That adell was a misprint in Ritson is proved by the fact that the word does not appear in his glossary. If we were to bring Mr. Hazlitt to book for his misprints! In the poem we have just quoted he gravely prints,—
“Matter in dede,
My sides did blede,”
for “mother, indede,” “through ryght wysenes” for “though ryghtwisenes,” “with man vnkynde” for “sith man vnkynde,” “ye knowe a parte” for “ye knowe aperte,” “here in” for “herein,” all of which make nonsense, and all come within the first one hundred and fifty lines, and those of the shortest, mostly of four syllables each. Perhaps they rather prove ignorance than want of care. One blunder falling within the same limits we have reserved for special comment, because it affords a good example of Mr. Hazlitt’s style of editing:—
“Your herte souerayne
Clouen in twayne
By longes the blynde.” (Vol. III. p. 7.)
Here the uninstructed reader would be as completely in the dark as to what longes meant as the editor plainly was himself. The old rhymer no doubt wrote Longis, meaning thereby Longinus, a personage familiar enough, one should think, to any reader of mediæval poetry. Mr. Hazlitt absolves himself for not having supplied a glossary by the plea that none is needed by the class of readers for whom his volumes are intended. But this will hardly seem a valid excuse for a gentleman who often goes out of his way to explain in his notes such simple matters as that “shape” means “form,” and that “Johan of the golden mouthe” means “St. Chrysostom,” which, indeed, it does not, any more than Johannes Baptista means St. Baptist. We will supply Mr. Hazlitt with an illustration of the passage from Bekker’s Ferabras, the more willingly as it may direct his attention to a shining example of how an old poem should be edited:—
“en la crotz vos pendero li fals Iuzieu truan,
can Longis vos ferie de sa lansa trencan:
el non avia vist en trastot son vivan;
lo sanc li venc per l’asta entro al punh colan;
e [el] toquet ne sos huelhs si vic el mantenan.”
Mr. Hazlitt, to be sure (who prints sang parlez for sanz parler) (Vol. I. p. 265), will not be able to form any notion of what these verses mean, but perhaps he will be able to draw an inference from the capital L that longes is a proper name. The word truan at the end of the first verse of our citation may also suggest to him that truant is not quite so satisfactory an explanation of the word trewāt as he seems to think. (Vol. IV. p. 24, note.) In deference to Mr. Hazlitt’s presumed familiarity with an author sometimes quoted by him in his notes, we will point him to another illustration:—
“Ac ther cam forth a knyght,
With a kene spere y-grounde
Highte Longeus, as the lettre telleth,
And longe hadde lore his sighte.”
Piers Ploughman, Wright, p. 374.
Mr. Hazlitt shows to peculiar advantage where old French is in question. Upon the word Osyll he favors us with the following note: “The blackbird. In East Cornwall ozell is used to signify the windpipe, and thence the bird may have had its name, as Mr. Couch has suggested to me.” (Vol. II. p. 25.) Of course the blackbird, alone among fowls, is distinguished by a windpipe! The name is merely another form of O. F. oisil, and was usurped naturally enough by one of the commonest birds, just as pajaro (L. passer) in Spanish, by a similar process in the opposite direction, came to mean bird in general. On the very next page he speaks of “the Romance which is vulgarly entitled Lybeaus Disconus, i. e. Le Beau Disconnu.” If he had corrected Disconus to Desconus, all had been well; but Disconnu neither is nor ever was French at all. Where there is blundering to be done, one stone often serves Mr. Hazlitt for two birds. Ly beaus Disconus is perfectly correct old French, and another form of the adjective (bius) perhaps explains the sound we give to the first syllable of beauty and Beaufort. A barrister at law, as Mr. Hazlitt is, may not be called on to know anything about old English or modern French, but we might fairly expect him to have at least a smattering of Law French! In volume fourth, page 129, a goodman trying his wife,
“Bad her take the pot that sod ouer the fire
And set it abooue vpon the astire.”