* * * * *
"ITS."
(Vol. vi., p. 509.)
The following are earlier instances of the employment of _its_ by the
poets, than any that your correspondent seems to have met with:
"How sometimes nature will betray _its_ folly,
_Its_ tenderness, and makes itself a pastime
To harder bosoms!
_Winter's Tale_, Act I. Sc. 2.
"Each following day
Became the next day's master, till the last
Made former wonders _its_."
_Henry VIII._, Act I. Sc. 1.
"On the green banks which that fair stream in-bound,
Flowers and odours sweetly smiled and smell'd,
Which, reaching out _its_ stretched arms around,
All the large desert in _its_ bosom held."
Fairefax, _Godfrey of Bulloigne_, xviii. 20., 1600.
I doubt if there are any earlier instances among the poets. I have had no
opportunity of examining the prose writers of the sixteenth century, but
think they must have employed _its_ earlier than the poets. As we may see
in the version of the Bible, and other works of the time, the English, like
the Anglo-Saxon, long continued to use the genitive _his_ for neuters as
well as for masculines; and _thereof_ for our present _of it_, _its_.
_Its_ leads me to reflect how ignorant people were of the old languages in
the last century. If ever there was a palpable forgery, it is the Poems of
Rowley: yet, if my memory does not deceive me, {161} Tyrwhitt regarded them
as genuine; and Malone authoritatively affirmed that "no one except the
nicest judges of English poetry, from Chaucer to Pope, was competent to
test their genuineness." Why, this little word _its_ might have tested it.
You see we have not been able to trace it in poetry higher up than the end
of the sixteenth century; and I am quite sure that it is not to be found in
either Chaucer or Spenser: and yet, in the very first page of Rowley, we
meet with the following instances of it:
"The whyche in _yttes_ felle use doe make moke dere."
"The thynge _yttes_ (_ytte is?_) moste bee _yttes_ owne defense."
But there is a still surer test. We can hardly read a line of Chaucer,
Gower, or any other poet of the time, without meeting with what the French
term the feminine _e_, and which must be pronounced as a syllable to make
the metre. From one end to the other of the Poems of Rowley, there is not a
single instance of it!