Chapter 14

“Quan vey laudeta moverDe joi sas alas contra’l rai,Que s’oblida e s laissa cazerPer la doussor qu ’al cor li ’n vai.”“Qual lodoletta che in aere si spazia,Prima cantando, e poi tace contentaDell’ ultima dolcezza che la sazia.”

“Quan vey laudeta moverDe joi sas alas contra’l rai,Que s’oblida e s laissa cazerPer la doussor qu ’al cor li ’n vai.”

“Qual lodoletta che in aere si spazia,Prima cantando, e poi tace contentaDell’ ultima dolcezza che la sazia.”

We are not sure that Bernard’s “Que s’oblida es laissa cazer” is not sweeter than Dante’s “tace contenta,” but it was plainly thedoussorthat gave its cue to the greater poet’s memory, and he has improved on it with that exquisiteultima, as his master Virgil sometimes did on Homer.

But authors whose interest for us is mainly bibliographic belong rather in such collections as Mr. Allibone’s. As literature they are oppressive; as items of literary history they find their place in that vast list which records not only those named for promotion, but also the killed, wounded, and missing in the Battle ofthe Books. There our hearts are touched with something of the same vague pathos that dims the eye in some deserted graveyard. The brief span of our earthly immortalities is brought home to us as nowhere else. What a necrology of notability! How many a controversialist, terrible in his day, how many a rising genius that somehow stuck on the horizon, how many a withering satirist, lies here shrunk all away to the tombstone brevity of a name and date! Think of the aspirations, the dreams, the hopes, the toil, the confidence (of himself and wife) in an impartial and generous posterity,—and then read “Smith J. [ohn?] 1713-1784 (?). The Vision of Immortality, an Epique Poem in twelve books, 1740, 4to. SeeLowndes.” The time of his own death less certain than that of his poem, (which we may fix pretty safely in 1740,) and the only posterity that took any interest in him the indefatigable compiler to whom a name was valuable in proportion as it was obscure. Well, to have even so much as your title-page read after it has rounded the corner of its first century, and to enjoy a posthumous public of one is better than nothing. This is the true Valhalla of Mediocrity, theLibro d’oroof theonymi-anonymi, of the never-named authors who exist only in name. Parson Adams would be here had he found a printer for his sermons, and Mr. Primrose, if a copy existed of his tracts on monogamy. Papyrorcetes junior will turn here with justifiable pride to the name of his respectable progenitor. Here we are secure of perpetuity at least, if of nothing better, and are sons though we may not be heirs, of fame. Here is a handy and inexpensive substitute for the waxenimaginesof the Roman patriciate, for those must have been inconvenient to pack on a change of lodgings, liable to melt in warm weather (even the elder Brutus himself might soften in the dog-days) and not readily salableunless to somenovus homowilling to buy a set of ancestors ready-made, as some of our own enthusiasts in genealogy are said to order a family-tree from the heraldic nurseryman, skilled to imp a slip of Scroggins on a stock of De Vere or Montmorenci. Fame, it should seem, like electricity, is both positive and negative, and if a writer must be Somebody to make himself of permanent interest to the world at large, he must not less be Nobody to have his namelessness embalmed by M. Guérard. The benignity of Providence is nowhere more clearly to be seen than in its compensations. As there is a large class of men madly desirous to decipher cuneiform and other inscriptions, simply because of their illegibility, so there is another class driven by a like irresistible instinct to the reprinting of unreadable books. Whether these have even a philologic value for us depends on the accuracy and learning bestowed upon them by the editor.

