Let us take an example or two. If any were to speak now of royal children as “royal imps”, it would sound, and with our present use of the word would be, impertinent and unbecoming enough; and yet ‘imp’ was once a name of dignity and honour, and not of slight or of undue familiarity. Thus Spenser addresses the Muses in this language,
“Ye sacred imps that on Parnasso dwell”;
and ‘imp’ was especially used of the scions of royal or illustrious houses. More than one epitaph, still existing, of our ancient nobility might be quoted, beginning in such language as this, “Here lies that noble imp”. Or what should we say of a poet who commenced a solemn poem in this fashion,
“Oh Israel, oh household of the Lord,
Oh Abraham’s brats, oh brood of blessed seed”?
Could we conclude anything else but that he meant, by using low words on lofty occasions, to turn sacred things into ridicule? Yet this was very far from the intention of Gascoigne, the poet whose lines I have just quoted. “Abraham’s brats” was used by him in perfect good faith, and without the slightest feeling that anything ludicrous or contemptuous adhered to the word ‘brat’, as indeed in his time there did not, any more than adheres to ‘brood’, which is another form of the same word now[222].
Call a person ‘pragmatical’, and you now imply not merely that he is busy, but over-busy, officious, self-important, and pompous to boot. But it once meant nothing of the kind, and ‘pragmatical’ (like πραγματικός) was one engaged in affairs, being an honourable title, given to a man simply and industriously accomplishing the business which properly concerned him[223]. So too to say that a person ‘meddles’ or is a ‘meddler’ implies now that he interferes unduly in other men’s matters, without a call mixing himself up with them. This was not insinuated in the earlier uses of the word. On the contrary three of our earlier translations of the Bible have, “Meddle with your own business” (1 Thess. iv. 11); and Barrow in one of his sermons draws at some length the distinction between ‘meddling’ and “being meddlesome”, and only condemns the latter.
‘Proser’
Or take again the words, ‘to prose’ or a ‘proser’. It cannot indeed be affirmed that they convey any moral condemnation, yet they certainly convey no compliment now; and are almost among the last which any one would desire should with justice be applied either to his talking or his writing. For ‘to prose’, as we all now know too well, is to talk or write heavily and tediously, without spirit and without animation; but once it was simply the antithesis of to versify, and a ‘proser’ the antithesis of a versifier or a poet. It will follow that the most rapid and liveliest writer who ever wrote, if he did not write in verse would have ‘prosed’ and been a ‘proser’, in the language of our ancestors. Thus Drayton writes of his contemporary Nashe:
“And surely Nashe, though he a proser were,
A branch of laurel yet deserves to bear”;
that is, the ornament not of a ‘proser’, but of a poet. The tacit assumption that vigour, animation, rapid movement, with all the precipitation of the spirit, belong to verse rather than to prose, and are the exclusive possession of it, is that which must explain the changed uses of the word.