“_i. e._ evil. In a MS. of the _Tale of the Basyn_, supposed by Mr.
Wright, who edited it in 1836, to be written in the Salopian dialect,
are the following lines:--
‘The lother hade litull thoght,
Off husbandry cowth he noght,
But alle his wyves _will_ be wroght.’” (Vol. I. p. 16.)
It is plain that he supposed _will_, in this very simple passage, to
mean _evil_! This he would seem to rectify, but at the same time takes
care to tell us that “the explanation [of _wylle_] is correct.” He is
willing to give up one blunder, if only he may have one left to comfort
himself withal! _Wylle_ is simply a rhyming fetch for _wild_, and the
passage means that the king rode at random. The use of _wild_ with this
meaning is still common in such phrases as “he struck wild.” In
“Havelok” we find it in the nearly related sense of _being at a loss,
knowing not what to do_:--
“To lincolne barfot he yede
Hwan he kam ther he was ful _wil_,
Ne hauede he no frend to gangen til.”
_All wylle_, in short, means the kind of editing that is likely to be
done by a gentleman who picks up his misinformation as he goes along. We
would hint that a person must know _something_ before he can use even a
glossary with safety.
In the “King and the Barker,” when the tanner finds out that it is the
king whom he has been treating so familiarly, and falls upon his knees,
Mr. Hazlitt prints,
“He had no meynde of hes hode, nor cape, ne radell,”
and subjoins the following note: “Radell, or raddle, signifies a side of
a cart; but here, apparently, stands for the cart itself. Ritson printed
_ner adell_.” Mr. Hazlitt’s explanation of _raddle_, which he got from
Halliwell, is incorrect. The word, as its derivation (from O. F.
_rastel_) implies, means the side or end of a _hay_-cart, in which the
uprights are set like the teeth of a rake. But what has a cart to do
here? There is perhaps a touch of what an editor of old doggerel would
benignantly call humor, in the tanner’s forgetfulness of his raiment,
but the cart is as little to the purpose as one of Mr. Hazlitt’s own
notes. The tanner was on horseback, as the roads of the period required
that he should be, and good old Ritson was plainly on the right track in
his reading, though his text was muddled by a misprint. As it was, he
got _one_ word right, and so far has the advantage of Mr. Hazlitt. The
true reading is, of course, _ner a dell_, never a deal, not a whit. The
very phrase occurs in another poem which Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in
his collection,--
“For _never a dell_
He wyll me love agayne.” (Vol. III. p. 2.)
That _adell_ was a misprint in Ritson is proved by the fact that the
word does not appear in his glossary. If we were to bring Mr. Hazlitt to
book for his misprints! In the poem we have just quoted he gravely
prints,--
“Matter in dede,
My sides did blede,”
for “mother, indede,” “through ryght wysenes” for “though ryghtwisenes,”
“with man vnkynde” for “sith man vnkynde,” “ye knowe a parte” for “ye
knowe aperte,” “here in” for “herein,” all of which make nonsense, and
all come within the first one hundred and fifty lines, and those of the
shortest, mostly of four syllables each. Perhaps they rather prove
ignorance than want of care. One blunder falling within the same limits
we have reserved for special comment, because it affords a good example
of Mr. Hazlitt’s style of editing:--
“Your herte souerayne
Clouen in twayne
By longes the blynde.” (Vol. III. p. 7.)
Here the uninstructed reader would be as completely in the dark as to
what _longes_ meant as the editor plainly was himself. The old rhymer no
doubt wrote Longis, meaning thereby Longinus, a personage familiar
enough, one should think, to any reader of mediæval poetry. Mr. Hazlitt
absolves himself for not having supplied a glossary by the plea that
none is needed by the class of readers for whom his volumes are
intended. But this will hardly seem a valid excuse for a gentleman who
often goes out of his way to explain in his notes such simple matters as
that “shape” means “form,” and that “Johan of the golden mouthe” means
“St. Chrysostom,” which, indeed, it does not, any more than Johannes
Baptista means St. Baptist. We will supply Mr. Hazlitt with an
illustration of the passage from Bekker’s _Ferabras_, the more willingly
as it may direct his attention to a shining example of how an old poem
should be edited:--
“en la crotz vos pendero li fals Iuzieu truan,
can Longis vos ferie de sa lansa trencan:
el non avia vist en trastot son vivan;
lo sanc li venc per l’asta entro al punh colan;
e [el] toquet ne sos huelhs si vic el mantenan.”