For there is scarcely any rubbish-heap of literature out of which something precious may not be raked by the diligent explorer, and the late Mr. Dyce (since Gifford, the best editor of our literature of the Tudor and Jacobean periods) might well be called the Golden Dustman, so many were the precious trifles sifted out by his intelligent industry. It would not be easy to name any work more thoroughly done than his edition of Skelton. He was not a philologist in the stricter sense, but no man had such a commonplace-book as he, or knew so exactly the meaning with which words were used during the period he did so much to illustrate. Elegant scholar ship is not often, as in him, patient of drudgery and conscientious in painstaking. Between such a man and Mr. Carew Hazlitt the contrast is by no means agreeable. The one was not more distinguished by modest accuracy than the other is by the rash conceit of that half-knowledge which is more mischievous in an editor than downright ignorance. This language is strong because it is true, though we should not have felt called upon to use it but for the vulgar flippancy with which Mr. Hazlitt alludes depreciatingly to the labors of his predecessors,—to such men as Ritson, Utterson, Wright, and Sir Frederick Madden, his superiors in everything that goes to the making of a good editor. Most of them are now dead and nailed in their chests, and it is not for us to forget the great debt we owe to them, and others like them, who first opened paths for us through the tangled wilderness of our early literature. A modern editor, with his ready-made helps of glossary, annotation, and comment, should think rather of the difficulties than the defects of these pioneers.

How different is Mr. Hazlitt’s spirit from that of the thorough and therefore modest scholar! In the Preface to hisAltenglische Sprachproben, Mätzner says of an editor,das Beste was er ist verdankt er Andern, an accidental pentameter that might seem to have dropped out ofNathan der Weise. Mr. Hazlitt would profit much by getting some friend to translate for him the whole paragraph in which it occurs.

We see it announced that Mr. Hazlitt is to superintend a new edition of Warton’s History of English Poetry, and are pained to think of the treatment that robust scholar and genial poet is likely to receive at the hands of an editor without taste, discrimination, or learning. Of his taste a single specimen may suffice. He tells us that “in an artistic and constructive point of view, theMylner of Abingtonis superior to its predecessor,” that predecessor being Chaucer’sReve’s Tale, which, with his usual inaccuracy, he assigns to theMiller! Of his discrimination we have a sufficient test in the verses he has fathered upon Herrick in a lateedition of the most graceful of our lyric poets. Perhaps discrimination is not, after all, the right word, for we have sometimes seen cause to doubt whether Mr. Hazlitt ever reads carefully the very documents he prints. For example, in the Biographical Notice prefixed to the Herrick he says (p. xvii): “Mr. W. Perry Herrick has plausibly suggested that the payments made by Sir William to his nephew were simply on account of the fortune which belonged to Robert in right of his father, and which his uncle held in trust; this was about £400; and I think from allusions in the letters printed elsewhere that this view may be the correct one.”Maybe! The poet says expressly, “I entreat you out ofmy little possessionto deliver to this bearer thecustomarye£10, without which I cannot meate [?] my ioyrney.” The words we have italicized are conclusive. By the way, Mr. Hazlitt’s wise-looking query after “meate” is conclusive also as to his fitness for editorship. Did he never hear of the familiar phrase “tomeetthe expense”? If so trifling a misspelling can mystify him, what must be the condition of his mind in face of the more than Protean travesties which words underwent before they were uniformed by Johnson and Walker? Mr. Hazlitt’s mind, to be sure, like the wind Cecias, always finds its own fog. In another of Herrick’s letters we find, “For what her monie can be effected (sic) when there is diuision ’twixt the hart and hand?” “Her monie” of course meansharmonie, andeffectedis therefore right. What Mr. Hazlitt may have meant by his “(sic)” it were idle to inquire.

