Again—the old word ‘herteles’ (heartless), instead of without courage, how well it expresses the want of courage or spirit: we often say people have no heart for work, or no heart for singing, when they are sad, or ill, or weak. Heartless does not always mean cowardly; it means that the person is dejected, or tired, or out of spirits. We have left off using the word heartless in that sense, however, and we have no word to express it. When we say heartless, we mean cruel or unkind, which is a perfectly different meaning.
Again, we have no word now for a meeting-time or appointment, as good as the old word ‘steven:’ we use the French word ‘rendezvous’ as a noun, which is not very wise. ‘Steven’ is a nice, short, and really English word which I should like to hear in use again.
One more instance. The word ‘fret’ was used for devouring. This just describes what we call ‘nibbling’ now. The moth fretting a garment—means the moth devouring or nibbling a garment.
This is a word we have lost sight of now in the sense of eating; we only use it for ‘complaining’ or ‘pining.’ But a fretted sky—and the frets on a guitar—are from the old Saxon verb frete, to eat or devour, and describe a wrinkly uneven surface, like the part of a garment fretted by the moth. So you must not be impatient with the old words, which are sometimes much better for their purpose than the words we use nowadays.
CANTERBURY TALES.
CHAUCER’S PILGRIMS.
Some of Chaucer’s best tales are not told by himself. They are put into the mouths of other people. In those days there were no newspapers—indeed there was not much news—so that when strangers who had little in common were thrown together, as they often were in inns, or in long journeys, they had few topics of conversation: and so they used to entertain each other by singing songs, or quite as often by telling their own adventures, or long stories such as Chaucer has written down and called the ‘Canterbury Tales.’