Mr. Hazlitt, to be sure (who prints _sang parlez_ for _sanz parler_)
(Vol. I. p. 265), will not be able to form any notion of what these
verses mean, but perhaps he will be able to draw an inference from the
capital L that _longes_ is a proper name. The word _truan_ at the end of
the first verse of our citation may also suggest to him that _truant_ is
not quite so satisfactory an explanation of the word _trewāt_ as he
seems to think. (Vol. IV. p. 24, _note_.) In deference to Mr. Hazlitt’s
presumed familiarity with an author sometimes quoted by him in his
notes, we will point him to another illustration:--
“Ac ther cam forth a knyght,
With a kene spere y-grounde
Highte Longeus, as the lettre telleth,
And longe hadde lore his sighte.”
_Piers Ploughman_, Wright, p. 374.
Mr. Hazlitt shows to peculiar advantage where old French is in question.
Upon the word _Osyll_ he favors us with the following note: “The
blackbird. In East Cornwall _ozell_ is used to signify the windpipe, and
thence the bird may have had its name, as Mr. Couch has suggested to
me.” (Vol. II. p. 25.) Of course the blackbird, alone among fowls, is
distinguished by a windpipe! The name is merely another form of O. F.
_oisil_, and was usurped naturally enough by one of the commonest birds,
just as _pajaro_ (L. _passer_) in Spanish, by a similar process in the
opposite direction, came to mean bird in general. On the very next page
he speaks of “the Romance which is vulgarly entitled _Lybeaus Disconus_,
i. e. _Le Beau Disconnu_.” If he had corrected _Disconus_ to _Desconus_,
all had been well; but _Disconnu_ neither is nor ever was French at all.
Where there is blundering to be done, one stone often serves Mr. Hazlitt
for two birds. _Ly beaus Disconus_ is perfectly correct old French, and
another form of the adjective (_bius_) perhaps explains the sound we
give to the first syllable of _beauty_ and _Beaufort_. A barrister at
law, as Mr. Hazlitt is, may not be called on to know anything about old
English or modern French, but we might fairly expect him to have at
least a smattering of Law French! In volume fourth, page 129, a goodman
trying his wife,
“Bad her take the pot that sod ouer the fire
And set it abooue vpon the astire.”
Mr. Hazlitt’s note upon _astire_ is “hearth, i. q. _astre_.” Knowing
that the modern French was âtre, he too rashly inferred a form which
never existed except in Italian. The old French word is _aistre_ or
_estre_, but Mr. Hazlitt, as usual, prefers something that is neither
old French nor new. We do not pretend to know what _astire_ means, but a
hearth that should be _abooue_ the pot seething over the fire would be
unusual, to say the least, in our semi-civilized country.
In the “Lyfe of Roberte the Deuill” (Vol. I. p. 232), Mr. Hazlitt twice
makes a knight _sentre_ his lance, and tells us in a note that the “Ed.
1798 has _fentered_,” a very easy misprint for the right word
_feutered_. What Mr. Hazlitt supposed to be the meaning of _sentre_ he
has not vouchsafed to tell us. _Fautre_ (sometimes _faltre_ or
_feutre_) means in old French the _rest_ of a lance. Thus in the _Roman
du Renart_ (26517),
“Et mist sa lance sor le _fautre_.”
But it also meant a peculiar _kind_ of rest. In Sir F. Madden’s edition
of _Gawayne_ (to which Mr. Hazlitt refers occasionally) we read,
“They _feutred_ their lances, these knyghtes good”;
and in the same editor’s “William and the Werwolf,”
“With sper festened in _feuter_, him for to spille.”
