“Next, that no gallant should not ought suppose
That prayers and glory doth consist in cloathes.”
Lege, nostro periculo, PRAYSE! Were dear old Tom still on earth, he might light his pipe cheerfully with any one of Mr. Hazlitt’s pages, secure that in so doing he was consuming a brace of blunders at the least. The word prayer is an unlucky one for Mr. Hazlitt. In the “Knyght and his Wyfe” (Vol. II. p. 18) he prints:—
“And sayd, Syre, I rede we make
In this chapel oure prayers,
That God us kepe both in ferrus.”
Why did not Mr. Hazlitt, who explains so many things that everybody knows, give us a note upon in ferrus? It would have matched his admirable elucidation of waygose, which we shall notice presently. Is it not barely possible that the MS. may have read prayere and in fere? Prayere occurs two verses further on, and not as a rhyme.
Mr. Hazlitt even sets Sir Frederick Madden right on a question of Old English grammar, telling him superciliously that can, with an infinitive, in such phrases as he can go, is used not “to denote a past tense, but an imperfect tense.” By past we suppose him to mean perfect. But even if an imperfect tense were not a past one, we can show by a passage in one of the poems in this very collection that can, in the phrases referred to, sometimes not only denotes a past but a perfect tense:—
“And thorow that worde y felle in pryde;
As the aungelle can of hevyn glyde,
And with the tywnkling[31] of an eye
God for-dud alle that maystrye
And so hath he done for my gylte.”
Now the angel here is Lucifer, and can of hevyn glyde means simply fell from heaven, not was falling. It is in the same tense as for-dud in the next line. The fall of the angels is surely a fait accompli. In the last line, by the way, Mr. Hazlitt changes “my for” to “for my,” and wrongly, the my agreeing with maystrye understood. In modern English we should use mine in the same way. But Sir Frederick Madden can take care of himself.
We have less patience with Mr. Hazlitt’s impertinence to Ritson, a man of ample reading and excellent taste in selection, and who, real scholar as he was, always drew from original sources. We have a foible for Ritson with his oddities of spelling, his acerb humor, his unconsciously depreciatory mister Tyrwhitts and mister Bryants, and his obstinate disbelief in Doctor Percy’s folio manuscript. Above all, he was a most conscientious editor, and an accurate one so far as was possible with the lights of that day. Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted two poems, “The Squyr of Low Degre” and “The Knight of Curtesy,” which had already been edited by Ritson. The former of these has passages that are unsurpassed in simple beauty by anything in our earlier poetry. The author of it was a good versifier, and Ritson, though he corrected some glaring errors, did not deal so trenchantly with verses manifestly lamed by the copyist as perhaps an editor should.[32] Mr. Hazlitt says of Ritson’s text, that “it offers more than an hundred departures from the original,” and of the “Knight of Courtesy,” that “Ritson’s text is by no means accurate.” Now Mr. Hazlitt has adopted nearly all of Ritson’s emendations, without giving the least hint of it. On the contrary, in some five or six instances, he gives the original reading in a foot-note with an “old ed. has” so and so, thus leaving the reader to infer that the corrections were his own. Where he has not followed Ritson, he has almost uniformly blundered, and that through sheer ignorance. For example, he prints,
“Alas! it tourned to wroth her heyle,”
where Ritson had substituted wrotherheyle. The measure shows that Ritson was right. Wroth her heyle, moreover, is nonsense. It should have been wrother her heyle at any rate, but the text is far too modern to admit of that archaic form. In the “Debate of the Body and the Soul” (Mätzner’s A. E. Sprachproben, 103) we have,