your small talents and let that suffice ye, But grow not vain upon it, I advise ^e," and in Pope's " Iliad," (XXII.),— " Yet for my sons I thank ye, Gods ! 'twas •well, Well have they perished, for in fight they fell." Finally, the same form occurs occasionally now as a mere expletive, and, naturally, only in familiar style, as when Dr. King uses it, (p. 574), — " He '11 laugh ye, dance ye, sing ye, laugh, look gay, And ruffle all the ladies in his play." It is curious, and to the observant student very suggestive, to notice in how many different ways different nations pre- fer to address one another among themselves. The Ger- man has not less than three distinct modes : he treats the superior of great distinction with a title instead of a pro- noun, and speaks to him as der Herr Graf^ "the Lord Count," but with the verb falls back to the ordinary way of using the third person plural. This, the pronoun Sie, he employs for all above or on an equality with him ; whilst he grants the friendly Du, our thou, to those he loves and holds dear ; the lower dependent or subordinate is occasionally still reminded of his inferiority by a rude Er. The French revolution abolished this degrading Er in the army, the Revo- lution of 1848 made an end to the half contemptuous Du, and now Sie remains almost the exclusive mode of address for all classes of society. The Danes follow the German rule, but prefer the singular of the verb. The Dutch have so entirely substituted you for thou., that the latter has com- pletely dropped out of the language, and the form of the second person of the verb is hardly ever given in grammars even, unless it be for the imperative. Hence in poetry they address the sun and the moon and all lifeless objects PRONOUNS. 249 alike with you^ and the plural of the verb ; and even the actor in his monologue has to become a plural to himself. It sounds strange indeed to the foreigner, to hear them use one and the same pronoun for God and king, wife, child, and friend, heaven, and earth, and horse, and dog. The Russian and the Greek use thou for all ordinary purposes, but you, as do almost all nations now, when they are particu- larly polite. The Pole is still faithful to his ancient thou, but he adds courteously the word for Lord or Lady, saying, Mash Pan, " Thou Lord." The Italian, Spaniard, and Por- tuguese, all employ the most indirect way of addressing each other, substituting expressions like " Your Mercy," " Your Grace," and their representative pronouns for our you, actu- ally saying to each other, " How is she to-day ? " " I thank her." The Persian uses exceptionally our you, for gener- ally all over the Orient the custom prevails of employing instead a mode of circumlocution which avoids all direct- ness so repugnant to Oriental courtesy. Hence they pre- fer saying, " The gentleman says," or, " The son of my Lord shall be served." They is, like she, it, thou, and their, simply a part of the Anglo-Saxon demonstrative, used as a per- sonal pronoun. The possessive pronouns are in English, as in most known languages, nothing more than derivative formations of the personal pronouns, and it matters little whether they are, as some maintain, the genitives of the latter, or, as others believe, adjectives made from them by the addition of en. So much is certain, that their form and meaning were for some time of a most undecided character. Thus Wickliffe employs oure and youre not as possessive pronouns, but as genitives plural, and says oure dreed, the dread of us, and youre feer, the fear of you. What is more interest- ing for our day, is the gradual shortening which mine and thine have undergone in former ages, and are still under- going. Originally they were probably the only forms used ; afterwards, and for some generations, the full forms were 250 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. preferred before vowels, and the shortened forms my and thy before consonants, in order to avoid the meeting of many consonants. Sir John Mandeville already has (59), « Thin hosen " and ''thi schon," and (179), " My wif " and " myn husbond." Chaucer observes the rule, saying, — " Rise up my wif, my love, my lady fre," (10012), and — « With thyn eighen Columbine," (10015). In our Bible version we read accordingly (Psalms Iv. 13) : " But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance," and the same distinction is occasionally ob- served by modern writers. Thus we find Hamlet giving this advice, — " Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice." Sir Walter Scott says, — " Thine ardent symphony sublime and high," and Byron has, — " Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow." Generally, however, but little attention is given to the dif- ference between the two forms ; on the contrary, even the shortened my is too long for modern haste, and must needs give way to me, simply. Fenimore Cooper observes on the differeilce between the old pronunciation, preserved in the States, and the more recent, that " my horse, my dog, the usual American mode, and me horse, me dog, the Eng- lish counterpart, are equally wrong, the first by an affected egotism, the last from offensive arrogance." The wrong may exist, but the reasons are hardly stated with fairness. The English usage has at least this advantage, that it pre- sents a means of emphasizing and dignifying the pronoun, of which the Americans are deprived by their uniform pro- nunciation. It is wasteful to say my servant when no other servant is spoken of, but there is advantage in the difference between " my Lord," addressed to the Creator, and the ordi- nary " my lord," given to peers, the orthodox pronuncia- tion of which now is " me Lud." PRONOUNS. 