[45] Casters and Chesters, p. 422.
[46] Ibid., p. 421. So Mr. Freeman, in the case of Chester, claims that “the name is historically a contraction” (English Towns and Districts, p. 231).
[47] This is the case of “Newport Gate,” from my point of view, over again (ante, p. 24).
[48] Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 104.
[49] P.S.—As it would seem, from the letter of “A. H.” (ante, p. 47) that there are people who believe that the Anglo-Saxon “port” was the “equivalent of haven,” or sea-port (portus), it may be worth referring to the English Chronicle, where, so late as 1088, Worcester, the town most distant from the sea, is spoken of distinctively as a “port.” The passage is thus rendered by Mr. Freeman: “They came to the port itself, and would then the port burn.” (W. Rufus, i. 47, 48.) In Earle’s “Philology of the English Tongue” (3rd Ed.) it is explained that by port was “signified, in Saxon times, just ‘a town, a market-town.’ This is the sense of it in such compounds as Newport Pagnell” (p. 19). It is, however, erroneously there too “derived from the Latin porta, a gate.” It is also worth noting that in the Quarterly Review, No. 315 (July, 1884), p. 9, it is asserted that “a port-reeve is the equivalent of a shire-reeve (!): and has nothing to do with portus, but much with porta”—the very error of which, I hope, I have now effectually disposed.
[50] This jeu d’esprit was written by Sir Joshua Reynolds to illustrate a remark which he had made—“That Dr. Johnson considered Garrick as his property, and would never suffer anyone to praise or abuse him but himself.” In the first of these supposed dialogues, Sir Joshua himself, by high encomiums upon Garrick, is represented as drawing down upon him Johnson’s censure; in the second, Gibbon, by taking the opposite side, calls forth his praise.
It should be added that the jeu d’esprit was printed privately in 1816, given by Lady Thomond to Mrs. Gwynne, who gave it to a lady connected with the family of Wynn of Wynnstay.
[51] The substance of this sermon, in consequence of a strongly expressed wish, will form the subject of a paper in our next number.
[52] In all these quotations I give the words in the old-fashioned version of Garencières, for the French would scarcely be understood by the general reader.
[53] Sometimes, even as at iii. 87, he particularly says that the warning he gives will be utterly useless to prevent the evil announced: “Sang nagera, captif ne me croiras.”