“Christ, which that is to every harm triacle”.
The antidotal character of treacle comes out yet more in these lines of Lydgate:
“There is no venom so parlious in sharpnes,
As whan it hath of treacle a likenes”.
[208] “A slave that within these twenty years rode with the black guard in the Duke’s carriage, ’mongst spits and dripping pans”. (Webster’s White Devil.) [First ed. 1612. “The Black Guard of the King’s Kitchen” is mentioned in a State Paper of 1535 (N.E.D.).]
[209] Génin (Lexique de la Langue de Molière, p. 367) says well: “En augmentant le nombre des mots, il a fallu restreindre leur signification, et faire aux nouveaux un apanage aux dépens des anciens”.
[210] [Accordingly there is nothing tautological in the “dead corpses” of 2 Kings xix, 35, in the A.V.]
[211] [‘Weed’, vegetable growth, Anglo-Saxon weód, is here confounded with a perfectly distinct word ‘weed’, clothing, which is the Anglo-Saxon waéd, a garment.]
[212] And no less so in French with ‘dame’, by which form not ‘domina’ only, but ‘dominus’, was represented. Thus in early French poetry, “Dame Dieu” for “Dominus Deus” continually occurs. We have here the key to the French exclamation, or oath, as we now perceive it to be, ‘Dame’! of which the dictionaries give no account. See Génin’s Variations du Langage Français, p. 347.
[213] [‘Hoyden’ seems to be derived from the old Dutch heyden, a heathen, then a clownish, boorish fellow.]
[214] [This “ancient Saxon phrase”, as Longfellow calls it, has not been found in any old English writer, but has been adopted from the Modern German. Neither is it known in the dialects, E.D.D.]