"Son of the Morning" (Vol. iv., pp. 209. 330. 391.).
—As none of your correspondents have been able to explain the meaning of this passage in Childe Harold, I may now tell you that the phrase is an orientalism for "traveller," in allusion to their early rising to avoid the heat of the mid-day sun. Lord Byron invites the traveller to visit the ruins of Greece, but not to molest them as some former travellers had done; then he turns upon Lord Elgin, and attacks him for his misdeeds in that way.
AN OLD BENGAL CIVILIAN.
Haberdasher (Vol. ii., pp. 167. 253.).
—In Todd's edition of Johnson's Dictionary, the word haberdasher is derived from berdash, which is said "to have been a name formerly used in England for a certain kind of neck-dress, whence the maker or seller of such clothes was called a berdasher; and thence comes haberdashers." This etymology is hardly admissible. Can an early reference be given to the use of the term berdash, as an article of dress? Minsheu, Todd remarks, ingeniously deduces it from Habt ihr dass, German, Have you this? the expression of a shopkeeper offering his wares to sell. But the derivation of the term haberdasher furnished by your correspondent (Vol. ii., p. 253.) is certainly the most satisfactory.
At the end of the sixteenth century (about 1580) the shopkeepers that went under this designation dealt largely in most of the minor articles of foreign manufacture; and among the "haberdashery" of that period were "daggers, swords owches, broaches, aiglets, Spanish girdles, French cloths, Milan caps, glasses, painted cruizes, dials, tables, cards, balls, puppets, ink-horns, tooth-picks, fine earthen pots, pins and points, hawks' bells, salt-cellars, spoons, knives, and tin dishes." A yet more curious list of goods vended by the "milloners or haberdashers" who dwelt at the Royal Exchange within two or three years after it had been built, occurs in Stow's Annals by Howe (p. 869.), where we are informed that they "sould mouse-trappes, bird-cages, shooing-hornes, lanthornes, and Jew's trumpes."
The author of that curious tract, Maroccus Extaticus, 1595 (which I reprinted in the Percy Society) speaks of a "felow" loading his sleeve with "fuel from the haberdashers."
The more ancient name of these traders was milainers, an appellation derived from their dealing in merchandize chiefly imported from the city of Milan. They were also, I believe, called hurrers, from dealing in hats and caps.
It is evident, from the above, that "a retailer of goods, a dealer in small wares," is the true meaning of the word haberdasher.
EDWARD F. RIMBAULT.