251 Ours and yoiirs are, among the illiterate, liable to even more violent ill-treatment, being changed into ourn and yourn, and yet apologists have been found for this vul- garism also, which they claim, like most vulgarisms, and especially Americanisms, to be but a well-preserved relic of former days. It cannot be denied that formerly our own and your own were often thus contracted, and it is not im- possible that this may have given rise to the provincialism above mentioned. Master R. Laneham, keeper of the Council Chamber, and a traveled man, tells us of some person who presented a petition to Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth, in which he took even greater liberties, for after praying for her Majesty's perpetual felicity, he finishes with the humblest submission of him and hizzen. His'n and her'n may have had the same origin, being contracted from his own and her own, though the use of the dative plural in Old English, hisum and herum, might possibly have had the same effect. The old Bible version has " The kyngdom of hevenes is herumJ^ They survive now only in affected style, as when Sam Slick says, " Drinking beer out of my pot and refusing his'n,* or in old-fashioned songs like the Berkshire ditty, — " But t' other young maiden looked sly at me, And from her seat she ris'n — Let 's you and I go our own way, And we '11 let she go sAis'n." Its is one of the most recent words of the English lan- guage, and as such, a striking illustration of what may be called the life of an idiom. It was utterly unknown in the days of true Old English, because as soon as a thing was regarded as the possessor of another thing, it became to that extent personified, and the personal pronouns his and her were employed. Spenser has no its in his works ; in fact, it was unknown in the days of Queen Elizabeth and King James. Mandeville shows his ignorance of such a word by saying, " Of that cytee bereth the contree his name," 252 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. (256)-, and Chaucer has : " But loke that it (the whele,) have his spokes alle," (Canterbury Tales, 7838). Bacon says, " Learning has his infancy, when it is but beginning and almost childish ; then his youth when it is luxuriant and juvenile ; then his strength of years, when it is solid and reduced, and lastly his old age, when it waxeth dry and ex- hausted." Evidently its is wanting, and every time it is needed, supplied by his. Hence we find the same substi- tution repeatedly in the Bible : " The fig-tree putteth forth her green figs " (Sol. Song, ii. 13), and " the tree is known by his fruit " (Matt. xii. 33). In fact, this remarkable pro- noun occurs in all but five times in our Bible version, which generally substitutes his or of it, as, " It (another beast) had three ribs in the mouth of it between the teeth of it ** (Daniel vii. 5), or thereof as, " Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof These remedies seem to have been early ap- plied, for we find already in the very ancient " Auturs of Arther," (Camden Soc. 11-13,) what is probably the oldest instance of such a substitution : — " For I will speke with the sprete, And of hit woe wille I wete, Gif that I may hit boles bete And the body bare." It was probably from the somewhat anomalous use of it, simply, instead of of it, that the modern its was derived. The earliest case of it being used as a possessive pronoun, occurs in the year 1548, in the Bible, where we find " The love and deuocion towardes God also hath it infancie and hath it commyng forward in growth of age." Sir Thomas More generally writes it hit, when he uses it thus as a pos- sessive pronoun derived from it. Ben Jonson surprises us by writing " need will have its course," though the word itself is not even mentioned in liis grammar. These early cases of its must, however, be viewed with great caution. Thus we are generally told that Shakespeare has it three or four times ; in '* Measure for Measure " (I. 2), we find " Heaven grant us its peace," and — PRONOUNS. 253 " each following day- Became the next day's master, till the last Made former wonders iatn." The true nature of the dual seems very early to have been forgotten by the people, or we would not meet so soon with the contracted form twin, and its absurd or at least most in- correct plural, twins. We shorten it still farther in twilight and from the compound between we derive a preposterous superlative betwixt. The former was once used with a instead of be, as in Chaucer's lines : — HOW WE COUNT. , 261 " Thy wife and thou mole hange atwynne, For that betwyt you shall be no synne." — Miller^s Tale. From the numeral three, recalling to us the rpCa, and tria of the ancients, the Anglo-Saxons made an ordinal thri/d, which we have changed, according to the prevailing ten- dency to transpose the r, into third. A curious descendant of the first form remains, however, in modern English. Certain districts were, it seems, of old divided into thirds, and