(The Cock and the Fox, 247.)
he was expressing a composite idea made up from the verb seal, Old Fr. seeler (sceller), Lat. sigillare, and seel, Old Fr. ciller, Vulgar Lat. *ciliare, from cilium, eye-brow. The latter verb, meaning to sew together the eyelids of a young falcon, was once a common word—
"Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day."
(Macbeth, iii. 2.)
The verb fret is Anglo-Sax. fretan, to eat away (cf. Ger. fressen). Fret is also used of interlaced bars in heraldry, in which sense it corresponds to Fr. frette with the same meaning; for this word, which also means ferrule, a Vulgar Lat. *ferritta (ferrum, iron) has been suggested. When Hamlet speaks of—
"This majestical roof fretted with golden fire,"
(Hamlet, ii. 3.)
is he thinking of frets in heraldry, or of fretwork, or are these two of one origin? Why should fret, in this sense, not come from fret, to eat away, since fretwork may be described as the "eating away" of part of the material? Cf. etch, which comes, through Dutch, from Ger. ätzen, the factitive of essen, to eat. But the German for fretwork is durchbrochene Arbeit, "broken-through" work, and Old Fr. fret or frait, Lat. fractus, means "broken." Who shall decide how much our fretwork owes to each of these possible etymons?
That form of taxation called excise, which dates from the time of Charles I., has always been unpopular. Andrew Marvell says that Excise—
"With hundred rows of teeth the shark exceeds,
And on all trades like cassowar she feeds."