We have already had occasion to examine some of Mr. Hazlitt’s work, and we are sorry to say that in the four volumes before us we find no reason for changing our opinion of his utter disqualification for the duties of editorship. He seldom clears up a real difficulty (never,we might say, with lights of his own), he frequently creates a darkness where none was before, and the peculiarbumptiousnessof his incapacity makes it particularly offensive. We shall bring a few instances in proof of what we assert, our only embarrassment being in the superabundance of our material. In the Introduction to the second volume of his collection, Mr. Hazlitt speaks of “the utter want of common care on the part of previous editors of our old poetry.” Such oversights as he has remarked upon in his notes are commonly errors of the press, a point on which Mr. Hazlitt, of all men, should have been charitable, for his own volumes are full of them. We call his attention to one such which is rather amusing. In his “additional notes” we find “line 77,wylle. Strike out the note upon this word; but the explanation is correct.Be wroghtwas a misprint, however, forhe wroght.” The error occurs in a citation of three lines in whichlotheris still left fortother. The original note affords us so good an example of Mr. Hazlitt’s style of editing as to be worth preserving. In the “Kyng and the Hermit” we read,—

“He ne wyst w[h]ere that he wasNe out of the forest for to passe,And thus he rode all wylle.”

And here is Mr. Hazlitt’s annotation on the wordwylle:—

“i. e.evil. In a MS. of theTale of the Basyn, supposed by Mr. Wright, who edited it in 1836, to be written in the Salopian dialect, are the following lines:—

‘The lother hade litull thoght,Off husbandry cowth he noght,But alle his wyveswillbe wroght.’”(Vol. I. p. 16.)

It is plain that he supposedwill, in this very simple passage, to meanevil! This he would seem to rectify, but at the same time takes care to tell us that “the explanation [ofwylle] is correct.” He is willing to give up one blunder, if only he may have one left to comfort himself withal!Wylleis simply a rhyming fetch forwild, and the passage means that the king rode at random. The use ofwildwith this meaning is still common in such phrases as “he struck wild.” In “Havelok” we find it in the nearly related sense ofbeing at a loss, knowing not what to do:—

“To lincolne barfot he yedeHwan he kam ther he was fulwil,Ne hauede he no frend to gangen til.”

All wylle, in short, means the kind of editing that is likely to be done by a gentleman who picks up his misinformation as he goes along. We would hint that a person must knowsomethingbefore he can use even a glossary with safety.

In the “King and the Barker,” when the tanner finds out that it is the king whom he has been treating so familiarly, and falls upon his knees, Mr. Hazlitt prints,

“He had no meynde of hes hode, nor cape, ne radell,”

and subjoins the following note: “Radell, or raddle, signifies a side of a cart; but here, apparently, stands for the cart itself. Ritson printedner adell.” Mr. Hazlitt’s explanation ofraddle, which he got from Halliwell, is incorrect. The word, as its derivation (from O. F.rastel) implies, means the side or end of ahay-cart, in which the uprights are set like the teeth of a rake. But what has a cart to do here? There is perhaps a touch of what an editor of old doggerel would benignantly call humor, in the tanner’s forgetfulness of his raiment, but the cart is as little to the purpose as one of Mr. Hazlitt’s own notes. The tanner was on horseback, as the roads of the period required that he should be, and good old Ritson was plainly on the right track in his reading, though his text was muddled by a misprint.As it was, he gotoneword right, and so far has the advantage of Mr. Hazlitt. The true reading is, of course,ner a dell, never a deal, not a whit. The very phrase occurs in another poem which Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in his collection,—

“Fornever a dellHe wyll me love agayne.” (Vol. III. p. 2.)

Thatadellwas a misprint in Ritson is proved by the fact that the word does not appear in his glossary. If we were to bring Mr. Hazlitt to book for his misprints! In the poem we have just quoted he gravely prints,—

“Matter in dede,My sides did blede,”

for “mother, indede,” “through ryght wysenes” for “though ryghtwisenes,” “with man vnkynde” for “sith man vnkynde,” “ye knowe a parte” for “ye knowe aperte,” “here in” for “herein,” all of which make nonsense, and all come within the first one hundred and fifty lines, and those of the shortest, mostly of four syllables each. Perhaps they rather prove ignorance than want of care. One blunder falling within the same limits we have reserved for special comment, because it affords a good example of Mr. Hazlitt’s style of editing:—

“Your herte souerayneClouen in twayneBy longes the blynde.” (Vol. III. p. 7.)

