_Eisell_ will, I think, if examples from our old writers decide, be at
least acknowledged to mean in Shakspeare what we now (improperly?) call
vinegar, and not any river. In _The Goolden Letanye of the Lyf and
Passion of our Lorde Jesu Criste_, edited from a MS. (No. 546.) in the
library at Lambeth, by Mr. Maskell, _Monumenta Ritualia_, ii. 252.,
comes this entreaty:--
"For thi thirste and tastyng of gall and _eysyl_, graunte us to
tast the swetnes of thi spirite; and have mercy on us."
All through the sixteenth century, and ages before, _eisell_ was not
only a housewife's word, but in every one's mouth--in the poet's as he
sang, the preacher's as he preached, and the people's while they prayed.
Surely, for this very reason, if Shakspeare meant Hamlet to rant about a
river, the bard would never have made the king choose, before all
others, that very one which bore the same name with the then commonest
word in our tongue: a tiny stream, moreover, which, if hardly ever
spoken of in these days of geographical knowledge, must have been much
less known then to Englishmen.