[The word occurs in Chaucer, _The Wyf of Bathes Prologue_, v. 5825.:
"And if I have a _gossib_, or a friend,
(Withouten gilt) thou chidest as a frend,
If that I walke or play into his hous."
And in Spenser, _Faerie Queene_, b. i. c. 12.:
"One mother, when as her foole-hardy child
Did come too neare, and with his talons play,
Halfe dead through feare, her little babe reuil'd,
And to her _gossips_ gan in counsell say."
Master Richard Verstegan is more to the point:
"Our Christian ancestors, understanding a spiritual affinity to grow
between the parents and such as undertooke for the child at baptisme,
called each other by the name of _Godsib_, which is as much as to say,
that they were _sib_ together, that is, _of kin_ together through God.
And the child, in like manner, called such his God-fathers, or
God-mothers."--_Restitution of Decayed Intelligence_, ch. vii.
A quotation or two from that delightful old _gossip_, Mr. Pepys, will show
its use in the middle of the seventeenth century:
"Lord's Day. With my wife to church. At noon dined nobly, ourselves
alone. After dinner, my wife and Mercer by coach to Greenwich, to be
_gossip_ to Mrs. Daniel's child. My wife much pleased with the
reception she had, and she was godmother, and did hold the child at the
font, and it is called John."--_Diary_, May 20, 1666.
"Lord's Day. My wife and I to Mr. Martin's, where I find the company
almost all come to the christening of Mrs. Martin's child, a girl.
After sitting long, till the church was done, the parson comes, and
then we to christen the child. I was godfather, and Mrs. Holder (her
husband, a good man, I know well) and a pretty lady that waits, it
seems, on my Lady Bath at Whitehall, her name Mrs. Noble, were
godmothers. After the christening comes in the wine {400} and
sweetmeats, and then to prate and tattle, and then very good company
they were, and I among them. Here was Mrs. Burroughs and Mrs. Bales
(the young widow whom I led home); and having staid till the moon was
up, I took my pretty _gossip_ to Whitehall with us, and I saw her in
her lodging."--_Ibid._, Dec. 2, 1666.]
_Humphry Repton._--To snatch from utter oblivion the once highly reputed
Humphry, the king of landscape gardeners, to whom many of our baronial
parks owe much of their picturesque beauty, and who, by the side of Sir
Joseph Paxton, would now most duly have taken knightful station in these
go-ahead days, I ask, in what publication was it, that in 1780, or
thereabouts, being an indefatigable attendant at all exhibitions and sales
of art, he, the said Humphry, was accustomed (as well able he was) to
enlighten the public upon what was passing in matters of art now nearly
three quarters of a century ago? Was it the _Bee_? Again, did he not, at
his death, leave two large volumes for publication, entitled _Recollections
of my Past Life_? Where are these?