In a note on the latter passage Sir F. Madden says, “There seems no
reason, however, why it [feuter] should not mean the rest attached to
the armour.” But Roquefort was certainly right in calling it a
“garniture d’une selle pour tenir la lance.” A spear fastened to the
saddle gave more deadly weight to the blow. The “_him for to spille_”
implies this. So in “Merlin” (E. E. Text Soc., p. 488): “Than thei toke
speres grete and rude, and putte hem in fewtre, and that is the grettest
crewelte that oon may do, ffor turnement oweth to be with-oute felonye,
and they meved to smyte hem as in mortall werre.” The context shows that
the _fewtre_ turned sport into earnest. A citation in Raynouard’s
_Lexique Roman_ (though wrongly explained by him) directed us to a
passage which proves that this particular kind of rest for the lance was
attached to the saddle, in order to render the blow heavier:--
“Lances _à_ [lege _as_] _arçons_ afeutrées
_Pour plus de dures colées rendre._”
_Branche des Royaux Lignages_, 4514, 4515.
Mr. Hazlitt, as we have said, lets no occasion slip to insinuate the
inaccuracy and carelessness of his predecessors. The long and useful
career of Mr. Wright, who, if he had given us nothing more than his
excellent edition of “Piers Ploughman” and the volume of “Ancient
Vocabularies,” would have deserved the gratitude of all lovers of our
literature or students of our language, does not save him from the
severe justice of Mr. Hazlitt, nor is the name of Warton too venerable
to be coupled with a derogatory innuendo. Mr. Wright needs no plea in
abatement from us, and a mischance of Mr. Hazlitt’s own has comically
avenged Warton. The word _prayer_, it seems, had somehow substituted
itself for _prayse_ in a citation by Warton of the title of the
“Schole-House of Women.” Mr. Hazlitt thereupon takes occasion to charge
him with often “speaking at random,” and after suggesting that it might
have been the blunder of a copyist, adds, “or it is by no means
impossible that Warton himself, having been allowed to inspect the
production, was guilty of this oversight.” (Vol. IV. p. 98.) Now, on the
three hundred and eighteenth page of the same volume, Mr. Hazlitt has
allowed the following couplet to escape his conscientious attention:--
“Next, that no gallant should not ought suppose
That _prayers_ and glory doth consist in cloathes.”
_Lege, nostro periculo_, PRAYSE! Were dear old Tom still on earth, he
might light his pipe cheerfully with any one of Mr. Hazlitt’s pages,
secure that in so doing he was consuming a brace of blunders at the
least. The word _prayer_ is an unlucky one for Mr. Hazlitt. In the
“Knyght and his Wyfe” (Vol. II. p. 18) he prints:--
“And sayd, Syre, I rede we make
In this chapel oure prayers,
That God us kepe both in ferrus.”
Why did not Mr. Hazlitt, who explains so many things that everybody
knows, give us a note upon _in ferrus_? It would have matched his
admirable elucidation of _waygose_, which we shall notice presently. Is
it not barely possible that the MS. may have read _prayere_ and _in
fere_? _Prayere_ occurs two verses further on, and not as a rhyme.
Mr. Hazlitt even sets Sir Frederick Madden right on a question of Old
English grammar, telling him superciliously that _can_, with an
infinitive, in such phrases as _he can go_, is used not “to denote a
_past_ tense, but an _imperfect_ tense.” By _past_ we suppose him to
mean _perfect_. But even if an imperfect tense were not a past one, we
can show by a passage in one of the poems in this very collection that
_can_, in the phrases referred to, sometimes not only denotes a past but
a perfect tense:--
“And thorow that worde y felle in pryde;
As the aungelle can of hevyn glyde,
And with the tywnkling[31] of an eye
God for-dud alle that maystrye
And so hath he done for my gylte.”
