LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS.[27] (continued 2)

On page 93 we have,—

Mr. Hazlitt annotates thus: “Rav’d seems here to be equivalent to reav’d or bereav’d. Perhaps the correct reading may be ’reav’d.’ See Worcester’s Dictionary, art. Rave?, where Menage’s supposition of affinity between rave and bereave is perhaps a little too slightingly treated.”

The meaning of Lovelace was, “the fire that raved.” But what Mr. Hazlitt would make with “reaved o’er my purer thoughts,” we cannot conceive. On the whole, we think he must have written the note merely to make his surprising glossological suggestion. All that Worcester does for the etymology, by the way, is to cite Richardson, no safe guide.

The comma in this verse has, of course, no right there, but Mr. Hazlitt leaves the whole passage so corrupt that we cannot spend time in disinfecting it. We quote it only for the sake of his note on “so so.” It is marvellous.

“An exclamation of approval when an actor made a hit. The corruption seems to be somewhat akin to the Italian, ’si, si,’ a corruption of ’sia, sia.’”

That the editor of an English poet need not understand Italian we may grant, but that he should not know the meaning of a phrase so common in his own language as so-so is intolerable. Lovelace has been saying that a certain play might have gained applause under certain circumstances, but that everybody calls it so-so,—something very different from “an exclamation of approval,” one should say. The phrase answers exactly to the Italian così così, while sì (not si) is derived from sic, and is analogous with the affirmative use of the German so and the Yankee jes’ so.

The note on fryed is,—

“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:—

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).

Mr. Hazlitt’s note is,—

“Hair is here used in what has become quite an obsolete sense. The meaning is outward form, nature, or character. The word used to be by no means uncommon; but it is now, as was before remarked, out of fashion; and indeed I do not think that it is found even in any old writer used exactly in the way in which Lovelace has employed it.”

We should think not, as Mr. Hazlitt understands it! Did he never hear of the golden hair of Apollo,—of the intonsum Cynthium? Don Quixote was a better scholar where he speaks of las doradas hebras de sus hermosos cabellos. But hair never meant what Mr. Hazlitt says it does, even when used as he supposes it to be here. It had nothing to do with “outward form, nature, or character,” but had a meaning much nearer what we express by temperament, which its color was and is thought to indicate.

On p. 232 “wild ink” is explained to mean “unrefined.” It is a mere misprint for “vild.”

Page 237, Mr. Hazlitt, explaining an illusion of Lovelace to the “east and west” in speaking of George Sandys, mentions Sandys’s Oriental travels, but seems not to know that he translated Ovid in Virginia.

Pages 251, 252:—

Mr. Hazlitt reads his for this in the last verse, and his note on “bone” is:—

“And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith. (Judges xv. 15.)”

Could the farce of “editing” go further? To make a “splinter of Castriot” an ass’s jawbone is a little too bad. We refer Mr. Hazlitt to “The Life of George Castriot, King of Epirus and Albania,” &c., &c., (Edinburgh, 1753,) p. 32, for an explanation of this profound difficulty. He will there find that the Turkish soldiers wore relics of Scanderbeg as charms.

Perhaps Mr. Hazlitt’s most astounding note is on the word pickear. (p. 203.)

“In the sense in which it is here used this word seems to be peculiar to Lovelace. To pickear, or pickeer, means to skirmish.” And, pray, what other possible meaning can it have here?

Of his corrections of the press we will correct a few samples.

Page 34, for “Love nee’re his standard,” read “neere.” Page 82, for “fall too,” read “fall to” (or, as we ought to print such words, “fall-to”). Page 83, for “star-made firmament,” read “star, made firmament.” Page 161, for “To look their enemies in their hearse,” read, both for sense and metre, into. Page 176, for “the gods have kneeled,” read had. Page 182, for “In beds they tumbled off their own,” read of. Page 184, for “in mine one monument I lie,” read owne. Page 212, for “Deucalion’s blackflung stone,” read “backflung.” Of the punctuation we shall give but one specimen, and that a fair average one:—

Our readers over ten years of age will easily correct this for themselves.

