for “files.” Lovelace commonly writes so;—on p. 181, where it escaped Mr. Hazlitt’s grammatical eye, we find,—
“But broken faith, and th’ cause of it,
All damning gold, was damned to the pit.”
Indeed, it was usual with writers of that day. Milton in one of his sonnets has,—
“Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng,”—
and Leigh Hunt, for the sake of the archaism, in one of his, “Patience and Gentleness is power.”
Weariness, and not want of matter, compels us to desist from further examples of Mr. Hazlitt’s emendations. But we must also give a few specimens of his notes, and of the care with which he has corrected the punctuation.
In a note on “flutes of canary” (p. 76) too long to quote, Mr. Hazlitt, after citing the glossary of Nares (edition of 1859, by Wright and Halliwell, a very careless book, to speak mildly), in which flute is conjectured to mean cask, says that he is not satisfied, but adds, “I suspect that a flute of canary was so called from the cask having several vent-holes.” But flute means simply a tall glass. Lassel, describing the glass-making at Murano, says, “For the High Dutch they have high glasses called Flutes, a full yard long.” So in Dryden’s Sir Martin Mar-all, “bring two flute-glasses and some stools, ho! We’ll have the ladies’ health.” The origin of the word, though doubtful, is probably nearer to flood than flute. But conceive of two gentlemen, members of one knows not how many learned societies, like Messrs. Wright and Halliwell, pretending to edit Nares, when they query a word which they could have found in any French or German dictionary!
On page 93 we have,—
“Hayle, holy cold! chaste temper, hayle! the fire
Raved o’er my purer thoughts I feel t’ expire.”
Mr. Hazlitt annotates thus: “Rav’d seems here to be equivalent to reav’d or bereav’d. Perhaps the correct reading may be ’reav’d.’ See Worcester’s Dictionary, art. Rave?, where Menage’s supposition of affinity between rave and bereave is perhaps a little too slightingly treated.”