Now the angel here is Lucifer, and _can of hevyn glyde_ means simply
_fell from heaven_, not _was falling_. It is in the same tense as
_for-dud_ in the next line. The fall of the angels is surely a _fait
accompli_. In the last line, by the way, Mr. Hazlitt changes “my for” to
“for my,” and wrongly, the _my_ agreeing with _maystrye_ understood. In
modern English we should use _mine_ in the same way. But Sir Frederick
Madden can take care of himself.
We have less patience with Mr. Hazlitt’s impertinence to Ritson, a man
of ample reading and excellent taste in selection, and who, real scholar
as he was, always drew from original sources. We have a _foible_ for
Ritson with his oddities of spelling, his acerb humor, his unconsciously
depreciatory mister Tyrwhitts and mister Bryants, and his obstinate
disbelief in Doctor Percy’s folio manuscript. Above all, he was a most
conscientious editor, and an accurate one so far as was possible with
the lights of that day. Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted two poems, “The Squyr
of Low Degre” and “The Knight of Curtesy,” which had already been edited
by Ritson. The former of these has passages that are unsurpassed in
simple beauty by anything in our earlier poetry. The author of it was a
good versifier, and Ritson, though he corrected some glaring errors, did
not deal so trenchantly with verses manifestly lamed by the copyist as
perhaps an editor should.[32] Mr. Hazlitt says of Ritson’s text, that
“it offers more than _an hundred_ departures from the original,” and of
the “Knight of Courtesy,” that “Ritson’s text is by no means accurate.”
Now Mr. Hazlitt has adopted nearly all of Ritson’s emendations, without
giving the least hint of it. On the contrary, in some five or six
instances, he gives the original reading in a foot-note with an “old ed.
has” so and so, thus leaving the reader to infer that the corrections
were his own. Where he has not followed Ritson, he has almost uniformly
blundered, and that through sheer ignorance. For example, he prints,
“Alas! it tourned to _wroth her heyle_,”
where Ritson had substituted _wrotherheyle_. The measure shows that
Ritson was right. _Wroth her heyle_, moreover, is nonsense. It should
have been _wrother her heyle_ at any rate, but the text is far too
modern to admit of that archaic form. In the “Debate of the Body and the
Soul” (Mätzner’s A. E. Sprachproben, 103) we have,
“Why schope thou me to wrother-hele,”
and in “Dame Siris” (Ibid., 110),
“To goder hele ever came thou hider.”
Mr. Hazlitt prints,
“For yf it may be found in thee
That thou them [de] fame for enuyte.”
The emendation [de] is Ritson’s, and is probably right, though it would
require, for the metre’s sake, the elision of _that_ at the beginning of
the verse. But what is _enuyte_? Ritson reads _enmyte_, which is, of
course, the true reading. Mr. Hazlitt prints (as usual either without
apprehending or without regarding the sense),
“With browes _bent_ and eyes full mery,”
where Ritson has _brent_, and gives parallel passages in his note on the
word. Mr. Hazlitt gives us
“To here the bugles there yblow,
With their _bugles_ in that place,”
though Ritson had made the proper correction to _begles_. Mr. Hazlitt,
with ludicrous _nonchalance_, allows the Squire to press into the throng
“With a _bastard_ large and longe,”
and that with the right word (_baslarde_) staring him in the face from
Ritson’s text. We wonder he did not give us an illustrative quotation
from Falconbridge! Both editors have allowed some gross errors to
escape, such as “come _not_” for “come” (v. 425); “so leue _he_ be” for
“ye be” (v. 593); “vnto _her_ chambre” for “vnto your” (v. 993); but in
general Ritson’s is the better and more intelligent text of the two. In
the “Knight of Curtesy,” Mr. Hazlitt has followed Ritson’s text almost
_literatim_. Indeed, it is demonstrable that he gave it to his printers
as copy to set up from. The proof is this: Ritson has accented a few
words ending in _tè_. Generally he uses the grave accent, but now and
then the acute. Mr. Hazlitt’s text follows all these variations exactly.
