It is observable that in all the above instances these appellations are only used to females. It is not improbable therefore, that, in an abstract sense, cockney might sometimes be used in speaking to male children as a term of endearment; and it may be necessary to make this remark here, for the purpose of anticipating any suggestion that it is connected with the present subject.
It remains only to notice the cockneys or sugar pellet which Mr. Steevens's old lady remembered to have eaten in her childhood. The French formerly used a kind of perfumed pastry made of the powdered Iris flower, sugar, musk, and rose-water; these were called pastilles; and from the similitude of the word to pastel, or the Languedoc woad mentioned at the beginning of this note as the produce of the pays de cocagne, it is not improbable that some latent affinity may exist. The animal involved in the English term might indeed be thought sufficient to indicate the form. Had the old lady, happily for us, described the shape of these comfits, and which motives of delicacy might have prevented, we could possibly have traced them from our Gallic neighbours in another descent of a very singular nature. The following extract from Legrand's Vie privée des Francois, tom. ii. p. 268, will explain this: "Croira-t-on qu'il a existé en France un tems ou l'on a donné aux menues pâtisseries de table les formes les plus obscenes, et les noms les plus infâmes? Croira-t-on que cet incroyable excés de depravation a duré plus de deux siécles? Aussi sont ce moins les noms de ces pâtisseries qu'il faut blâmer que les formes qu'on leur donnait. Champier, apres avoir décrit les differentes pâtisseries usitées de son temps, dit, Quædam pudenda muliebria, aliæ virilia (si diis placet) representant. Sunt quos c... saccharatos appellitent. Adeò degeneravere boni mores, ut etiam Christianis obscœna et pudenda in cibis placeant."
Minsheu's tale of the cock neighing, and Casaubon's derivation of cockney from οικογενης, i. e. domi natus, may serve to increase those smiles of compassion which it is to be feared some of the present remarks may have already excited.
It is worth remarking, although not immediately connected with the present subject, that in the Celtic languages coeg, and kok, signified anything foolish or good for nothing. They seem connected with the radical word for a cuckow, a silly bird, which has thus transmitted its appellation to persons of a similar nature. See the words cog in the Welsh dictionaries, and cok in Pryce's Cornish vocabulary. In the North they call the cuckow a gowk, whence genkit, foolish, and gawky. Our term cokes, for a fool, is of the same family, and, perhaps, cuckold.
Scene 4. Page 132.
Lear. Thou art a boil.
The note on this word states that it was written byle in the old copies, which all the modern editors have too strictly followed; that the mistake arose from the word boil being often pronounced as if written bile; and that in the folio we find in Coriolanus the same false spelling as here.—But this charge against the editors seems to have originated in a misconception. The ancient and true orthography is byle and bile, and such was the common pronunciation. The modern boyl and boil are corruptions. Thus in the Promptuarium parvulorum, 1516, we have "Byle sore,—Pustula." In Mathews's bible, 1551, "Satan smote Job with marvelous soore byles." In Whetstone's Mirour for magestrates of cyties, 1584, 4to, "Dicyng houses are of the substance of other buildinges, but within are the botches and byles of abhomination." Bile is pure Saxon, and is so given in most of the old dictionaries.
Scene 4. Page 135.
Lear. ... but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws.
On the word flaws we have the following note: "A flaw, signifying a crack or other similar imperfection; our author, with his accustomed license, uses the word here for a small broken particle. So again in the fifth Act,