Here the uninstructed reader would be as completely in the dark as to whatlongesmeant as the editor plainly was himself. The old rhymer no doubt wrote Longis, meaning thereby Longinus, a personage familiar enough, one should think, to any reader of mediæval poetry. Mr. Hazlitt absolves himself for not having supplied a glossary by the plea that none is needed by the class of readers for whom his volumes are intended. But this will hardly seem a valid excuse for a gentleman whooften goes out of his way to explain in his notes such simple matters as that “shape” means “form,” and that “Johan of the golden mouthe” means “St. Chrysostom,” which, indeed, it does not, any more than Johannes Baptista means St. Baptist. We will supply Mr. Hazlitt with an illustration of the passage from Bekker’sFerabras, the more willingly as it may direct his attention to a shining example of how an old poem should be edited:—

“en la crotz vos pendero li fals Iuzieu truan,can Longis vos ferie de sa lansa trencan:el non avia vist en trastot son vivan;lo sanc li venc per l’asta entro al punh colan;e [el] toquet ne sos huelhs si vic el mantenan.”

Mr. Hazlitt, to be sure (who printssang parlezforsanz parler) (Vol. I. p. 265), will not be able to form any notion of what these verses mean, but perhaps he will be able to draw an inference from the capital L thatlongesis a proper name. The wordtruanat the end of the first verse of our citation may also suggest to him thattruantis not quite so satisfactory an explanation of the wordtrewātas he seems to think. (Vol. IV. p. 24,note.) In deference to Mr. Hazlitt’s presumed familiarity with an author sometimes quoted by him in his notes, we will point him to another illustration:—

“Ac ther cam forth a knyght,With a kene spere y-groundeHighte Longeus, as the lettre telleth,And longe hadde lore his sighte.”Piers Ploughman, Wright, p. 374.

Mr. Hazlitt shows to peculiar advantage where old French is in question. Upon the wordOsyllhe favors us with the following note: “The blackbird. In East Cornwallozellis used to signify the windpipe, and thence the bird may have had its name, as Mr. Couch has suggested to me.” (Vol. II. p. 25.) Of course the blackbird, alone among fowls, is distinguished by a windpipe! The name is merely another form of O. F.oisil, and was usurped naturally enough by one of the commonest birds, just aspajaro(L.passer) in Spanish, by a similar process in the opposite direction, came to mean bird in general. On the very next page he speaks of “the Romance which is vulgarly entitledLybeaus Disconus, i. e.Le Beau Disconnu.” If he had correctedDisconustoDesconus, all had been well; butDisconnuneither is nor ever was French at all. Where there is blundering to be done, one stone often serves Mr. Hazlitt for two birds.Ly beaus Disconusis perfectly correct old French, and another form of the adjective (bius) perhaps explains the sound we give to the first syllable ofbeautyandBeaufort. A barrister at law, as Mr. Hazlitt is, may not be called on to know anything about old English or modern French, but we might fairly expect him to have at least a smattering of Law French! In volume fourth, page 129, a goodman trying his wife,

“Bad her take the pot that sod ouer the fireAnd set it abooue vpon the astire.”

Mr. Hazlitt’s note uponastireis “hearth, i. q.astre.” Knowing that the modern French was âtre, he too rashly inferred a form which never existed except in Italian. The old French word isaistreorestre, but Mr. Hazlitt, as usual, prefers something that is neither old French nor new. We do not pretend to know whatastiremeans, but a hearth that should beaboouethe pot seething over the fire would be unusual, to say the least, in our semi-civilized country.

