"NAMBY-PAMBY," AND OTHER WORDS OF THE SAME FORM.
(Vol. viii., p. 318.)
The origin of the word namby-pamby is explained in the following passage of Johnson's Life of Ambrose Philips:
"The pieces that please best are those which from Pope and Pope's adherents procured him the name of namby-pamby, the poems of short lines, by which he paid his court to all ages and characters—from Walpole, 'the steerer of the realm,' to Miss Pulteney in the nursery. The numbers are smooth and sprightly, and the diction is seldom faulty. They are not loaded with much thought, yet, if they had been written by Addison, they would have had admirers. Little things are not valued but when they are done by those who can do greater."
In the Treatise on the Bathos, the infantine style is exclusively exemplified by passages from Ambrose Philips:
"This [says Pope] is when a poet grows so very simple as to think and talk like a child. I shall take my examples from the greatest master in this way: hear how he fondles like a mere stammerer:
'Little charm of placid mien,
Miniature of Beauty's queen,
Hither, British Muse of mine,
Hither, all ye Grecian nine,
With the lovely Graces three,
And your pretty nursling see.
When the meadows next are seen,
Sweet enamel, white and green;
When again the lambkins play,
Pretty sportlings full of May,
Then the neck so white and round,
(Little neck with brilliants bound)
And thy gentleness of mind,
(Gentle from a gentle kind), &c.
Happy thrice, and thrice again,
Happiest he of happy men,' &c.
And the rest of those excellent lullabies of his composition."—C. xi.
These verses are stated by Warburton, in his note on the passage, to be taken from a poem to
Miss Cuzzona. They are however in fact selected from two poems addressed to daughters of Lord Carteret, and are put together arbitrarily, out of the order in which they stand in the original poems. There is a short poem by Philips in the same metre, addressed to Signora Cuzzoni, and dated May 25, 1724, beginning, "Little syren of the stage;" but none of the verses quoted in the Treatise on the Bathos are extracted from it.
Namby-pamby belongs to a tolerably numerous class of words in our language, all formed on the same rhyming principle. They are all familiar, and some of them childish; which last circumstance probably suggested to Pope the invention of the word namby-pamby, in order to designate the infantine style which Ambrose Philips had introduced. Many of them, however, are used by old and approved writers; and the principle upon which they are formed must be of great antiquity in our language. The following is a collection of words which are all formed in this manner:
Bow-wow.—A word coined in imitation of a dog's bark. Compare the French aboyer.