Time brings to obscure authors[30] an odd kind of reparation, an immortality, not of love and interest and admiration, but of curiosity merely. In proportion as their language was uncouth, provincial, or even barbarous, their value becomes the greater. A book of which only a single copy escaped its natural enemies, the pastry-cook and trunk-maker, may contain one word that makes daylight in some dark passage of a great author, and its name shall accordingly live forever in a note. Is not, then, a scholiastic athanasy better than none? And if literary vanity survive death, or even worse, as Brunetto Latini’s made him insensible for a moment to the rain of fire and the burning sand, the authors of such books as are not properly literature may still comfort themselves with a non omnis moriar, laying a mournful emphasis on the adjective, and feeling that they have not lived wholly in vain while they share with the dodo a fragmentary continuance on earth. To be sure, the immortality, such as it is, belongs less to themselves than to the famous men they help to illustrate. If they escape oblivion, it is by a back door, as it were, and they survive only in fine print at the page’s foot. At the banquet of fame they sit below the salt. After all, perhaps, the next best thing to being famous or infamous is to be utterly forgotten, for this also is to achieve a kind of definite result by living. To hang on the perilous edge of immortality by the nails, liable at any moment to drop into the fathomless ooze of oblivion, is at best a questionable beatitude. And yet sometimes the merest barnacles that have attached themselves to the stately keels of Dante or Shakespeare or Milton have an interest of their own by letting us know in what remote waters those hardy navigators went a pearl-fishing. Has not Mr. Dyce traced Shakespeare’s “dusty death” to Anthony Copley, and Milton’s “back resounded Death!” to Abraham Fraunce? Nay, is it not Bernard de Ventadour’s lark that sings forever in the diviner air of Dante’s Paradise?

We are not sure that Bernard’s “Que s’oblida es laissa cazer” is not sweeter than Dante’s “tace contenta,” but it was plainly the doussor that gave its cue to the greater poet’s memory, and he has improved on it with that exquisite ultima, as his master Virgil sometimes did on Homer.

But authors whose interest for us is mainly bibliographic belong rather in such collections as Mr. Allibone’s. As literature they are oppressive; as items of literary history they find their place in that vast list which records not only those named for promotion, but also the killed, wounded, and missing in the Battle of the Books. There our hearts are touched with something of the same vague pathos that dims the eye in some deserted graveyard. The brief span of our earthly immortalities is brought home to us as nowhere else. What a necrology of notability! How many a controversialist, terrible in his day, how many a rising genius that somehow stuck on the horizon, how many a withering satirist, lies here shrunk all away to the tombstone brevity of a name and date! Think of the aspirations, the dreams, the hopes, the toil, the confidence (of himself and wife) in an impartial and generous posterity,—and then read “Smith J. [ohn?] 1713-1784 (?). The Vision of Immortality, an Epique Poem in twelve books, 1740, 4to. See Lowndes.” The time of his own death less certain than that of his poem, (which we may fix pretty safely in 1740,) and the only posterity that took any interest in him the indefatigable compiler to whom a name was valuable in proportion as it was obscure. Well, to have even so much as your title-page read after it has rounded the corner of its first century, and to enjoy a posthumous public of one is better than nothing. This is the true Valhalla of Mediocrity, the Libro d’oro of the onymi-anonymi, of the never-named authors who exist only in name. Parson Adams would be here had he found a printer for his sermons, and Mr. Primrose, if a copy existed of his tracts on monogamy. Papyrorcetes junior will turn here with justifiable pride to the name of his respectable progenitor. Here we are secure of perpetuity at least, if of nothing better, and are sons though we may not be heirs, of fame. Here is a handy and inexpensive substitute for the waxen imagines of the Roman patriciate, for those must have been inconvenient to pack on a change of lodgings, liable to melt in warm weather (even the elder Brutus himself might soften in the dog-days) and not readily salable unless to some novus homo willing to buy a set of ancestors ready-made, as some of our own enthusiasts in genealogy are said to order a family-tree from the heraldic nurseryman, skilled to imp a slip of Scroggins on a stock of De Vere or Montmorenci. Fame, it should seem, like electricity, is both positive and negative, and if a writer must be Somebody to make himself of permanent interest to the world at large, he must not less be Nobody to have his namelessness embalmed by M. Guérard. The benignity of Providence is nowhere more clearly to be seen than in its compensations. As there is a large class of men madly desirous to decipher cuneiform and other inscriptions, simply because of their illegibility, so there is another class driven by a like irresistible instinct to the reprinting of unreadable books. Whether these have even a philologic value for us depends on the accuracy and learning bestowed upon them by the editor.

