"To the same notes thy sons shall hum or snore,
And all thy yawning daughters cry encore."
It was not, I think, in use so early as Shakspeare's time, who makes Bottom anticipate that "the Duke shall say, Let him roar again, let him roar again," where the jingle of "encore" would have been obvious. It is somewhat curious that where we use the French word encore, the French audiences use the Latin word "bis."
C.
"Hauling over the Coals" (Vol. viii., p. 125.).—This saying I conceive to have arisen from the custom prevalent in olden times, when every Baron was supreme in his own castle, of extracting money from the unfortunate Jews who happened to fall into his power, by means of torture. The most usual modus operandi seems to have been roasting the victims over a slow fire. Every one remembers the treatment of Isaac of York by Front-de-Bœuf, so vividly described in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. Although the practice has long been numbered amongst the things that were, the fact of its having once obtained is handed down to posterity in this saying, as when any one is taken to task for his shortcomings he is hauled over the coals.
John P. Stilwell.
Dorking.
The Words "Cash" and "Mob" (Vol. viii., p. 386.).—Mr. Fox was right: mob is not genuine English—teste Dean Swift! A lady who was well known to Swift used to say that the greatest scrape she ever got into with him was by using the word mob. "Why do you say that?" he exclaimed in a passion; "never let me hear you say that again!" "Why, sir," she asked, "what am I to say?" "The rabble, to be sure," answered he. (Sir W. Scott's Works of Swift, vol. ix.) The word appears to have been introduced about the commencement of the eighteenth century, by a process to which we owe many other and similar barbarisms—"beauties introduced to supply the want of wit, sense, humour, and learning." In a paper of The Tatler, No. 230., much in the spirit, and possibly from the pen, of Swift, complaint is made of the "abbreviations and elisions" which had recently been introduced, and a humorous example of them is given. By these, the author adds,
"Consonants of most obdurate sound are joined together without one softening vowel to intervene; and all this only to make one syllable of two, directly contrary to the example of the Greeks and Romans, and a natural tendency towards relapsing into barbarity. And this is still more visible in the next refinement, which consists in pronouncing the first syllable in a word that has many, and dismissing the rest. Thus we cram one syllable and cut off the rest, as the owl fattened her mice after she had bit off their legs to prevent their running away; and if ours be the same reason for maiming our words, it will certainly answer the end, for I am sure no other nation will desire to borrow them."
I have only to add (see Blackwood's Magazine, vol. ii., 1842) that "mob is mobile."