“Hayle, holy cold! chaste temper, hayle! the fire
Raved o’er my purer thoughts I feel t’ expire.”
Mr. Hazlitt annotates thus: “_Rav’d_ seems here to be equivalent to
_reav’d_ or _bereav’d_. Perhaps the correct reading may be ’reav’d.’ See
Worcester’s _Dictionary_, art. RAVE?, where Menage’s supposition of
affinity between _rave_ and _bereave_ is perhaps a little too
slightingly treated.”
The meaning of Lovelace was, “the fire _that_ raved.” But what Mr.
Hazlitt would make with “reaved o’er my purer thoughts,” we cannot
conceive. On the whole, we think he must have written the note merely to
make his surprising glossological suggestion. All that Worcester does
for the etymology, by the way, is to cite Richardson, no safe guide.
“Where now one _so so_ spatters, t’other: no!” (p. 112.)
The comma in this verse has, of course, no right there, but Mr. Hazlitt
leaves the whole passage so corrupt that we cannot spend time in
disinfecting it. We quote it only for the sake of his note on “_so so_.”
It is marvellous.
“An exclamation of approval when an actor made a hit. The
corruption seems to be somewhat akin to the Italian, ’_si, si_,’ a
corruption of ’_sia, sia_.’”
That the editor of an English poet need not understand Italian we may
grant, but that he should not know the meaning of a phrase so common in
his own language as _so-so_ is intolerable. Lovelace has been saying
that a certain play might have gained applause under certain
circumstances, but that everybody calls it _so-so_,--something very
different from “an exclamation of approval,” one should say. The phrase
answers exactly to the Italian _così così_, while _sì_ (not _si_) is
derived from _sic_, and is analogous with the affirmative use of the
German so and the Yankee _jes’ so_.
“Oh, how he hast’ned death, burnt to be fryed!” (p. 141.)