This is the remains of the French embonpoint, or as it was written then en bon point.——The phrase was wearing out in Chaucer’s time, the en bon being translated, and point preserved. Now, the whole is translated, and we say in good case, or plight.——You may find many other instances of this in the old poets.
“The days are now a cock-stride longer,” say the country-folks at Twelfth-day—and many have been the conjectures upon the derivation of this phrase (see the Gentleman’s Magazine). It is not cock-stride, but cock’s-tread. In the country, tread is pronounced trede, (not tred)—and in most of the western counties, Devonshire excepted, stride has more of the e than i in its sound.—But the impossibility of expressing by any known signs the different provincial modifications of the sound of the vowels, has occasioned some strange mistakes when people of one county endeavour to write down an expression used in another. Our old poets, who generally writ in the dialect of the province where they resided, and spelt as well as they could with their own country vowels, have given birth to much laughable criticism.
Help-mate is an odd corruption. In the Book of Genesis it is said, “it is not good for man to be alone, I will make an help meet for him”—that is an help, proper for him—meet is an adjective. But these two words, like the first man and his help, soon became one, and of late have been corrected into help-mate.
As I was reading John Struys’s voyages the other day, I thought I discovered the original of the word, and perhaps of the liquor, punch; which, if I am right, has nothing to do with that diverting personage in puppet-shews of the same name, from whom it is usually derived. Struys was at Gomroon in Persia, where he says, he drank——“A liquor much in use there, called pale punshen, being compounded of arak, sugar, and raisins, which is so bewitching that they cannot refrain from drinking it.” I really believe he forgot to mention the water—for how in such a climate as the southern part of Persia it was possible to drink undiluted arak, I have no conception. The raisins have given place, and very properly, to lemons. But I had better leave this to its own merits.—I am afraid it will not bear too minute an examination—remember it is only humbly offered together with the other conjectures of
Yours, &c.
As Struys’s Voyages is a scarce book, I might with great ease have practised the common trick of authors, and introduced water into the quotation without fear of discovery. It being supposed that few will give themselves the trouble to turn to the original book to examine extracts, authors have been made to give evidence to facts, “of which they nothing know,” and to support systems which never had existence, but in the imagination of the writer who presses them into his service.
LETTER XXVI.
THE rubs and difficulties which the public throw in the way of a genius at his first appearance, are frequently too great to be surmounted.
We are apt to form our opinion of a man’s abilities, by his resemblance to some other man of reputation in the art or science he professes. A painter, musician, or author perfectly new we are afraid to commend—like hounds, we wait for the opening of one whose cry we may venture to follow.—But it should be remembered that a sure mark of a genius is originality. As he is original, and therefore new, perhaps it may be necessary to conquer some prepossessions before we can judge of his merit; and as he is generally incapable, from that modesty which so frequently attends ability, of insisting on his own excellencies, the world should take that task from him.—But does it so? Or from the fear of commending too hastily, leave a Being to languish in obscurity, which should be protected and encouraged. The greatest part of those who seem to have been born to make mankind happy, were themselves miserable. A melancholy catalogue might be made of these. If we know any thing of Homer, it is, that he ran about ballad-singing. Poor, unhappy, half-starved Cervantes, Camöens, Butler, Fielding! Does it not grieve you to be told that the author of Tom Jones lies in the factory’s burying-ground at Lisbon, undistinguished, unregarded—not a stone to mark the place! And would it not raise our indignation to behold stately monuments erected for those whose names were never heard of, until they appeared in their epitaph?——were they not considered rather as monuments of the sculptor’s art, than as preserving the memory of the persons whose dust they so pompously cover.