Webster, A Cure for a Cuckold, act iii. sc. 1.
If the sleepy drench
Of that forgetful lake benumb not still.
Milton, Paradise Lost, ii. 73.
| Forlorn, | } |
| Forlorn Hope. |
There are two points of difference between the past use of ‘forlorn hope’ and the present. The first, that it was seldom used,—I can recall no single example,—in that which is now its only application, namely, of those who, being the first to mount the breach, thus set their lives upon a desperate hazard; but always of the skirmishers and others thrown out in front of an army about to engage. Here, indeed, the central notion of the word may be affirmed to agree with that it has now. These first come to hand-strokes with the enemy; they bear the brunt of their onset; with less likelihood therefore that they will escape than those who come after. This is quite true, and it comes remarkably out in my first quotation from Holland; just as in a retreat they are the ‘forlorn hope’ (Swedish Intelligencer, vol. i. p. 163), who bring up the rear. But in passages innumerable this of the greater hazard to which the ‘forlorn hope’ are exposed, has quite disappeared, and the ‘forlorn’ (for ‘hope’ is often omitted) are simply that part of the army which, being posted in the front, is first engaged. The phrase is an importation from Holland, and ‘hope’ is the Dutch ‘hoop,’ a heap, band, troop. I find it first in Gascoigne’s Fruits of War, st. 74.
The fearful are in the forlorn [see Rev. xxi. 8] of those that march for hell.—Gurnall, The Christian in Complete Armour, c. 1.
They [the Enniskillen horse] offered with spirit to make always the forlorn of the army.—Dryden (Scott’s edition), vol. vii. p. 303.
These [the Roman Velites] were loose troops, answerable in a manner to those which we call now by a French name Enfans Perdues, but when we use our own terms, The Forlorn Hope.—Sir W. Raleigh, History of the World, v. 3, 8.
Before the main battle of the Carthaginians he sets the auxiliaries and aid-soldiers, a confused rabble and medley of all sorts of nations, who, as the forlorn hope, bearing the furious heat of the first brunt, might, if they did no other good, yet, with receiving many a wound in their bodies dull and turn the edge of the enemy’s sword.—Holland, Livy, p. 765.