Among My Books. First Series

by James Russell Lowell

[121] Gray, himself a painful corrector, told Nicholls that "nothing was done so well as at the first concoction,"—adding, as a reason, "We think in words." Ben Jonson said, it was a pity Shakespeare had not blotted more, for that he sometimes wrote nonsense,—and cited in proof of it the verse,

"Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."

The last four words do not appear in the passage as it now stands, and Professor Craik suggests that they were stricken out in consequence of Jonson's criticism. This is very probable; but we suspect that the pen that blotted them was in the hand of Master Heminge or his colleague. The moral confusion in the idea was surely admirably characteristic of the general who had just accomplished a successful coup d'etat, the condemnation of which he would fancy that he read in the face of every honest man he met, and which he would therefore be forever indirectly palliating.

[122] We use the word Latin here to express words derived either mediately or immediately from that language.

[123] The prose of Chaucer (1390) and of Sir Thomas Malory (translating from the French, 1470) is less Latinized than that of Bacon, Browne, Taylor, or Milton. The glossary to Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar (1679) explains words of Teutonic and Romanic root in about equal proportions. The parallel but independent development of Scotch is not to be forgotten.

[124] I believe that for the last two centuries the Latin radicals of English have been more familiar and homelike to those who use them than the Teutonic. Even so accomplished a person as Professor Crail, in his English of Shakespeare, derives head, through the German haupt, from the Latin caput! I trust that its genealogy is nobler, and that it is of kin with coelum, tueri, rather than with the Greek [kephalae], if Suidas be right in tracing the origin of that to a word meaning vacuity. Mr. Craik suggests, also, that quick and wicked may be etymologically identical, because he fancies a relationship between busy and the German böse, though wicked is evidently the participial form of A. S. wacan, (German weichen,) to bend, to yield, meaning one who has given way to temptation, while quick seems as clearly related to wegan, meaning to move, a different word, even if radically the same. In the "London Literary Gazette" for November 13,1858, I find an extract from Miss Millington's "Heraldry in History, Poetry, and Romance," in which, speaking of the motto of the Prince of Wales,—De par Houmaut ich diene,—she says; "The precise meaning of the former word [Houmout] has not, I think, been ascertained." The word is plainly the German Hochmuth, and the whole would read, De par (Aus) Hochmuth ich diene,—"Out of magnanimity I serve." So entirely lost is the Saxon meaning of the word knave, (A. S. cnava, German knabe,) that the name navvie, assumed by railway-laborers, has been transmogrified into navigator. I believe that more people could tell why the month of July was so called than could explain the origin of the names for our days of the week, and that it is oftener the Saxon than the French words in Chaucer that puzzle the modern reader.

[125] De Vulgari Eloquio, Lib. II. cap. i. ad finem. I quote this treatise as Dante's, because the thoughts seem manifestly his; though I believe that in its present form it is an abridgment by some transcriber, who sometimes copies textually, and sometimes substitutes his own language for that of the original.

[126] Vol. III. p. 348, note. He grounds his belief, not on the misprinting of words, but on the misplacing of whole paragraphs. We were struck with the same thing in the original edition of Chapman's "Biron's Conspiracy and Tragedy." And yet, in comparing two copies of this edition, I have found corrections which only the author could have made. One of the misprints which Mr. Spedding notices affords both a hint and a warning to the conjectural emendator. In the edition of "The Advancement of Learning" printed in 1605 occurs the word dusinesse. In a later edition this was conjecturally changed to business; but the occurrence of vertigine in the Latin translation enables Mr. Spedding to print rightly, dizziness.

[127] "At first sight, Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists seem to write in styles much alike; nothing so easy as to fall into that of Massinger and the others; whilst no one has ever yet produced one scene conceived and expressed in the Shakespearian idiom. I suppose it is because Shakespeare is universal, and, in fact, has no manner."—Coleridge's Tabletalk, 214.

[128] Pheidias said of one of his pupils that he had an inspired thumb, because the modelling-clay yielded to its careless sweep a grace of curve which it refused to the utmost pains of others.