In the facsimile of the sonnet to Fairfax I find
"Thy firm unshak'n vertue ever brings,"
which shows how much faith we need give to the apostrophe.
[365] Mr. Masson might have cited a good example of this from Drummond, whom (as a Scotsman) he is fond of quoting for an authority in English,—
"Sleep, Silence' child, sweet father of soft rest."
The survival of Horse for horses is another example. So by a reverse process pult and shay have been vulgarly deduced from the supposed plurals pulse and chaise.
[366] Chapman's spelling is presumably his own. At least he looked after his printed texts. I have two copies of his "Byron's Conspiracy," both dated 1608, but one evidently printed later than the other, for it shows corrections. The more solemn ending in ed was probably kept alive by the reading of the Bible in churches. Though now dropped by the clergy, it is essential to the right hearing of the more metrical passages in the Old Testament, which are finer and more scientiflc than anything in the language, unless it be some parts of "Samson Agonistes." I remember an old gentleman who always used the contracted form of the participle in conversation, but always gave it back its embezzled syllable in reading. Sir Thomas Browne seems to have preferred the more solemn form. At any rate he has the spelling empuzzeled in prose.
[367] He thinks the same of the variation strook and struck, though they were probably pronounced alike. In Marlowe's "Faustus" two consecutive sentences (in prose) begin with the words "Cursed be he that struck." In a note on the passage Mr. Dyce tells us that the old editions (there were three) have stroke and strooke in the first instance, and all agree on strucke in the second. No inference can be drawn from such casualties.
[368] The lines are not "from one of the Satires," and Milton made them worse by misquoting and bringing love jinglingly near to grove. Hall's verse (in his Satires) is always vigorous and often harmonious. He long before Milton spoke of rhyme almost in the very terms of the preface to Paradise Lost.
[369] Mr. Masson goes so far as to conceive it possible that Milton may have committed the vulgarism of leaving a t out of slep'st, "for ease of sound." Yet the poet could bear boast'st and—one stares and gasps at it—doat'dst. There is, by the way, a familiar passage in which the ch sound predominates, not without a touch of sh, in a single couplet:—