He [Sir Matthew Hale] kept no greater a family than myself.—Baxter, Life, part 3, § 107.
A just master may have an unconscionable servant; and if he have a numerous family and keep many, it is a rare thing if he have not some bad.—Sanderson, Sermons, 1671, vol. i. p. 115.
To join to wife good family,
And none to keep for bravery ...
These be the steps unfeignedly
To climb to thrift by husbandry.
Tusser, Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, 9.
Fancy. The distinction between ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination,’ for which Wordsworth so earnestly contended, has obtained full recognition. It was the more easy for it to find acceptance from the fact that it fell in with a certain clinamen, a disposition already obscurely working in the minds of men, to ascribe different domains of meaning to these several words. But while what has been thus done has been well done, it would be a mistake to regard this as an old distinction that was now recovered from the oblivion into which it had fallen. The Greeks ascribed no such subordination of φαντασία (‘phantasy,’ ‘phansy,’ ‘fancy’) to some other word, as we now ascribe to ‘fancy’ in its relation to ‘imagination.’ Φαντασία was for Plato and Aristotle (see too Longinus, c. 15), all that ‘imagination’ is for us, the power which summons up before the mind’s eye of the poet, and of as many as he can carry along with him, the forms of things not present, shaping and moulding, dissolving and reuniting and fusing these at his will; while ‘fancy,’ as we now understand the word, with the humbler offices assigned to it, as the aggregative and associated power, more playful but less earnest, dealing often in prettinesses rather than in beauties, had not obtained any special word to express it. At the Revival of Learning both words found themselves in our English vocabulary; but far down into the seventeenth century there was no sense of any distinction between them; they were simply duplicates, one from the Greek and one from the Latin. They are constantly employed by Henry More as absolutely convertible; and where Milton makes any difference between them, it is to the advantage of ‘fancy,’ which includes ‘imagination’ as a greater includes a less. At a later day it was felt to be a waste of wealth to have two words absolutely identical in meaning for one and the same mental operation; above all, while another went without any to designate it at all; and thus the instinct which is ever at work in a language for the making the most of its resources began to work for the desynonymizing of ‘imagination’ and ‘fancy.’ This could only be effected by the coming down of one or the other from its height of place. The lot naturally fell on ‘fancy,’ the grand φαντάζεσθαι, on which it rested, being far more obscured to such as were not scholars, than the Latin ‘imago,’ on which ‘imagination’ reposed.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping phantasies, that apprehend