His Sunday, till one o’clock, was passed in “spelling the newspapers;” after that he walked on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with his hands behind him, till three—he then entered Lincoln’s Inn chapel, and returned to boiled beef and suet pudding at five, which were always brought to him first.—If an old friend or two dropped in, his happiness was complete.
He was a philosopher too, at least he indulged in a sort of philosophy, and I am not sure that it was not a good sort, although not a very elevated or poetical one. He evinced a disregard for life. The sooner “we are all dead the better” was one of his favourite phrases. And now he is dead.—Peace to his ashes!
This is the only tablet raised to his memory; the inscription is feeble, but it has the novelty of truth, and may occasion some of his many acquaintances to remember the quaintness and eccentricities of “Poor Billy W——.”
W. H.
ABORIGENES.
This word is explained in every dictionary, English, Latin, or French, as a general name for the indigenous inhabitants of a country; when in reality it is the proper name of a peculiar people of Italy, who were not indigenous, but supposed to have been a colony of Arcadians. The error has been founded chiefly on the supposed derivation of the word from ab origine. Never (except in Swift’s ludicrous work) was a more eccentric etymology—a preposition, with its governed case, made plural by the modern final s! The university of Oxford, some years ago, added to this solecism by a public prize poem on the Aboriginal Britons.
The most rational etymology of the word seems to be a compound of the Greek words απο, ορος, and γενος, a race of mountaineers. So Virgil calls them,
“—Genus indocile ac dispersum montibus altis.”
It seems more probable, that the name of the oldest settlers in Italy should have a Greek than a Latin derivation.