---- Rectory, Hereford.
The Word "_clamour" in "The Winter's Tale_."--MR. KEIGHTLEY complains (Vol
viii., p. 241.) that some observations of mine (p. 169.) on the word
_clamour_, in _The Winter's Tale_, are precisely similar to his own in Vol.
vii., p. 615. Had they been so in reality, I presume our Editor would not
have inserted them; but I think they contain something farther, suggesting,
as they do, the A.-S. origin of the word, and going far to prove that our
modern _calm_, the older _clame_, the Shakspearian _clamour_, the more
frequent _clem_, Chaucer's _clum_, &c., all of them spring from the same
source, viz. the A.-S. _clam_ or _clom_, which means a band, clasp,
bandage, chain, prison; from which substantive comes the verb _claemian_, to
clam, to stick or glue together, to bind, to imprison.
If I passed over in silence those points on which MR. KEIGHTLEY and myself
agreed, I need scarcely assure him that it was for the sake of brevity, and
not from any want of respect to him.
I may remark, by the way, on a conjecture of MR. KEIGHTLEY'S (Vol. vii., p.
615.), that perhaps, in _Macbeth_, Act V. Sc. 5., Shakspeare might have
written "till famine _clem_ thee," and not, as it stands in the first
folio, "till famine _cling_ thee," that he is indeed, as he says, "in the
region of conjecture:" _cling_ is purely A.-S., as he will find in
Bosworth, "_Clingan_, to wither, pine, to cling or shrink up; marcescere."