In the “Lyfe of Roberte the Deuill” (Vol. I. p. 232), Mr. Hazlitt twice makes a knightsentrehis lance, and tells us in a note that the “Ed. 1798 hasfentered,” a very easy misprint for the right wordfeutered. What Mr. Hazlitt supposed to be the meaning ofsentrehe hasnot vouchsafed to tell us.Fautre(sometimesfaltreorfeutre) means in old French therestof a lance. Thus in theRoman du Renart(26517),

“Et mist sa lance sor lefautre.”

But it also meant a peculiarkindof rest. In Sir F. Madden’s edition ofGawayne(to which Mr. Hazlitt refers occasionally) we read,

“Theyfeutredtheir lances, these knyghtes good”;

and in the same editor’s “William and the Werwolf,”

“With sper festened infeuter, him for to spille.”

In a note on the latter passage Sir F. Madden says, “There seems no reason, however, why it [feuter] should not mean the rest attached to the armour.” But Roquefort was certainly right in calling it a “garniture d’une selle pour tenir la lance.” A spear fastened to the saddle gave more deadly weight to the blow. The “him for to spille” implies this. So in “Merlin” (E. E. Text Soc., p. 488): “Than thei toke speres grete and rude, and putte hem in fewtre, and that is the grettest crewelte that oon may do, ffor turnement oweth to be with-oute felonye, and they meved to smyte hem as in mortall werre.” The context shows that thefewtreturned sport into earnest. A citation in Raynouard’sLexique Roman(though wrongly explained by him) directed us to a passage which proves that this particular kind of rest for the lance was attached to the saddle, in order to render the blow heavier:—

“Lancesà[legeas]arçonsafeutréesPour plus de dures colées rendre.”Branche des Royaux Lignages, 4514, 4515.

Mr. Hazlitt, as we have said, lets no occasion slip to insinuate the inaccuracy and carelessness of his predecessors. The long and useful career of Mr. Wright,who, if he had given us nothing more than his excellent edition of “Piers Ploughman” and the volume of “Ancient Vocabularies,” would have deserved the gratitude of all lovers of our literature or students of our language, does not save him from the severe justice of Mr. Hazlitt, nor is the name of Warton too venerable to be coupled with a derogatory innuendo. Mr. Wright needs no plea in abatement from us, and a mischance of Mr. Hazlitt’s own has comically avenged Warton. The wordprayer, it seems, had somehow substituted itself forpraysein a citation by Warton of the title of the “Schole-House of Women.” Mr. Hazlitt thereupon takes occasion to charge him with often “speaking at random,” and after suggesting that it might have been the blunder of a copyist, adds, “or it is by no means impossible that Warton himself, having been allowed to inspect the production, was guilty of this oversight.” (Vol. IV. p. 98.) Now, on the three hundred and eighteenth page of the same volume, Mr. Hazlitt has allowed the following couplet to escape his conscientious attention:—

“Next, that no gallant should not ought supposeThatprayersand glory doth consist in cloathes.”

Lege, nostro periculo,PRAYSE! Were dear old Tom still on earth, he might light his pipe cheerfully with any one of Mr. Hazlitt’s pages, secure that in so doing he was consuming a brace of blunders at the least. The wordprayeris an unlucky one for Mr. Hazlitt. In the “Knyght and his Wyfe” (Vol. II. p. 18) he prints:—

“And sayd, Syre, I rede we makeIn this chapel oure prayers,That God us kepe both in ferrus.”

Why did not Mr. Hazlitt, who explains so many things that everybody knows, give us a note uponin ferrus? It would have matched his admirable elucidation ofwaygose, which we shall notice presently. Is it not barely possible that the MS. may have readprayereandin fere?Prayereoccurs two verses further on, and not as a rhyme.

Mr. Hazlitt even sets Sir Frederick Madden right on a question of Old English grammar, telling him superciliously thatcan, with an infinitive, in such phrases ashe can go, is used not “to denote apasttense, but animperfecttense.” Bypastwe suppose him to meanperfect. But even if an imperfect tense were not a past one, we can show by a passage in one of the poems in this very collection thatcan, in the phrases referred to, sometimes not only denotes a past but a perfect tense:—

“And thorow that worde y felle in pryde;As the aungelle can of hevyn glyde,And with the tywnkling[31]of an eyeGod for-dud alle that maystryeAnd so hath he done for my gylte.”

