"What motive shall we assign for your conduct? You could not have intended to warn the Christian world against indulging in similar imprudences; for you well know that in the present day, society has not the smallest tendency that way. You could not mean to warn the Brethren against the recurrence of the same absurdities; for you acknowledge yourself that they have already for a long period risen superior to them; and instead of the least tendency to relapse, they have repeatedly and publicly confessed their mistake, and have suffered so much, and such often unmerited obloquy, on account of their long-exploded phraseology, that they are more likely in future to keep too far within bounds from over caution, than once more wildly to overleap them.
— — —
"The only way to account for your conduct in this respect, is to suppose it owing entirely to inadvertence. You were merely amusing yourself, like the boys in the fable, unmindful that your sport might perhaps prove death to a set of poor frogs. But ought you not to have remembered the golden rule of Christ, never to do unto others what you would not choose to have done to yourself? Are you not still smarting under the blows you so lately received from the battle-axe of Wat Tyler? Believe me, sir, communities have feeling as well as individuals. In the days of your ignorance, as you will now call them, you wrote what you are at present ashamed of. To have composed Wat Tyler, you feel to be little congenial with the spirit that ought to dwell in a poet-laureate. When that unfortunate effusion of your pen was officiously dragged into light, did it not touch you to the quick? And why? Because you repented that you had ever written it. We repent of having written and said those things which occasioned Rimius' trumpet to sound. We have repeatedly declared that we do repent, and our conduct has proved the truth of our declaration. Must we not, therefore, feel pain at seeing our old delinquencies, long forgiven and forgotten, once more coupled with our name by a man of your respectable character and abilities? Is not the pain we feel the very impress of what you have felt, and still feel, on the score of Wat Tyler?"
From a Pamphlet printed at Bristol, 1820.
SIGMA.
ARCHAIC AND PROVINCIAL WORDS.
(Vol. v., p. 173.)
In pursuance of my recommendation I now send to "N. & Q." the following provincial and technical words, as taken from the published evidence given before the coroner at the inquest on the Holmefirth catastrophe. Technical names have been there used, which are either strange or unknown even to many engineers, and which no dictionary that I am acquainted with contains. The inquiry is, however, one of such general interest at this time, as connected with the recent fearful loss of life, and enormous destruction of property, that I also give some words, the meaning of which is not so obscure. The names of the reservoir which was bursted, and of the village which suffered most damage, may be taken first.
Bilberry Reservoir: Bilberry is the local name of a berry growing on a heath shrub; a species of Vacci'nium: the genus consists of about fifty species. This berry, in England, is known as wimberry, blueberry, blaeberry, blae, whortleberry, whort and huckleberry; Saxon—heort-berg, hartberry; German—heidel-beere, heathberry; Dutch—blaauwbes, blueberry. The reservoir, no doubt, covered a site on which Vacci'nium Myrtillus, the common bilberries, grew.
Holmefirth: this name may be from holm, the Ilex, the evergreen oak; or holm, a tract of flat rich land on the bank of a brook or river. Frith, a passage or narrow channel; or frith, a kind of "weir" for catching fish.
Greenhowlers: the name of a place where one of the witnesses resides. Howler, or Owler, Alnus glutinosa, the common alder, a tree or shrub growing in damp places, in plantations and hedges, mistaken by the ignorant for the hazel. To send a boy "nutting amongst the howlers," is to put him upon a fool's task. This word is common in Lancashire and Yorkshire.