The main difference between the two is that Ritson prints the first
personal pronoun _i_, and Mr. Hazlitt, I. Ritson is probably right; for
in the “Scholehouse of Women” (vv. 537, 538) where the text no doubt was
“i [i. e. _one_] deuil a woman to speak may constrain,
But all that in hel be cannot let it again,”
Mr. Hazlitt changes “i” to “A,” and says in a note, “Old ed. has _I_.”
That by his correction he should miss the point was only natural; for he
evidently conceives that the _sense_ of a passage does not in the least
concern an editor. An instance or two will suffice. In the “Knyght and
his Wyfe” (Vol. II. p. 17) we read,
“The fynd tyl hure hade myche tene
As hit was a sterfull we seme!”
Mr. Hazlitt in a note explains _tene_ to mean “trouble or sorrow”; but
if that were its meaning here, we should read _made_, and not _hade_,
which would give to the word its other sense of _attention_. The last
verse of the couplet Mr. Hazlitt seems to think perfectly intelligible
as it stands. We should not be surprised to learn that he looked upon it
as the one gem that gave lustre to a poem otherwise of the dreariest. We
fear we shall rob it of all its charm for him by putting it into modern
English:--
“As it was after full well seen.”
So in the “Smyth and his Dame” (Vol. III. p. 204) we read,
“It were a lytele maystry
To make a blynde man to se,”
instead of “_as_ lytell.” It might, indeed, be as easy to perform the
miracle on a blind man as on Mr. Hazlitt. Again, in the same poem, a
little further on,
“For I tell the now trevely,
Is none so wyse ne _to_ sle,
But ever _ye_ may som what lere,”
which, of course, should be,
“ne _so_ sle
But ever _he_ may som what lere.”
Worse than all, Mr. Hazlitt tells us (Vol. I. p. 158) that when they
bury the great Khan, they lay his body in a tabernacle,
“With sheld and spere and other wede
With a whit mere to gyf him in ylke.”
We will let Sir John Maundeville correct the last verse: “And they seyn
that when he shale come into another World ... the mare schalle _gheven
him mylk_.” Mr. Hazlitt gives us some wretched doggerel by “Piers of
Fulham,” and gives it swarming with blunders. We take at random a couple
of specimens:--
“And loveship goith ay to warke
Where that presence is put a bake,” (Vol. II. pp. 13, 14,)
where we should read “love’s ship,” “wrake,” and “abake.” Again, just
below,
“Ffor men haue seyn here to foryn,
That love laughet when men be forsworn.”
Love should be “Iove.” Ovid is the obscure person alluded to in the “men
here to foryn”:
“Jupiter e cœlo perjuria ridet amantum.”
We dare say Mr. Hazlitt, if he ever read the passage, took it for
granted that “to foryn” meant _too foreign_, and gave it up in despair.
But surely Shakespeare’s
“At lovers’ perjuries,
They say, Jove laughs,”
is not too foreign to have put him on the right scent.
Mr. Hazlitt is so particular in giving us _v_ for _u_ and _vice versa_,
that such oversights are a little annoying. Every man his own editor
seems to be his theory of the way in which old poetry should be
reprinted. On this plan, the more riddles you leave (or make) for the
reader to solve, the more pleasure you give him. To correct the blunders
in any book edited by Mr. Hazlitt would give the young student a pretty
thorough training in archaic English. In this sense the volumes before
us might be safely recommended to colleges and schools. When Mr. Hazlitt
undertakes to correct, he is pretty sure to go wrong. For example, in
“Doctour Doubble Ale” (Vol. III. p. 309) he amends thus:--
“And sometyme mikle strife is
Among the ale wyfes, [y-wis];
where the original is right as it stands. Just before, in the same poem,
we have a parallel instance:--
“And doctours dulpatis
That falsely to them pratis,
And bring them to the gates.”
