[62] Long details are given of Garter history, very inaccurate, both here and in the last omitted passage.—W.
[63] Derivations of “Esquire” and “Gentleman” are given.—W.
[64] The proper spelling of what is now called kersey. It is really “causeway cloth,” and causeway is still pronounced (as it should be) karsey by the homely people who are not tied to the tail of the dogmatic dictionary man, whose unnecessary ingenuity (in place of a small knowledge of “country matters”) has in this case set up a phantom phalanx of busy looms in the harmless little village of Kersey in Suffolk. The Scotch have the full phrase still. The French causie is nearer to carsie than to book-made causeway.—W.
[65] This etymology of a much-disputed word is doubtless accurate. Thus Piers Plowman’s
“Thoruh ziftes haven zemen to rennen and to ride.”
The peculiar “z” stood the Saxon “ge.” In fact Geo, old Mother Earth, stares us in the face. A yeoman is an “earth-man.” We may literally say our modern English sabremen of the shires, at a periodical muster on caracoling steeds, are “racy of the soil.”—W.
[66] Harrison was quick to catch a true idea of the authors he delights in, and his weakness for displaying his fund of classical lore is therefore generally a pleasure instead of a bore. The phrase from the distinguished Roman youth, Aulus Persius Flaccus, occurs in the Prologue to his poems:
“Heliconidas pallidamque Pirenen
Illis remitto quorum imagines lambunt
Hederæ sequaces: ipse semipaganus
Ad sacra vatum carmen adfero nostrum;”
which may be thus Englished:
“Those Helicon-births and pallor-breeding Pirenes
Must remit I to them o’er whose countenance traileth
The ivy up-clinging: myself, half-breed of the soil,
To the shrine of our prophets my song I deliver.”