Now the angel here is Lucifer, andcan of hevyn glydemeans simplyfell from heaven, notwas falling. It is in the same tense asfor-dudin the next line. The fall of the angels is surely afait accompli. In the last line, by the way, Mr. Hazlitt changes “my for” to “for my,” and wrongly, themyagreeing withmaystryeunderstood. In modern English we should useminein the same way. But Sir Frederick Madden can take care of himself.

We have less patience with Mr. Hazlitt’s impertinence to Ritson, a man of ample reading and excellent taste in selection, and who, real scholar as he was, always drew from original sources. We have afoiblefor Ritson with his oddities of spelling, his acerb humor, his unconsciously depreciatory mister Tyrwhitts and mister Bryants, and his obstinate disbelief in Doctor Percy’s folio manuscript. Above all, he was a most conscientious editor, and an accurate one so far as was possible with the lights of that day. Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted two poems, “The Squyr of Low Degre” and “The Knight of Curtesy,” which had already been edited by Ritson. The former of these has passages that are unsurpassed in simple beauty by anything in our earlier poetry. The author of it was a good versifier, and Ritson, though he corrected some glaring errors, did not deal so trenchantly with verses manifestly lamed by the copyist as perhaps an editor should.[32]Mr. Hazlitt says of Ritson’s text, that “it offers more thanan hundreddepartures from the original,” and of the “Knight of Courtesy,” that “Ritson’s text is by no means accurate.” Now Mr. Hazlitt has adopted nearly all of Ritson’s emendations, without giving the least hint of it. On the contrary, in some five or six instances, he gives the original reading in a foot-note with an “old ed. has” so and so, thus leaving the reader to infer that the corrections were his own. Where he has not followed Ritson, he has almost uniformly blundered, and that through sheer ignorance. For example, he prints,

“Alas! it tourned towroth her heyle,”

where Ritson had substitutedwrotherheyle. The measure shows that Ritson was right.Wroth her heyle, moreover, is nonsense. It should have beenwrother her heyleat any rate, but the text is far too modern to admit of that archaic form. In the “Debate of the Body and the Soul” (Mätzner’s A. E. Sprachproben, 103) we have,

“Why schope thou me to wrother-hele,”

and in “Dame Siris” (Ibid., 110),

“To goder hele ever came thou hider.”

Mr. Hazlitt prints,

“For yf it may be found in theeThat thou them [de] fame for enuyte.”

The emendation [de] is Ritson’s, and is probably right, though it would require, for the metre’s sake, the elision ofthatat the beginning of the verse. But what isenuyte? Ritson readsenmyte, which is, of course, the true reading. Mr. Hazlitt prints (as usual either without apprehending or without regarding the sense),

“With browesbentand eyes full mery,”

where Ritson hasbrent, and gives parallel passages in his note on the word. Mr. Hazlitt gives us

“To here the bugles there yblow,With theirbuglesin that place,”

though Ritson had made the proper correction tobegles. Mr. Hazlitt, with ludicrousnonchalance, allows the Squire to press into the throng

“With abastardlarge and longe,”

and that with the right word (baslarde) staring him in the face from Ritson’s text. We wonder he did not give us an illustrative quotation from Falconbridge! Both editors have allowed some gross errors to escape, such as “comenot” for “come” (v. 425); “so leuehebe” for “ye be” (v. 593); “vntoherchambre” for “vnto your” (v. 993); but in general Ritson’s is the better and more intelligent text of the two. In the “Knight of Curtesy,” Mr. Hazlitt has followed Ritson’s text almostliteratim. Indeed, it is demonstrable that he gave it to his printers as copy to set up from. The proof is this: Ritson has accented a few words ending intè.Generally he uses the grave accent, but now and then the acute. Mr. Hazlitt’s text follows all these variations exactly. The main difference between the two is that Ritson prints the first personal pronouni, and Mr. Hazlitt, I. Ritson is probably right; for in the “Scholehouse of Women” (vv. 537, 538) where the text no doubt was

