“I. e. freed. _Free_ and _freed_ were sometimes pronounced like
_fry_ and _fryed_; for Lord North, in his _Forest of Varieties_,
1645, has these lines:--
’Birds that long have lived free,
Caught and cag’d, but pine and die.’
Here evidently _free_ is intended to rhyme with _die_.”
“Evidently!” An instance of the unsafeness of rhyme as a guide to
pronunciation. It was _die_ that had the sound of _dee_, as everybody
(but Mr. Hazlitt) knows. Lovelace himself rhymes _die_ and _she_ on p.
269. But what shall we say to our editor’s not knowing that _fry_ was
used formerly where we should say _burn_? Lovers used to _fry_ with
love, whereas now they have got out of the frying-pan into the fire. In
this case a martyr is represented as burning (i. e. longing) to be fried
(i. e. burned).
“Her beams ne’er shed or change like th’ hair of day.” (p. 224.)