these were called " third things," in the old sense of the word thing. Thus we find, in Magna Charta, a thrithing already spoken of, and the same term is repeated in Stat. 21, Henry III. c. 10, (1260,) and from it are probably derived the three Ridings of Yorkshire, the initial th having been lost at an early day. Our Saxon fathers formed words for the numerals up to nine, but there their power of invention seems to have abandoned them, for ten is not an original word. It comes from the Saxon verb tynan, to close, to shut in or up, expressive of the simple fact that when the calculation had gone on to the extent of the ten fingers, one after another having been turned in, both hands were found " closed " or " shut in." Nor is this use of the ancient word so entirely obsolete, that it could not be proved even from modern usage. There are very few forms, in the purely Saxon districts at least, of which a certain portion does not still bear the name of tyning, e. g., the Middle Tyning or the Upper Tyning. The designation arose, like the more modern close, from the fact that these lands were carefully inclosed and cultivated, unlike the common, the not inclosed lands, which lay waste. From the same verb was derived the noun tun, our town ; at first it meant noth- ing more than an inclosure, and as such we have already seen it was used in our Bible version,- where WicklifFe sub- stitutes it for the word farm. More recently still we have had recourse to the same root, when our new railway wants required the word tunnel, a diminutive of tun, and meaning an " inclosed way." 262 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. Before proceeding to the larger compound numerals, we insert here, for purposes of comparison, the first ten numer- als in the kindred languages which form the family of our English: — Eng. Welsh. A. Sax. Old H. Ger. Mod. Ger. GotkU. One, an, j 1, Un, An, Ein, Ein, Ain, Two, Dau, Tu, twa, Zuene, Zwei, Tvai, Three, Tri, tair, Thry, Thri, Drei, Threis, Four, Fed war. Feower, Fior, Tier, Fidwor, Five, Pump, Fif, Finf, Funf, Firaf, Six, Chwech, Seox, Sehs, Sechs, Saihs, Seven, Saith, Seofan, Sipun, Sieben, Sibun, Eight, Wyth, Eahta, Ahto, Acht, Ahtau, Nine, Naw, Nigon, Niun, Neun, Niun, Ten. Deg. Tyn, tig. Zehan. Zehn, Taihun. A similar correspondence is shown to exist throughout the whole Indo-European class of languages. It is well known that our eleven is simply the an lif, one left, of our Saxon fathers, as this was really the case after both hands had been closed ; in the same manner twelve is the contracted form of twd lif, two left, and these two nu- merals afford us in their simpler form an additional evi- dence of the duodecimal method of counting, which long prevailed among Scandinavian and Old German nations. Hence England has always had a small and a great hun- dred, — 100 and 120, — and the original ton contains yet 2400 lbs., in contrast with the modern or small ton of 2000 lbs. After twelve the numerals are simply compounds of ten and the lower numbers, until we arrive at twenty^ which con- sists of the dual twain, and the old word tig, corresponding to the root in ScVa and decern, and meaning ten. Instead of twenty we still use frequently the old Celtic word score — one of tl^ few true Celtic forms that have held their own in our language. It is a relic of the fondness the Celts had for counting by twenties, which survives in a very striking manner in the French substitute of Quatre- Vingt, four twenties, for eighty, soixante-dix for seventy, and all similar formations. Our Bible has ^^ fourscore and ten ; " HOW WE COUNT. 263 Shakespeare uses, in " Measure for Measure," " ninescore and seventeen pounds," and Byron speaks of " six of my fourscore years." The frequent use of the verb to score, for counting, arises probably from the manner in which, in the days of Old England, archers called the distance of twenty yards a score^ and thus counted up their relative merits. In quarantine the substitution of a Latin term for the Saxon forty, shows the danger we incur by using foreign words without adhering faithfully to their original meaning. In former days the time of trial for persons coming from regions where contagious diseases prevailed, was forty days ; and this gave rise, in the Mediterranean, where this precaution against pestilence was most general, to the use of the word quarantaine. Now we have forgot- ten the true signification of quaranta, and speak ludicrously of a " quarantine of ten days." Hundred is a compound of hund, which meant either an exact number of hundred already, or merely served to designate a large, round sum ; it is the same as the root in TptaKovra and centum^ as we may see at a glance by a comparison of the English hundred in our shires, with the Canton of the Swiss Confederacy. To this was added red^ which is simply our rod or reed, an instrument universally used by the Anglo-Saxons to mark by notches cut in it the number of times they wished to remember. It is well known that this custom is by no means extinct, either in Scandinavian countries, or in the northern parts of the kingdom. If we have, in common with all nations, made no pro- gress in the formation of numerals, we have at least learnt to write them much better than our ancestors. The oldest inscriptions on the marble of Italy or the granite of