“Wynkyng, as it were, wytterly ich saw hyt.”
Again, for our editor’s blunders are as endless as the heads of an old-fashioned sermon, in the “Schole-House of Women” (Vol. IV. p. 130), Mr. Hazlitt has a note on the phrase “make it nice,”
(“And yet alwaies they bible bable
Of euery matter and make it nice,”)
which reads thus: “To make it pleasant or snug. I do not remember to have seen the word used in this sense very frequently. But Gascoigne has it in a precisely similar way:—
‘The glosse of gorgeous Courtes by thee did please mine eye,
A stately sight me thought it was to see the braue go by,
To see their feathers flaunte, to make [marke!] their straunge deuise,
To lie along in ladies lappes, to lispe, and make it nice.’”
To make it nice means nothing more nor less than to play the fool, or rather, to make a fool of yourself, faire le niais. In old English the French niais and nice, from similarity of form and analogy of meaning, naturally fused together in the word nice, which, by an unusual luck, has been promoted from a derogatory to a respectful sense. Gascoigne’s lispe might have put Mr. Hazlitt on his guard, if he ever considered the sense of what he quotes. But he never does, nor of what he edits either. For example, in the “Smyth and his Dame” we find the following note: “Prowe, or proffe, is not at all uncommon as a form of profit. In the ‘Seven Names of a Prison,’ a poem printed in Reliquiæ Antiquæ, we have,—
‘Quintum nomen istius foveæ ita probatum,
A place of proff for man to know bothe frend and foo.’”
Now proff and prow are radically different words. Proff here means proof, and if Mr. Hazlitt had read the stanza which he quotes, he would have found (as in all the others of the same poem) the meaning repeated in Latin in the last line, probacio amicorum.
But we wish to leave our readers (if not Mr. Hazlitt) in good humor, and accordingly we have reserved two of his notes as bonnes bouches. In “Adam Bel,” when the outlaws ask pardon of the king,
“They kneled downe without lettyng
And each helde vp his hande.”