For there is scarcely any rubbish-heap of literature out of which something precious may not be raked by the diligent explorer, and the late Mr. Dyce (since Gifford, the best editor of our literature of the Tudor and Jacobean periods) might well be called the Golden Dustman, so many were the precious trifles sifted out by his intelligent industry. It would not be easy to name any work more thoroughly done than his edition of Skelton. He was not a philologist in the stricter sense, but no man had such a commonplace-book as he, or knew so exactly the meaning with which words were used during the period he did so much to illustrate. Elegant scholar ship is not often, as in him, patient of drudgery and conscientious in painstaking. Between such a man and Mr. Carew Hazlitt the contrast is by no means agreeable. The one was not more distinguished by modest accuracy than the other is by the rash conceit of that half-knowledge which is more mischievous in an editor than downright ignorance. This language is strong because it is true, though we should not have felt called upon to use it but for the vulgar flippancy with which Mr. Hazlitt alludes depreciatingly to the labors of his predecessors,—to such men as Ritson, Utterson, Wright, and Sir Frederick Madden, his superiors in everything that goes to the making of a good editor. Most of them are now dead and nailed in their chests, and it is not for us to forget the great debt we owe to them, and others like them, who first opened paths for us through the tangled wilderness of our early literature. A modern editor, with his ready-made helps of glossary, annotation, and comment, should think rather of the difficulties than the defects of these pioneers.

How different is Mr. Hazlitt’s spirit from that of the thorough and therefore modest scholar! In the Preface to his Altenglische Sprachproben, Mätzner says of an editor, das Beste was er ist verdankt er Andern, an accidental pentameter that might seem to have dropped out of Nathan der Weise. Mr. Hazlitt would profit much by getting some friend to translate for him the whole paragraph in which it occurs.

We see it announced that Mr. Hazlitt is to superintend a new edition of Warton’s History of English Poetry, and are pained to think of the treatment that robust scholar and genial poet is likely to receive at the hands of an editor without taste, discrimination, or learning. Of his taste a single specimen may suffice. He tells us that “in an artistic and constructive point of view, the Mylner of Abington is superior to its predecessor,” that predecessor being Chaucer’s Reve’s Tale, which, with his usual inaccuracy, he assigns to the Miller! Of his discrimination we have a sufficient test in the verses he has fathered upon Herrick in a late edition of the most graceful of our lyric poets. Perhaps discrimination is not, after all, the right word, for we have sometimes seen cause to doubt whether Mr. Hazlitt ever reads carefully the very documents he prints. For example, in the Biographical Notice prefixed to the Herrick he says (p. xvii): “Mr. W. Perry Herrick has plausibly suggested that the payments made by Sir William to his nephew were simply on account of the fortune which belonged to Robert in right of his father, and which his uncle held in trust; this was about £400; and I think from allusions in the letters printed elsewhere that this view may be the correct one.” May be! The poet says expressly, “I entreat you out of my little possession to deliver to this bearer the customarye £10, without which I cannot meate [?] my ioyrney.” The words we have italicized are conclusive. By the way, Mr. Hazlitt’s wise-looking query after “meate” is conclusive also as to his fitness for editorship. Did he never hear of the familiar phrase “to meet the expense”? If so trifling a misspelling can mystify him, what must be the condition of his mind in face of the more than Protean travesties which words underwent before they were uniformed by Johnson and Walker? Mr. Hazlitt’s mind, to be sure, like the wind Cecias, always finds its own fog. In another of Herrick’s letters we find, “For what her monie can be effected (sic) when there is diuision ’twixt the hart and hand?” “Her monie” of course means harmonie, and effected is therefore right. What Mr. Hazlitt may have meant by his “(sic)” it were idle to inquire.

