1627. _marineer_, Fr. _marinier_; we now use the ending _-er_; but modern
words of French origin shew their lateness by the accent on the last
syllable, as _engineer_.--M. The Fr. _pionnier_ is _pioner_ in Shakespeare,
but is now _pioneer_.
1628. 'God give this monk a thousand cart-loads of bad years!' [174] He
alludes to the deceitful monk described in the Shipman's Tale. A _last_ is
a very heavy load. In a Statute of 31 Edw. I. a _weight_ is declared to be
14 stone; 2 _weights_ of wool are to make a _sack_; and 12 _sacks_ a
_last_. This makes a last of wool to be 336 stone, or 42 cwt. But the
dictionaries shew that the weight was very variable, according to the
substance weighed. The word means simply a heavy burden, from A. S.
_hlæst_, a burden, connected with _hladan_, to load; so that _last_ and
_load_ are alike in sense. _Laste_, in the sense of heavy weight, occurs in
Richard the Redeles, ed. Skeat, iv. 74. _Quad_ is the Old English
equivalent of the Dutch _kwaad_, bad, a word in very common use. In O.E.,
_þe qued_ means the evil one, the devil; P. Pl. B. xiv. 189. Cf. note to A.
4357. The omission of the word _of_ before _quad_ may be illustrated by the
expression 'four score years,' i. e. _of_ years.
1630. 'The monk put an ape in the man's hood, and in his wife's too.' We
should now say, he made him look like an ape. The contents of the _hood_
would be, properly, the man's head and face; but neighbours seemed to see
peeping from it an ape rather than a man. It is a way of saying that he
made a dupe of him. In the Milleres Tale (A. 3389), a girl is said to have
made her lover _an ape_, i. e. a dupe; an expression which recurs in the
Chanones Yemannes Tale, G. 1313. Spenser probably borrowed the expression
from this very passage; it occurs in his Faerie Queene, iii. 9. 31:--
'Thus was _the ape_,
By their faire handling, _put into Malbeccoes cape_.'