If folk lore be worthy of a place in your columns, folk talk should not
be shut out, and that the etymological solutions, gathered from this
source, which I have previously forwarded, have not appeared, is
doubtless attributable to some other cause than indifferentism to the
authority. I have found many inexplicable words and phrases, occurring
in the older writers, rendered plain and highly expressive by folk talk
definitions; and a glance at the relative positions of the common people
of this day, and the writers of the past, to the educated and scholarly
world of the nineteenth century, will suffice to show good reasons for a
discriminative reference to the language of the one, for the elucidation
of the other's expression. In common with the majority of your readers,
as I should think, I found the notes and replies on "eysell" and
"captious" to be highly interesting, and of course applied to the folk
talk for its definition. In the first case I obtained from my own
experience, what I think will be a satisfactory clue to its meaning, and
something more in addition. There is a herb of an acid taste, the common
name for which--the only one with which I am acquainted--is
_green-sauce_; and this herb is, or rather was, much sought after by
children in my boyish days. At a public school not a dozen miles from
Stratford-on-Avon, it was a common practice for we lads to spend our
holidays in roaming about the fields; and among objects of search, this
green-sauce was a prominent one, and it was a point of honour with each
of us to notify to the others the discovery of a root of green-sauce. In
doing this, the discoverer, after satisfying himself by his taste that
the true herb was found, followed an accepted course, and signified his
success to his companions by raising his voice and shouting, what I have
always been accustomed to write, "Hey-sall." I have no knowledge of the
origin of this word; it was with us as a school-rule so to use it; and I
have no doubt but that "ey-sell" was in Shakspeare's time the popular
name for the herb to which I allude.
Mixing much with the rural population of Warwickshire, I have, on many
occasions, seen the word "captious" used in the sense of carping,
irritable, unthankfulness, and self-willed; and, in my humble opinion,
such a rendering would be more in accordance with the character of the
fiction, and the poet's early teaching, than any definition I have yet
seen in your pages.