Coleridge's Essays on Beauty (Vol. iv., p. 175.).
—I have copies of the Essays referred to. They were republished about 1836 in Fraser's Literary Chronicle.
MORTIMER COLLINS.
Guernsey.
"Nao" or "Naw," a Ship (Vol. iv., p. 28.).
—I have already answered GOMER upon the imaginary word naw, a ship: I beg now to remark on MR. FENTON'S nav. If nav was a ship at all, I am at a loss to know why it should be "a much older term." It would probably be subsequent to the introduction of the Latin noun, which it docks of its final is. The word or name is quoted from a Triad, the ninety-seventh of that series which contains the mention of Llewelyn ap Griffith, the last prince of Wales; and what makes it "one of the oldest" Triads, I have no idea. Nor do I know what ascertains the date of any of them; or removes the date of the composition of any one of them beyond the middle ages.
But Nevydd is no very uncommon proper name of men and women, derived from nev, heaven; and nav neivion is simply "lord of lords." It forms the plural like mab, meibion, and march, meirchion. Mr. Walters gives nav under no words but lord. David ap Gwelyn either mentions the navigation of the lords, the Trojan chieftains, to Britain; or else that of Nevydd Nav Neivion, cutting short his title. But the former is the plain sense of the thing. If MR. FENTON will only turn to Owen's Dictionary (from which naw, a ship, is very properly excluded) he will there find the quotation from Gwalchmai; in which the three Persons of the Trinity are styled the Undonion Neivion, "harmonizing or consentaneous Lords." He will scarcely make bold to turn them into ships.
A. N.
Unde derivatur Stonehenge (Vol. iv., p. 57.).
—Your correspondent P. P. proposes to interpret this word, horse-stones, from hengst, the Saxon for a horse; and to understand thereby large stones, as the words horse-chesnut, horse-daisy, horse-mushroom, &c., mean large ones. But, if he had duly considered the arguments contained in Mr. Herbert's Cyclops Christianus, pp. 162-4., he would have seen the necessity of showing, that in Anglo-Saxon and English the description can follow, in composition, the thing described; which it seems it can do in neither. In support of his stone-horse, he should have produced a chesnut-horse in the vegetable sense; a daisy-horse, or a mushroom-horse. Till he does that, the grammatical canon appealed to by that author, will remain in as full force against the stone-horse as against the stone-hanging.