Mr. Hazlitt’s note upon astire is “hearth, i. q. astre.” Knowing that the modern French was âtre, he too rashly inferred a form which never existed except in Italian. The old French word is aistre or estre, but Mr. Hazlitt, as usual, prefers something that is neither old French nor new. We do not pretend to know what astire means, but a hearth that should be abooue the pot seething over the fire would be unusual, to say the least, in our semi-civilized country.
In the “Lyfe of Roberte the Deuill” (Vol. I. p. 232), Mr. Hazlitt twice makes a knight sentre his lance, and tells us in a note that the “Ed. 1798 has fentered,” a very easy misprint for the right word feutered. What Mr. Hazlitt supposed to be the meaning of sentre he has not vouchsafed to tell us. Fautre (sometimes faltre or feutre) means in old French the rest of a lance. Thus in the Roman du Renart (26517),
“Et mist sa lance sor le fautre.”
But it also meant a peculiar kind of rest. In Sir F. Madden’s edition of Gawayne (to which Mr. Hazlitt refers occasionally) we read,
“They feutred their lances, these knyghtes good”;
and in the same editor’s “William and the Werwolf,”
“With sper festened in feuter, him for to spille.”
In a note on the latter passage Sir F. Madden says, “There seems no reason, however, why it [feuter] should not mean the rest attached to the armour.” But Roquefort was certainly right in calling it a “garniture d’une selle pour tenir la lance.” A spear fastened to the saddle gave more deadly weight to the blow. The “him for to spille” implies this. So in “Merlin” (E. E. Text Soc., p. 488): “Than thei toke speres grete and rude, and putte hem in fewtre, and that is the grettest crewelte that oon may do, ffor turnement oweth to be with-oute felonye, and they meved to smyte hem as in mortall werre.” The context shows that the fewtre turned sport into earnest. A citation in Raynouard’s Lexique Roman (though wrongly explained by him) directed us to a passage which proves that this particular kind of rest for the lance was attached to the saddle, in order to render the blow heavier:—
“Lances à [lege as] arçons afeutrées
Pour plus de dures colées rendre.”
Branche des Royaux Lignages, 4514, 4515.
Mr. Hazlitt, as we have said, lets no occasion slip to insinuate the inaccuracy and carelessness of his predecessors. The long and useful career of Mr. Wright, who, if he had given us nothing more than his excellent edition of “Piers Ploughman” and the volume of “Ancient Vocabularies,” would have deserved the gratitude of all lovers of our literature or students of our language, does not save him from the severe justice of Mr. Hazlitt, nor is the name of Warton too venerable to be coupled with a derogatory innuendo. Mr. Wright needs no plea in abatement from us, and a mischance of Mr. Hazlitt’s own has comically avenged Warton. The word prayer, it seems, had somehow substituted itself for prayse in a citation by Warton of the title of the “Schole-House of Women.” Mr. Hazlitt thereupon takes occasion to charge him with often “speaking at random,” and after suggesting that it might have been the blunder of a copyist, adds, “or it is by no means impossible that Warton himself, having been allowed to inspect the production, was guilty of this oversight.” (Vol. IV. p. 98.) Now, on the three hundred and eighteenth page of the same volume, Mr. Hazlitt has allowed the following couplet to escape his conscientious attention:—