“The while thou sittest in chirche, thi bedys schalt thou bidde.”
(Vol. I. p. 181.)
i. e. thou shalt offer thy prayers. Mr. Hazlitt’s note on _bidde_ is,
“i. e. _bead_. So in _The Kyng and the Hermit_, line 111:--
‘That herd an hermyte there within
Unto the gate he gan to wyn
Bedying his prayer.’”
Precisely what Mr. Hazlitt understands by _beading_ (or indeed by
anything else) we shall not presume to divine, but we _should_ like to
hear him translate “if any man bidde the worshyp,” which comes a few
lines further on. Now let us turn to page 191 of the same volume.
“Maydenys ben loneliche and no thing sekir.” Mr. Hazlitt tells us in a
note that “sekir or sicker” is a very common form of _secure_, and
quotes in illustration from the prose _Morte Arthure_, “A! said Sir
Launcelot, comfort yourselfe, for it shall bee unto us as a great
honour, and much more then if we died in any other places: for of death
wee be _sicker_.” Now in the text the word means _safe_, and in the note
it means _sure_. Indeed _sure_, which is only a shorter form of
_secure_, is its ordinary meaning. “I mak sicker,” said Kirkpatrick, a
not unfitting motto for certain editors, if they explained it in their
usual phonetic way.
In the “Frere and the Boye,” when the old man has given the boy a bow,
he says:--
“Shote therin, whan thou good thynke;
For yf thou shote and wynke,
The prycke thow shalte hytte.”
Mr. Hazlitt’s explanation of _wynke_ is “to close one eye in taking
aim,” and he quotes a passage from Gascoigne in support of it. Whatever
Gascoigne meant by the word (which is very doubtful), it means nothing
of the kind here, and is another proof that Mr. Hazlitt does not think
it so important to understand what he reads as St. Philip did. What the
old man said was, “even if you shut both your eyes, you can’t help
hitting the mark.” So in “Piers Ploughman” (Whitaker’s text),
“Wynkyng, as it were, wytterly ich saw hyt.”
Again, for our editor’s blunders are as endless as the heads of an
old-fashioned sermon, in the “Schole-House of Women” (Vol. IV. p. 130),
Mr. Hazlitt has a note on the phrase “make it nice,”
(“And yet alwaies they bible bable
Of euery matter and make it nice,”)
which reads thus: “To make it pleasant or _snug_. I do not remember to
have seen the word used in this sense very frequently. But Gascoigne has
it in a precisely similar way:--
‘The glosse of gorgeous Courtes by thee did please mine eye,
A stately sight me thought it was to see the braue go by,
To see their feathers flaunte, to make [marke!] their straunge deuise,
To lie along in ladies lappes, to lispe, and make it nice.’”
To _make it nice_ means nothing more nor less than to _play the fool_,
or rather, to _make a fool of yourself, faire le niais_. In old English
the French _niais_ and _nice_, from similarity of form and analogy of
meaning, naturally fused together in the word _nice_, which, by an
unusual luck, has been promoted from a derogatory to a respectful sense.
Gascoigne’s _lispe_ might have put Mr. Hazlitt on his guard, if he ever
considered the sense of what he quotes. But he never does, nor of what
he edits either. For example, in the “Smyth and his Dame” we find the
following note: “_Prowe_, or _proffe_, is not at all uncommon as a form
of _profit_. In the ‘Seven Names of a Prison,’ a poem printed in
_Reliquiæ Antiquæ_, we have,--
‘Quintum nomen istius foveæ ita probatum,
A place of _proff_ for man to know bothe frend and foo.’”
Now _proff_ and _prow_ are radically different words. _Proff_ here means
_proof_, and if Mr. Hazlitt had read the stanza which he quotes, he
would have found (as in all the others of the same poem) the meaning
repeated in Latin in the last line, _probacio amicorum_.
But we wish to leave our readers (if not Mr. Hazlitt) in good humor, and
accordingly we have reserved two of his notes as _bonnes bouches_. In
“Adam Bel,” when the outlaws ask pardon of the king,
“They kneled downe without lettyng
And each helde vp his hande.”
To this passage (tolerably plain to those not _too_ familiar with “our
early literature”) Mr. Hazlitt appends this solemn note: ‘_To hold up
the hand_ was formerly a sign of respect or concurrence, or a mode of
taking an oath; and thirdly as a signal for mercy. In all these senses
it has been employed from the most ancient times; nor is it yet out of
practice, as many savage nations still testify their respect to a
superior by holding their hand [either _their hands_ or _the hand_, Mr.
Hazlitt!] over their head. _Touching the hat_ appears to be a vestige of
the same custom. In the present passage the three outlaws may be
understood to kneel on approaching the throne, and to hold up each a
hand as a token that they desire to ask the royal clemency or favour. In
the lines which are subjoined it [what?] implies a solemn assent to an
oath:
‘This swore the duke and all his men,
And all the lordes that with him lend,
And tharto to[33] held they up thaire hand.’”
Minot’s Poems, ed. 1825, p. 9.
The admirable Tupper could not have done better than this, even so far
as the mere English of it is concerned. Where all is so fine, we
hesitate to declare a preference, but, on the whole, must give in to the
passage about _touching the hat_, which is as good as “mobbled queen.”
The Americans are still among the “savage nations” who “imply a solemn
assent to an oath” by holding up the hand. Mr. Hazlitt does not seem to
know that the question whether to kiss the book or hold up the hand was
once a serious one in English politics.
But Mr. Hazlitt can do better even than this! Our readers may be
incredulous; but we shall proceed to show that he can. In the
“Schole-House of Women,” among much other equally delicate satire of the
other sex (if we may venture still to call them so), the satirist
undertakes to prove that woman was made, not of the rib of a man, but of
a dog:--
‘And yet the rib, as I suppose,
That God did take out of the man
A dog vp caught, and a way gose
Eat it clene; so that as than
The woork to finish that God began
Could not be, as we haue said,
Because the dog the rib connaid.
A remedy God found as yet;
Out of the dog he took a rib.”
Mr. Hazlitt has a long note on _way gose_, of which the first sentence
shall suffice us: “The origin of the term way-goose is involved in some
obscurity.” We should think so, to be sure! Let us modernize the
spelling and grammar, and correct the punctuation, and then see how it
looks:--
“A dog up caught and away goes,
Eats it up.”