“i [i. e.one] deuil a woman to speak may constrain,But all that in hel be cannot let it again,”

Mr. Hazlitt changes “i” to “A,” and says in a note, “Old ed. hasI.” That by his correction he should miss the point was only natural; for he evidently conceives that thesenseof a passage does not in the least concern an editor. An instance or two will suffice. In the “Knyght and his Wyfe” (Vol. II. p. 17) we read,

“The fynd tyl hure hade myche teneAs hit was a sterfull we seme!”

Mr. Hazlitt in a note explainsteneto mean “trouble or sorrow”; but if that were its meaning here, we should readmade, and nothade, which would give to the word its other sense ofattention. The last verse of the couplet Mr. Hazlitt seems to think perfectly intelligible as it stands. We should not be surprised to learn that he looked upon it as the one gem that gave lustre to a poem otherwise of the dreariest. We fear we shall rob it of all its charm for him by putting it into modern English:—

“As it was after full well seen.”

So in the “Smyth and his Dame” (Vol. III. p. 204) we read,

“It were a lytele maystryTo make a blynde man to se,”

instead of “aslytell.” It might, indeed, be as easy to perform the miracle on a blind man as on Mr. Hazlitt. Again, in the same poem, a little further on,

“For I tell the now trevely,Is none so wyse netosle,But everyemay som what lere,”

which, of course, should be,

“nesosleBut everhemay som what lere.”

Worse than all, Mr. Hazlitt tells us (Vol. I. p. 158) that when they bury the great Khan, they lay his body in a tabernacle,

“With sheld and spere and other wedeWith a whit mere to gyf him in ylke.”

We will let Sir John Maundeville correct the last verse: “And they seyn that when he shale come into another World ... the mare schallegheven him mylk.” Mr. Hazlitt gives us some wretched doggerel by “Piers of Fulham,” and gives it swarming with blunders. We take at random a couple of specimens:—

“And loveship goith ay to warkeWhere that presence is put a bake,” (Vol. II. pp. 13, 14,)

where we should read “love’s ship,” “wrake,” and “abake.” Again, just below,

“Ffor men haue seyn here to foryn,That love laughet when men be forsworn.”

Love should be “Iove.” Ovid is the obscure person alluded to in the “men here to foryn”:

“Jupiter e cœlo perjuria ridet amantum.”

We dare say Mr. Hazlitt, if he ever read the passage, took it for granted that “to foryn” meanttoo foreign, and gave it up in despair. But surely Shakespeare’s

“At lovers’ perjuries,They say, Jove laughs,”

is not too foreign to have put him on the right scent.

Mr. Hazlitt is so particular in giving usvforuandvice versa, that such oversights are a little annoying.Every man his own editor seems to be his theory of the way in which old poetry should be reprinted. On this plan, the more riddles you leave (or make) for the reader to solve, the more pleasure you give him. To correct the blunders in any book edited by Mr. Hazlitt would give the young student a pretty thorough training in archaic English. In this sense the volumes before us might be safely recommended to colleges and schools. When Mr. Hazlitt undertakes to correct, he is pretty sure to go wrong. For example, in “Doctour Doubble Ale” (Vol. III. p. 309) he amends thus:—

“And sometyme mikle strife isAmong the ale wyfes, [y-wis];

where the original is right as it stands. Just before, in the same poem, we have a parallel instance:—

“And doctours dulpatisThat falsely to them pratis,And bring them to the gates.”