Scan- dinavia, whether they contain weighty records of early races or mystic accounts of Northern gods, all unite in one com- mon way of marking numbers simply by straight lines, such as could most easily be carved in stone or cut in wood. It was in Italy first that the custom of the Greeks to use their 264 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. vowfels for that purpose, obtained most largely, and as the Greek v is the Latin V, the Romans adopted this, the fifth vowel, as meaning five, retaining for the preceding numbers the ancient strokes, I, II, III, and IIII. Improving on this, they placed two Vs one over the other, ][, and contracting the figure in one, counted X, equal to ten. C as the initial letter of centum^ became the sign for hundred, and as the ancient Roman alphabet was not written in round but in square lines, the lower half of the old-fashioned C resem- bled the later L sufficiently to let this letter stand for the half hundred, or fifly. M became, as the initial letter of mille, the sign for a thousand, and D, it is said, meant di- midium, or the half of thousand. These signs, however, long used for all purposes in England, had in their turn to give way to those which we now employ. These have been introduced through the Arabs, who themselves prob- ably obtained them from the eastern part of India. They employed them in their admirable researches, mainly for the purposes of astrology, and afterwards for arithmetical problems. After they had conquered Spain, they intro- duced them, with the many branches of knowledge which Christian Europe owes to their faithful stewardship of the treasures of ancient lore, into the schools and uni- versities of the Peninsula. There it was that Gerbert, studying Theology and the Black Art in the halls of Sala- manca, became acquainted with them in the tenth century, and learnt to know their value. He afterwards rose rapidly in the Church, and when he bore at last the triple crown as Sylvester II., he introduced, with other fruits of his learning, the use of these Arabic signs throughout Christen- dom. They are found earliest in Astronomical Tables, then merchants discovered their great usefulness ; from 1300 we meet with them in inscriptions, but not before 1400 in manuscripts. How slowly they must have made their way into popular use may be judged from the fact that a horn- book, at least as old as 1570, and like all books of the kind, ARTICLES. 265 intended for the humbler classes, concludes with the Lord's Prayer and the Roman numerals, the Arabic numerals being omitted. As one of the pronouns is used as definite article in English, and one of the numerals as indefinite article, it may not be amiss to add here a few remarks concerning the history and nature of that mysterious class of words, the articles. They belong so exclusively to modern languages, and throw so much light upon the transition of those de- rived from ancient idioms, that they have ever been a favor- ite topic with linguists, without being, on that account, any more satisfactorily explained than other subjects of philologic controversy. This only is universally admitted — that they have taken the place and perform, in part at least, the duty of the elaborate system of inflections in Greek and Latin. It is well known that the former possessed only a so-called definite article, o, rj, ro, whilst of an indefinite article no other trace is found but the equivocal rts, made enclitic. The Latin had really no article at all. Both these languages, however, had a very complete system of inflections for nouns, in their numerous declensions, most of which consisted in the addition of pronouns, by means of connecting vowels, to the end of the root. Thus av-qp became avhp6<:^ and homo became hominis. In the Romance languages these varied terminations were lost at the time of the conquest of Rome and Roman colonies under the influence of causes identical with those which produced a similar loss of Anglo-Saxon inflections afler the Norman conquest of England. The German tribes who made them- selves masters of Gaul, Spain, and Italy, would not and could not learn these nice distinctions of sound, and curtly abandoned them. As soon, however, as new languages be- gan to be formed out of the surviving Latin elements, and the German idioms that were mixed up with them, the necessity for such inflections became apparent once more, and was felt by all. Following, then, the example set already 266 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. by later Roman authors, certain words suggestive of the same ideas formerly represented by declensions, &c., were chosen and used ; but instead of being added at the end of words which had generally lost their original termination, and with it their vitality, these words were placed before the noun and hence called prepositions. All the Romance lan- guages followed the same plan of choosing for this purpose the demonstrative pronoun ille, which gave the French le and la, the Italian ^7, Zo, and /a, and the Spanish eZ, la, lo, and the numeral unus, which gave a similar form to the daugh- ters of Latin. The same causes led to precisely the same results in English, also. The Anglo-Saxon had, like the Latin, a large number of inflections for its nouns, which the Danish and the Norman conquerors alike rejected. As Old