We have already had occasion to examine some of Mr. Hazlitt’s work, and we are sorry to say that in the four volumes before us we find no reason for changing our opinion of his utter disqualification for the duties of editorship. He seldom clears up a real difficulty (never, we might say, with lights of his own), he frequently creates a darkness where none was before, and the peculiar bumptiousness of his incapacity makes it particularly offensive. We shall bring a few instances in proof of what we assert, our only embarrassment being in the superabundance of our material. In the Introduction to the second volume of his collection, Mr. Hazlitt speaks of “the utter want of common care on the part of previous editors of our old poetry.” Such oversights as he has remarked upon in his notes are commonly errors of the press, a point on which Mr. Hazlitt, of all men, should have been charitable, for his own volumes are full of them. We call his attention to one such which is rather amusing. In his “additional notes” we find “line 77, wylle. Strike out the note upon this word; but the explanation is correct. Be wroght was a misprint, however, for he wroght.” The error occurs in a citation of three lines in which lother is still left for tother. The original note affords us so good an example of Mr. Hazlitt’s style of editing as to be worth preserving. In the “Kyng and the Hermit” we read,—

And here is Mr. Hazlitt’s annotation on the word wylle:—

“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:—

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:—

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,

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,—

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,—

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:—

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:—

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:—

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,

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),

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,

and in the same editor’s “William and the Werwolf,”

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:—

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:—

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:—

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:—

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,

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,

and in “Dame Siris” (Ibid., 110),

Mr. Hazlitt prints,

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),

where Ritson has brent, and gives parallel passages in his note on the word. Mr. Hazlitt gives us

though Ritson had made the proper correction to begles. Mr. Hazlitt, with ludicrous nonchalance, allows the Squire to press into the throng

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

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,

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:—

So in the “Smyth and his Dame” (Vol. III. p. 204) we read,

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,

which, of course, should be,

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,

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:—

where we should read “love’s ship,” “wrake,” and “abake.” Again, just below,

Love should be “Iove.” Ovid is the obscure person alluded to in the “men here to foryn”:

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

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:—

where the original is right as it stands. Just before, in the same poem, we have a parallel instance:—

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

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,

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,

which we print purposely without punctuation. Mr. Hazlitt prints them thus,

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,

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:—

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,

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:—

The word bot seems a stumbling-block to Mr. Hazlitt. On page 54 of the same volume we have,

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:—

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,

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,”

and in the “Smyth and his Dame,”

The word was not “used in various significations.” Even so lately as “Flodden Ffeild” we find,

Connected with land it was a commonplace in German as well as in English. So in the Tristan of Godfrey of Strasburg,

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.”

We gather a few more of these flowers of exposition and etymology:—

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:—

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:—

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),

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,”

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:—

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,—

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,

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:

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:—

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:—

We will ask Mr. Hazlitt to compare the text, as he prints it, with

We should have expected a note here on the “hall he-goose.” Not to speak of the point of the joke, such as it is, a goose that could eat up a man’s rib could only be matched by one that could swallow such a note,—or write it!

We have made but a small florilegium from Mr. Hazlitt’s remarkable volumes. His editorial method seems to have been to print as the Lord would, till his eye was caught by some word he did not understand, and then to make the reader comfortable by a note showing that the editor is as much in the dark as he. We are profoundly thankful for the omission of a glossary. It would have been a nursery and seminary of blunder. To expose pretentious charlatanry is sometimes the unpleasant duty of a reviewer. It is a duty we never seek, and should not have assumed in this case but for the impertinence with which Mr. Hazlitt has treated dead and living scholars, the latchets of whose shoes he is not worthy to unloose, and to express their gratitude to whom is, or ought to be, a pleasure to all honest lovers of their mother-tongue. If he who has most to learn be the happiest man, Mr. Hazlitt is indeed to be envied; but we hope he will learn a great deal before he lays his prentice hands on Warton’s “History of English Poetry,” a classic in its own way. If he does not learn before, he will be likely to learn after, and in no agreeable fashion.