The word bug, signifying a frightful object or spectre, derived from the Celtic and the root of bogie, bug-aboo, bug-bear—is well known in our earlier literature. Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Beaumont and Fletcher, Holinshed and many others, use it; and in Matthew's Bible, the fifth verse of the ninety-first psalm is rendered:
"Thou shalt not nede to be afraid of any bugs by night."
Thus we see that a real "terror of the night" in course of time, assumed, by common consent, the title of the imaginary evil spirit of our ancestors.
One word more. I can see no difficulty in tracing the derivation of the word humbug, without going to Hamburg, Hume of the Bog, or any such distant sources. In Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, I find the word hum signifying deceive. Peter Pindar, too, writes writes:
"Full many a trope from bayonet and drum
He threaten'd but behold! 'twas all a hum."
Now, the rustic who frightens his neighbour with a turnip lanthorn and a white sheet, or the spirit-rapping medium, who, for a consideration, treats his verdant client with a communication from the unseen world, most decidedly humbugs him; that is, hums or deceives him with an imaginary spirit, or bug.
W. Pinkerton.
Ham.
I take it that the editor of Archbishop Bramhall's Works was judicious in not altering the