[90] Preface to Juvenal.
[91] Preface to Troilus and Cressida. In justice to Dryden, and lest it should be said that he had spoken poetic blasphemy, it ought not to be forgotten that ‘pestered’ had not in his time at all so offensive a sense as it would have now. It meant no more than inconveniently crowded; thus Milton: “Confined and pestered in this pinfold here”.
[92] Thus in North’s Plutarch, p. 499: “After the fire was quenched, they found in niggots of gold and silver mingled together, about a thousand talents”; and again, p. 323: “There was brought a marvellous great mass of treasure in niggots of gold”. The word has not found its way into our dictionaries or glossaries.
[93] [‘Niggot’ rather stands for ‘ningot’, due to a coalescence of the article in ‘an ingot’ (as if ‘a ningot’); just as, according to some, in French l’ingot became lingot.]
[94] [Such collections were essayed in J. C. Hare’s Two Essays in English Philology, 1873, “Words derived from Names of Persons”, and in R. S. Charnock’s Verba Nominalia, pp. 326.]
[95] [In a strangely similar way the stone-worshipper in the Malay Peninsula gives to his sacred boulder the title of Mohammed (Tylor, Primitive Culture, 3rd ed. ii. 254).]
[96] [But Wolsey’s jester was most probably so called from his wearing a varicoloured or patchwork coat; compare the Shakespearian use of ‘motley’. Similarly the maquereaux of the old French comedy were clothed in a mottled dress like our harlequin, just as the Latin maccus or mime wore a centunculus or patchwork coat, his name being perhaps connected with macus (in macula), a spot (Gozzi, Memoirs, i, 38). In stage slang the harlequin was called patchy, as his Latin counterpart was centunculus.]
[97] [An error. Prof. Skeat shows that ‘tram’ was an old word in Scottish and Northern English (Etym. Dict., 655 and 831).]
[98] Several of these we have in common with the French. Of their own they have ‘sardanapalisme’, any piece of profuse luxury, from Sardanapalus; while for ‘lambiner’, to dally or loiter over a task, they are indebted to Denis Lambin, a worthy Greek scholar of the sixteenth century, whom his adversaries accused of sluggish movement and wearisome diffuseness in style. Every reader of Pascal’s Provincial Letters will remember Escobar, the great casuist among the Jesuits, whose convenient subterfuges for the relaxation of the moral law have there been made famous. To the notoriety which he thus acquired he owes his introduction into the French language; where ‘escobarder’ is used in the sense of to equivocate, and ‘escobarderie’ of subterfuge or equivocation. The name of an unpopular minister of finance, M. de Silhouette, unpopular because he sought to cut down unnecessary expenses in the state, was applied to whatever was cheap, and, as was implied, unduly economical; it has survived in the black outline portrait which is now called a ‘silhouette’. (Sismondi, Histoire des Français, tom. xix, pp. 94, 95.) In the ‘mansarde’ roof we have the name of Mansart, the architect who introduced it. I need hardly add ‘guillotine’.
[99] See Col. Mure, Language and Literature of Ancient Greece, vol. i, p. 350.