English arose, the old demonstrative pronoun se, seo, thaet, was chosen naturally to act as a definite article, having been used already in Anglo-Saxon very generally for that pur- pose. In Semi-Saxon it had lost almost all of its forms except thaet, the remaining cases being used but rarely, and the declension having become less distinct. It appeared, therefore, very early in Old English as the, of all genders, though with different case endings, and only in middle Eng- lish became absolutely of all cases and genders. Thus we have obtained our article the. In like manner the Anglo- Saxon numeral an was employed with the meaning of an indefinite article branching off from the fuller form one, as has been shown above. The first instance of its use in this aspect occurs in " Layamon's Brut," but it does not seem to have come into general use until the middle of the thirteenth century. Before that time the indefinite article was gener- ally expressed by the use of sutn, our some, or, as in the ancient languages, by the omission of any designation. The rare and judicious use of the article in English is one of the points in which its beautiful simplicity is best shown. In its proper omission, especially, whenever the sense of the noun is not limited or determined, lies an ex- ARTICLES. 267 cellence of English even over Greek, where it is often used without giving additional weight or conferring a clearer meaning to the noun which it accompanies. This beauty becomes more striking yet, when we compare with it the use which the nearest relative of English, the German, makes of the article. Its almost insufferable repetition there mars often the most beautiful periods, encumbering them sadly, and thus depriving the language of the brief and impressive energy of her English sister. Few are aware under what curious disguises the article occasionally makes its appearances in English. There are large num- bers of foreign words which presented themselves at the time of their introduction, accompanied by their article ; the hospitable Englishman adopted them without inquiring what was their substance and what their shadow, and thus we have virtually nouns possessed of their own article, and yet preceded by the English article. In other words, again, we have imagined an initial a to be the article, and thus deprived them of part of their substance, in making them English. This has been, e. g.^ the case with the Malay word amuco, designating the peculiar intoxication from rage and other sources for which the natives of those regions are remarkable ; we have fancied the word to con- sist of two parts, and although the phrase was at first cor- rectly spelled " to run amock" we now call it erroneously " to run a much" The same process takes place continu- ally in other languages as well as in our own. The French have taken the Latin hedera, and called it, for years, hierre^ as it is still written in Ronsard Vhierre, whilst since the days of that poet it has become Uerre, and now takes an addi- tional le before it. The same origin have la luette, le loriot, le loutre, and la lonze, whilst Pen demain has become le lende- main^ and Apulia has degenerated into la Pouille. In the majority of similar cases in English, we can plead our pardonable ignorance of foreign forms at the time that the latter were introduced into England. This is a suffi- 268 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. cient' plea, for instance, for the double article we employ with Arabic words, which contain already the Arabic article al, as in Algebra, (al Geber,) alcohol, almanac, alcali, elixir, (al Aksir,) alchymy, alcove, admiral, (from almirante,) alem- bic, and azimuth. Even the Spanish, through which we have obtained these Eastern terms, had already made a similar mistake in many instances, and we only follow the example it has set us, when we now speak of a lily, instead of the Arabic alelt, from Xeipiov, or of a fan from old aban, which is still used in the diminutive form abanico. Our saffron comes to us likewise from azafran, and azure from the Per- sian lazur, which we meet with again in a slightly altered form in lapis lazuli. It is curious to observe how the Ital- ian arancia has given us the correct orange, whilst the Span- iards have been misled by the indefinite article before it, and now speak of an orange as of una naranja, repeating it a second time. Our word alligator has a somewhat similar origin. It comes originally from the Latin lacerta, a lizard, in Spanish, el lagarto ; hence Sir Walter Raleigh writes of a certain newly discovered land : " But for lagartos it ex- ceeded." In Ben Jonson we find the contraction with the article already established, as he calls the creature an cdigarta, and when English sailors landed in America and saw there for the first time the crocodile of that Continent, they called it very naturally a great lizard, an alligator. We ought not to forget, finally, that the name of Spain itself has undergone a change of the same kind before it assumed its present English garb. It was first, of course, Hispania, whence its name in the vernacular of Espana, This, however, was constantly misspelt, until, finally, the orthography, imitating the pronunciation, settled somewhat into Espayne. Its frequent connection with the preposition de, makes it appear in numerous MSS. first