FOLK TALK: "EYSELL", "CAPTIOUS."
If folk lore be worthy of a place in your columns, folk talk should not be shut out, and that the etymological solutions, gathered from this source, which I have previously forwarded, have not appeared, is doubtless attributable to some other cause than indifferentism to the authority. I have found many inexplicable words and phrases, occurring in the older writers, rendered plain and highly expressive by folk talk definitions; and a glance at the relative positions of the common people of this day, and the writers of the past, to the educated and scholarly world of the nineteenth century, will suffice to show good reasons for a discriminative reference to the language of the one, for the elucidation of the other's expression. In common with the majority of your readers, as I should think, I found the notes and replies on "eysell" and "captious" to be highly interesting, and of course applied to the folk talk for its definition. In the first case I obtained from my own experience, what I think will be a satisfactory clue to its meaning, and something more in addition. There is a herb of an acid taste, the common name for which—the only one with which I am acquainted—is green-sauce; and this herb is, or rather was, much sought after by children in my boyish days. At a public school not a dozen miles from Stratford-on-Avon, it was a common practice for we lads to spend our holidays in roaming about the fields; and among objects of search, this green-sauce was a prominent one, and it was a point of honour with each of us to notify to the others the discovery of a root of green-sauce. In doing this, the discoverer, after satisfying himself by his taste that the true herb was found, followed an accepted course, and signified his success to his companions by raising his voice and shouting, what I have always been accustomed to write, "Hey-sall." I have no knowledge of the origin of this word; it was with us as a school-rule so to use it; and I have no doubt but that "ey-sell" was in Shakspeare's time the popular name for the herb to which I allude.
Mixing much with the rural population of Warwickshire, I have, on many occasions, seen the word "captious" used in the sense of carping, irritable, unthankfulness, and self-willed; and, in my humble opinion, such a rendering would be more in accordance with the character of the fiction, and the poet's early teaching, than any definition I have yet seen in your pages.
EMUN.