Come troll the brown bowl to me.”
But to go further back, we find it in the burden of an old three-part song, “We be three poor Mariners,” in Ravenscroft’s Deuteromelia, 1609:
“Shall we go dance the round, the round,
Shall we go dance the round;
And he that is a bully boy,
Come pledge me on the ground.”
One of the words which the English used to class among Americanisms—ignorant that it was older and better English than their own usage—was Fall, used as the name of the third of the seasons. The English, corrupted by the Johnsonese of the Hanoverian reigns, call it by the Latinism, Autumn. But the other term, in general use on this side of the Atlantic, is the word by which all the old writers of the language know it. “The hole yere,” says scholarly Roger Ascham in his Toxophilus, “is divided into iiii. partes, Spring tyme, Sommer, Faule of the leafe, & Winter, whereof the hole winter for the roughnesse of it, is cleane taken away from shoting: except it be one day amonges xx., or one yeare amonges xi.”
This statement, by the way, that exceptionally mild winters were in the ratio of one to eleven, is worth noting with reference to the recent announcement of science that the spots on the sun have an eleven-year period of maximum frequency.
NO LOVE LOST BETWEEN THEM.
In the ordinary acceptation of the words, “No love was lost between the two,” we are led to infer that the two were on very unfriendly terms. But in the ballad of The Babes in the Wood, as given in Percy’s Reliques, occur the following lines, which convey the contrary idea:—