Let our readers admire with us the easy “it is commonly used” of Mr. Hazlitt, as if he had store of other examples in his note-book. He could an if he would! But unhappily he borrowed this single quotation from Nares, and, as usual, it throws no scintilla of light upon the point in question, for his habit in annotation is to find by means of a glossary some passage (or passages if possible) in which the word to be explained occurs, and then—why, then to give the word as an explanation of itself. But in this instance, Mr. Hazlitt, by the time he had reached the middle of his next volume (Vol. III. p. 281) had wholly forgotten that pryme was “commonly used by early writers” for noon, and in a note on the following passage,
“I know not whates a clocke
But by the countre cocke,
The mone nor yet the pryme,
Vntyll the sonne do shyne,”
he informs us that it means “six o’clock in the morning”! Here again this editor, who taxes Ritson with want of care, prints mone for none in the very verse he is annotating, and which we may therefore presume that he had read. A man who did not know the moon till the sun showed it him is a match even for Mr. Hazlitt himself. We wish it were as easy as he seems to think it to settle exactly what pryme means when used by our “early writers,” but it is at least absolutely certain that it did not mean noon.
But Mr. Hazlitt, if these volumes are competent witnesses, knows nothing whatever about English, old or new. In the “Mery Jest of Dane Hew” he finds the following verses,
“Dame he said what shall we now doo
Sir she said so mote go
The munk in a corner ye shall lay”
which we print purposely without punctuation. Mr. Hazlitt prints them thus,
“Dame, he said, what shall we now doo?
Sir, she said, so mote [it] go.
The munk,” &c.,
and gives us a note on the locution he has invented to this effect, “? so might it be managed.” And the Chancellor said, I doubt! Mr. Hazlitt’s query makes such a singular exception to his more natural mood of immediate inspiration that it is almost pathetic. The amended verse, as everybody (not confused by too great familiarity with our “early writers”) knows, should read,
“Sir, she said, so might I go,”
and should be followed only by a comma, to show its connection with the next. The phrase “so mote I go,” is as common as a weed in the works of the elder poets, both French and English; it occurs several times in Mr. Hazlitt’s own collection, and its other form, “so mote I fare,” which may also be found there, explains its meaning. On the phrase point-device (Vol. III. p. 117) Mr. Hazlitt has a positively incredible note, of which we copy only a part: “This term, which is commonly used in early poems” [mark once more his intimacy with our earlier literature] “to signify extreme exactitude, originated in the points which were marked on the astrolabe, as one of the means which the astrologers and dabblers in the black art adopted to enable them (as they pretended) to read the fortunes of those by whom they were consulted in the stars and planetary orbs. The excessive precision which was held to be requisite in the delineation of these points” [the delineation of a point is good!] “&c. on the astrolabe, led to point-device, or points-device (as it is sometimes found spelled), being used as a proverbial expression for minute accuracy of any kind.” Then follows a quotation from Gower, in which an astrolabe is spoken of “with points and cercles merveilous,” and the note proceeds thus: “Shakespeare makes use of a similar figure of speech in the Tempest, I. 2, where the following dialogue takes place between Prospero and Ariel:—