The original probably reads (or should read) _wyfis_ and _gatis_. But it
is too much to expect of Mr. Hazlitt that he should remember the very
poems he is editing from one page to another, nay, as we shall presently
show, that he should even read them. He will change _be_ into _ben_
where he should have let it alone (though his own volumes might have
furnished him with such examples as “were go,” “have se,” “is do,” and
fifty more), but he will sternly retain _bene_ where the rhyme requires
_be_, and Ritson had so printed. In “Adam Bel” the word _pryme_ occurs
(Vol. II. p. 140), and he vouchsafes us the following note: “i. e. noon.
It is commonly used by early writers in this sense. In the _Four_ P. P.,
by John Heywood, circa 1540, the apothecary says
‘If he taste this boxe nye aboute the pryme
By the masse, he is in heven or even songe tyme.’”
Let our readers admire with us the easy “it is commonly used” of Mr.
Hazlitt, as if he had store of other examples in his note-book. He could
an if he would! But unhappily he borrowed this single quotation from
Nares, and, as usual, it throws no scintilla of light upon the point in
question, for his habit in annotation is to find by means of a glossary
some passage (or passages if possible) in which the word to be explained
occurs, and then--why, then to give the word as an explanation of
itself. But in this instance, Mr. Hazlitt, by the time he had reached
the middle of his next volume (Vol. III. p. 281) had wholly forgotten
that _pryme_ was “commonly used by early writers” for _noon_, and in a
note on the following passage,
“I know not whates a clocke
But by the countre cocke,
The mone nor yet the pryme,
Vntyll the sonne do shyne,”
he informs us that it means “six o’clock in the morning”! Here again
this editor, who taxes Ritson with want of care, prints _mone_ for
_none_ in the very verse he is annotating, and which we may therefore
presume that he had read. A man who did not know the moon till the sun
showed it him is a match even for Mr. Hazlitt himself. We wish it were
as easy as he seems to think it to settle exactly what _pryme_ means
when used by our “early writers,” but it is at least absolutely certain
that it did not mean _noon_.
But Mr. Hazlitt, if these volumes are competent witnesses, knows nothing
whatever about English, old or new. In the “Mery Jest of Dane Hew” he
finds the following verses,
“Dame he said what shall we now doo
Sir she said so mote go
The munk in a corner ye shall lay”
which we print purposely without punctuation. Mr. Hazlitt prints them
thus,
“Dame, he said, what shall we now doo?
Sir, she said, so mote [it] go.
The munk,” &c.,
and gives us a note on the locution he has invented to this effect, “?
so might it be managed.” And the Chancellor said, _I doubt!_ Mr.
Hazlitt’s query makes such a singular exception to his more natural mood
of immediate inspiration that it is almost pathetic. The amended verse,
as everybody (not confused by too great familiarity with our “early
writers”) knows, should read,
“Sir, she said, so might I go,”
and should be followed only by a comma, to show its connection with the
next. The phrase “so mote I go,” is as common as a weed in the works of
the elder poets, both French and English; it occurs several times in Mr.
Hazlitt’s own collection, and its other form, “so mote I fare,” which
may also be found there, explains its meaning. On the phrase
_point-device_ (Vol. III. p. 117) Mr. Hazlitt has a positively
incredible note, of which we copy only a part: “This term, which is
commonly used in early poems” [mark once more his intimacy with our
earlier literature] “to signify extreme exactitude, originated in the
points which were marked on the astrolabe, as one of the means which the
astrologers and dabblers in the black art adopted to enable them (as
they pretended) to read the fortunes of those by whom they were
consulted in the stars and planetary orbs. The excessive precision which
was held to be requisite in the delineation of these points” [the
delineation of a _point_ is good!] “&c. on the astrolabe, led to
_point-device_, or points-device (as it is sometimes found spelled),
being used as a proverbial expression for minute accuracy of any kind.”
