Minor Notes.
Verses in Pope—"Bug" or "Bee."—Pope, in the Dunciad, speaking of the purloining propensities of Bays, has the lines:
"Next o'er his books his eyes began to roll,
In pleasing memory of all he stole;
How here he sipp'd, how there he plunder'd snug,
And suck'd all o'er, like an industrious bug."
In reading these lines, some time ago, I was forcibly struck with the incongruity of the terms "sipp'd" and "industrious" as applied to "bug;" and it occurred to me that Pope may have originally written the passage with the words "free" and "bee," as the rhymes of the two last lines. My reasons for this conjecture are these: 1st. Because Pope is known to have been very fastidious on the score of coarse or vulgar expressions; and his better judgment would have recoiled from the use of so offensive a word as "bug." 2ndly. Because, as already stated, the terms "sipp'd" and "industrious" are inapplicable to a bug. Of the bug it may be said, that it "sucks" and "plunders;" but it cannot, with any propriety, be predicated of it, as of the bee, that it "sips" and is "industrious." My impression is, that when Pope found he was doing too much honour to Tibbald by comparing him to a bee, he substituted the word "bug" and its corresponding rhyme, without reflecting that some of the epithets, already applied to the one, are wholly inapplicable to the other.
Henry H. Breen.
St. Lucia, March, 1851.
Rub-a-dub.—This word is put forward as an instance of how new words are still formed with a view to similarity of sound with the sound of what they are intended to express, by Dr. Francis Lieber, in a "Paper on the Vocal Sounds of Laura Bridgeman compared with the Elements of Phonetic Language," and its authorship is assigned