I have digressed: I return to words which have been misunderstood. A second word is of more importance, Imp; which properly means a Graft. The best translation of ὦ Λήδας ἔρνος to my mind, is, ‘O Imp of Leda’! for neither ‘bud of Leda’, nor ‘scion of Leda’ satisfy me: much less ‘sprig’ or ‘shoot of Leda’. The theological writers so often used the phrase ‘imp of Satan’ for ‘child of the devil’, that (since Bunyan?) the vulgar no longer understand that imp means scion, child, and suppose it to mean ‘little devil’. A Reviewer has omitted to give his unlearned readers any explanation of the word (though I carefully explained it) and calls down their indignation upon me by his censures, which I hope proceeded from carelessness and ignorance.
Even in Spenser’s Fairy Queen the word retains its rightful and noble sense:
Well worthy imp! then said the lady, etc.,
and in North’s Plutarch,
‘He took upon him to protect him from them all, and not to suffer so goodly an imp [Alcibiades] to lose the good fruit of his youth’.
Dryden uses the verb, To imp; to graft, insert.
I was quite aware that I claimed of my readers a certain strength of mind, when I bid them to forget the defilements which vulgarity has shed over the noble word Imp, and carry their imaginations back two or three centuries: but I did not calculate that any critic would call Dainty grotesque. This word is equivalent in meaning to Delicate and Nice, but has precisely the epical character in which both those words are deficient. For instance, I say, that after the death of Patroclus, the coursers ‘stood motionless’,
Drooping tōwārd the ground their heads, and down their plaintive eyelids
Did warm tears trickle to the ground, their charioteer bewailing.
Defilèd were their dainty manes, over the yoke-strap dropping.