Then follows a quotation from Gower, in which an astrolabe is spoken of
“with points and cercles merveilous,” and the note proceeds thus:
“Shakespeare makes use of a similar figure of speech in the _Tempest_,
I. 2, where the following dialogue takes place between Prospero and
Ariel:--
‘_Prosp._ Hast thou, spirit,
Performed _to point_ the tempest that I bade thee?
_Ar._ In every article.’”
Neither the proposed etymology nor the illustration requires any remark
from us. We will only say that _point-device_ is excellently explained
and illustrated by Wedgwood.
We will give a few more examples out of many to show Mr. Hazlitt’s utter
unfitness for the task he has undertaken. In the “Kyng and the Hermyt”
are the following verses,
“A wyld wey, I hold, it were
The wey to wend, I you swere,
Bot ye the dey may se,”
meaning simply, “I think it would he a wild thing (in you) to go on your
way unless you wait for daylight.” Mr. Hazlitt punctuates and amends
thus:--
“A wyld wey I hold it were,
The wey to wend, I you swere,
Ye bot [by] the dey may se.” (Vol. I. p. 19.)
The word _bot_ seems a stumbling-block to Mr. Hazlitt. On page 54 of the
same volume we have,
“Herd i neuere bi no leuedi
_Hote_ hendinesse and curteysi.”
The use of the word _by_ as in this passage would seem familiar enough,
and yet in the “Hye Way to the Spittel Hous” Mr. Hazlitt explains it as
meaning _be_. Any boy knows that _without_ sometimes means _unless_
(Fielding uses it often in that sense), but Mr. Hazlitt seems unaware
of the fact. In his first volume (p. 224) he gravely prints:--
“They trowed verelye that she shoulde dye;
_With that_ our ladye wold her helpe and spede.”
The semicolon after _dye_ shows that this is not a misprint, but that
the editor saw no connection between the first verse and the second. In
the same volume (p. 133) we have the verse,
“He was a grete tenement man, and ryche of londe and lede,”
and to _lede_ Mr. Hazlitt appends this note: “_Lede_, in early English,
is found in various significations, but here stands as the plural of
_lad_, a servant.” In what conceivable sense is it the plural of _lad_?
And does _lad_ necessarily mean a servant? The _Promptorium_ has _ladde_
glossed by _garcio_, but the meaning _servant_, as in the parallel cases
of παις, _puer_, _garçon_, and _boy_, was a derivative one, and of later
origin. The word means simply _man_ (in the generic sense) and in the
plural _people_. So in the “Squyr of Low Degre,”
“I will forsake both land and _lede_,”
and in the “Smyth and his Dame,”
“That hath both land and _lyth_.”
The word was _not_ “used in various significations.” Even so lately as
“Flodden Ffeild” we find,
“He was a noble _leed_ of high degree.”
Connected with _land_ it was a commonplace in German as well as in
English. So in the _Tristan_ of Godfrey of Strasburg,
“Er Bevalch sin liut und fin lant
An sines marschalkes hant.”
Mr. Hazlitt is more nearly right than usual when he says that in the
particular case cited above _lede_ means _servants_. But were these of
only one sex? Does he not know that even in the middle of the last
century when an English nobleman spoke of “my people,” he meant simply
his domestics?
Encountering the familiar phrase _No do!_ (Vol. IV. p. 64), Mr. Hazlitt
changes it to _Not do!_ He informs us that _Goddes are_ (Vol. I. p. 197)
means “God’s heir”! He says (Vol. II. p. 146): “_To borrow_, in the
sense of _to take_, _to guard_, or _to protect_, is so common in early
English that it is unnecessary to bring forward any illustration of its
use in this way.” But he relents, and presently gives us two from _Ralph
Roister Doister_, each containing the phrase “Saint George to borrow!”
That _borrow_ means _take_ no owner of books need be told, and Mr.
Hazlitt has shown great skill in _borrowing_ other people’s
illustrations for his notes, but the phrase he quotes has no such
meaning as he gives it. Mr. Dyce in a note on Skelton explains it
rightly, “St. George being my pledge or surety.”