as d^Espayne, and then as de Spayne, under the misapprehension that the letter e belonged to the preposition, and thus it gradually shaped itself into simple Spain. ARTICLElii^i|PQH,l| 269 The same plea of ignorance applies to mistakes made in French words only when their adoption can be traced to the days of great national trouble and profound ignorance. This is, however, generally the case ; French was spoken only by the higher classes, and by them, even, without great correctness ; the spelling was almost arbitrary, and we need not wonder, therefore, that the good people made free with these foreign terms, which for generations presented to them no very clear meaning. The indistinct pronunciation of English vowels contributed still farther to dim their per- ception, and hence almost any a or e at the beginning of a French word was liable to be mistaken for an English article. It is thus that avant gave us our van, esprit our sprite, and esdandre the double form of scandal and slander. The enlumineur, who brought his craft from France and adorned missals and romances with his quaint art, be- came in England famous as a limner ; the etincelle dwindled into a tinsel, etiquette into a ticket, and exemplaire, a sam- pler. Among the curious plants brought back by the Crusaders from the Orient, was also the bulb that takes its name from Ascalon, and was naturalized in France as echa- lote ; we again took the e to be an -o-fi€u (fte) and pet-i-mus (nos). The root conveyed no idea of action or motion, neither of which was, or now is, inherent in the verb ; the active power rested solely in the person or the agent ; if we take this away, the Greek or Latin verb returns at once to the sim- ple form of a noun. Thus it was in Anglo-Saxon also, but after a while, and especially under the influence of the Nor- man Conquest, the full force of the personal pronoun, so constantly added to the root, was no longer felt. It be- came necessary to give a new form to the verbal char- acter of the root, but as in the noun, the inflection was no longer added at the end, but placed before it in the shape of pronoun and preposition. So in the verb, also, modern idioms place the pronoun before it and leave the words disconnected. Anglo-Saxon nouns now serve, there- fore, as verbs without any change of form, and we use thus words like love, hate, fear, dream, sleep, and book. Norman- French nouns are not so indiscriminately fit for verbal use ; still we have motion, place, notice, minister, pain, place, and question as nouns and as verbs. The tendency is to add to this class, and among more recent forms may be mentioned station, post, provision, and preface. Many occur now and then only to resume their allegiance. Milton says " to syl- lable men's names ; " but of all authors Shakespeare uses the most unbounded liberty in this respect. He says, " This (calamity) periods his comfort;" "Come, sermon me no farther," and Portia, Cato's daughter, exclaims , — " Think you I am no stronger than my sex, Being ao fathered and so husbanded! " This power of turning almost any noun into a verb has been called the most kin^y prerogative of the English Ian- LIVING WORDS. 275 guage, and compared to the right of ennobling exercised by the Crown. For just because most English verbs of purely English descent are still in their simplest form, so as not to be distinguished from nouns, they bring up at once the full form and power of the object itself, from which the action is derived. The effect is still greater when the act, or the process itself, is to be suggested as a concreted thing or in a picture. This direct and undis- guised descent gives our verbs, mainly, the peculiar vigor and liveliness for which they are distinguished, and which is not a little increased by their simplicity, as contrasted with the more ornate, but also less transparent, verbs of other languages. How powerful is the effect which the idea of man produces when we speak of " manning a vessel ; " how strong and suggestive is our language when it expresses efforts to " arm a fortress " or to " hridle our passions." There must, of course, be a limit to this abundant use of nouns as verbs in the very nature of their meaning ; and the tendency of our time to increase the stock almost at random, can hardly be called an improvement of the lan- guage. Lovers of liberty, it is true, see in this promiscuous use of nouns and verbs but an effect of the general equaliz- ing tendency of our age. Macaulay is occasionally bold in impressing new words, as when he says, " The bark of a shepherd's dog or the hleat of a lamb," where, heretofore, harking and bleating would have been used. New addi- tions of the same class are, to bag, to father, to air, to ex- perience, and to bayonet, and the most recent coinage now accepted is, perhaps, " to progressJ^ By the side of these innovations, there appears no reason why we should not still speak of the " childing of a woman," or adopt Sylves- ter's substitute for deifying, in " some godding fortune, idol of ambition." The free use made in English of proper names for ver- bal purposes is not original to our language, but was al- ready well known in antiquity. Thus, when Demosthenes 276 STUDIES IN ENGLISH. heard that King Philip of Macedon had bribed the oracle, in order to dispirit the Athenians, he used the word