"PINECE WITH A STINK."
(Vol. viii., pp. 270. 350.)
I would not have meddled with this subject if R. G., getting on a wrong scent, had not arrived at the very extraordinary conclusion that Bramhall meant a "pinnace," and an "offensive composition well known to sailors!"
The earliest notice that I have met with of the pinece in an English work, is in the second part of the Secrets of Maister Alexis of Piemont, translated by W. Warde, Lond. 1568. There I find the following secrets—worth knowing, too, if effective:
"Against stinking vermin called Punesies.—If you rub your bedsteede with squilla stamped with vinaigre, or with the leaves of cedar tree sodden in oil, you shall never feel punese. Also if you set under the bed a payle full of water the puneses will not trouble you at all."
Butler, in the first canto of the third part of Hudibras, also mentions it thus:
"And stole his talismanic louse—
His flea, his morpion, and punaise."
If the Querist refers to his French dictionary he will soon discover the meaning of morpion and punaise—the latter without doubt the pinece of Bishop Bramhall. Cotgrave, in his French-English Dictionary, London, 1650, defines punaise to be "the noysome and stinking vermin called the bed punie."
It may be bad taste to dwell any longer on this subject; but as it illustrates a curious fact in natural history, and as it has been well said, that whatever the Almighty has thought proper to create is not beneath the study of mankind, I shall crave a word or two more.
The pinece is not originally a native of this country; and that is the reason why, so many years after its first appearance in England, it was known only by a corruption of its French name punaise, or its German appellation wandlaus (wall-louse). Penny, a celebrated physician and naturalist in the reign of Henry VII., discovered it at Mortlake in rather a curious manner. Mouffet, in his Theatrum Insectorum (Lond. 1634), thus relates the story:
"Anno 1503, dum hæc Pennio scriptitaret, Mortlacum Tamesin adjacentem viculum, magna festinatione accersebatur ad duas nobiles, magno metu ex cimicum vestigiis percussas, et quid nescio contagionis valde veritas. Tandem recognita, ac bestiolis captis, risu timorem omnem excussat."
Mouffet also tells us that in his time the insect was little known in England, though very common on the Continent, a circumstance which he ascribes to the superior cleanliness of the English:
"Munditiem frequentemque lectulorum et culcitrarem lotionem, cum Galli, Germani, et Itali minus curant, pariunt magis hane pestem, Angli autem munditei et cultus studiosissimi rarius iis laborant."
Ray, in his Historia Insectorum, published in 1710, merely terms it the punice or wall-louse; indeed, I am not aware that the modern name of the insect appears in print previous to 1730, when one Southal published A Treatise of Buggs. Southal appears to have been an illiterate person; and he erroneously ascribes the introduction of the insect into this country to the large quantities of foreign fir used to rebuild London after the Great Fire.
The word bug, signifying a frightful object or spectre, derived from the Celtic and the root of bogie, bug-aboo, bug-bear—is well known in our earlier literature. Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Beaumont and Fletcher, Holinshed and many others, use it; and in Matthew's Bible, the fifth verse of the ninety-first psalm is rendered:
"Thou shalt not nede to be afraid of any bugs by night."
Thus we see that a real "terror of the night" in course of time, assumed, by common consent, the title of the imaginary evil spirit of our ancestors.
One word more. I can see no difficulty in tracing the derivation of the word humbug, without going to Hamburg, Hume of the Bog, or any such distant sources. In Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, I find the word hum signifying deceive. Peter Pindar, too, writes writes:
"Full many a trope from bayonet and drum
He threaten'd but behold! 'twas all a hum."
Now, the rustic who frightens his neighbour with a turnip lanthorn and a white sheet, or the spirit-rapping medium, who, for a consideration, treats his verdant client with a communication from the unseen world, most decidedly humbugs him; that is, hums or deceives him with an imaginary spirit, or bug.
W. Pinkerton.
Ham.
I take it that the editor of Archbishop Bramhall's Works was judicious in not altering the
word pinece to pinnace, as an object very different from the latter was meant; i. e. a cimex, who certainly revenges any attack upon his person with a stink. Pinece is only a mistaken orthography of punese, the old English name of the obnoxious insect our neighbours still call a punaise (see Cotgrave in voce). Florio says "Cimici, a kinde of vermine in Italie that breedeth in beds and biteth sore, called punies or wall-lice." We have it in fitting company in Hudibras, III. 1.:
"And stole his talismanic louse,
His flea, his morpion, and punese."
This is only one more instance of the danger of altering the orthography, or changing an obsolete word, the meaning of which is not immediately obvious. The substitution of pinnace would have been entirely to depart from the meaning of the Archbishop.
S. W. S.