The original probably reads (or should read)wyfisandgatis. But it is too much to expect of Mr. Hazlitt that he should remember the very poems he is editing from one page to another, nay, as we shall presently show, that he should even read them. He will changebeintobenwhere he should have let it alone (though his own volumes might have furnished him with such examples as “were go,” “have se,” “is do,” and fifty more), but he will sternly retainbenewhere the rhyme requiresbe, and Ritson had so printed. In “Adam Bel” the wordprymeoccurs (Vol. II. p. 140), and he vouchsafes us the following note: “i. e. noon. It is commonly used by early writers in this sense. In theFourP. P., by John Heywood, circa 1540, the apothecary says

‘If he taste this boxe nye aboute the prymeBy the masse, he is in heven or even songe tyme.’”

Let our readers admire with us the easy “it is commonly used” of Mr. Hazlitt, as if he had store of other examples in his note-book. He could an if he would! But unhappily he borrowed this single quotation from Nares, and, as usual, it throws no scintilla of light upon the point in question, for his habit in annotation is to find by means of a glossary some passage (or passages if possible) in which the word to be explained occurs, and then—why, then to give the word as an explanation of itself. But in this instance, Mr. Hazlitt, by the time he had reached the middle of his next volume (Vol. III. p. 281) had wholly forgotten thatprymewas “commonly used by early writers” fornoon, and in a note on the following passage,

“I know not whates a clockeBut by the countre cocke,The mone nor yet the pryme,Vntyll the sonne do shyne,”

he informs us that it means “six o’clock in the morning”! Here again this editor, who taxes Ritson with want of care, printsmonefornonein the very verse he is annotating, and which we may therefore presume that he had read. A man who did not know the moon till the sun showed it him is a match even for Mr. Hazlitt himself. We wish it were as easy as he seems to think it to settle exactly whatprymemeans when used by our “early writers,” but it is at least absolutely certain that it did not meannoon.

But Mr. Hazlitt, if these volumes are competent witnesses, knows nothing whatever about English, old or new. In the “Mery Jest of Dane Hew” he finds the following verses,

“Dame he said what shall we now dooSir she said so mote goThe munk in a corner ye shall lay”

which we print purposely without punctuation. Mr. Hazlitt prints them thus,

“Dame, he said, what shall we now doo?Sir, she said, so mote [it] go.The munk,” &c.,

and gives us a note on the locution he has invented to this effect, “? so might it be managed.” And the Chancellor said,I doubt!Mr. Hazlitt’s query makes such a singular exception to his more natural mood of immediate inspiration that it is almost pathetic. The amended verse, as everybody (not confused by too great familiarity with our “early writers”) knows, should read,

“Sir, she said, so might I go,”

and should be followed only by a comma, to show its connection with the next. The phrase “so mote I go,” is as common as a weed in the works of the elder poets, both French and English; it occurs several times in Mr. Hazlitt’s own collection, and its other form, “so mote I fare,” which may also be found there, explains its meaning. On the phrasepoint-device(Vol. III. p. 117) Mr. Hazlitt has a positively incredible note, of which we copy only a part: “This term, which is commonly used in early poems” [mark once more his intimacy with our earlier literature] “to signify extreme exactitude, originated in the points which were marked on the astrolabe, as one of the means which the astrologers and dabblers in the black art adopted to enable them (as they pretended) to read the fortunes of those by whom they were consulted in the stars and planetary orbs. The excessive precision which was held to be requisite in the delineation of these points” [the delineation of apointis good!] “&c. on the astrolabe, led topoint-device, or points-device (as it is sometimes found spelled), being used as a proverbial expression for minute accuracy ofany kind.” Then follows a quotation from Gower, in which an astrolabe is spoken of “with points and cercles merveilous,” and the note proceeds thus: “Shakespeare makes use of a similar figure of speech in theTempest, I. 2, where the following dialogue takes place between Prospero and Ariel:—

‘Prosp.Hast thou, spirit,Performedto pointthe tempest that I bade thee?Ar.In every article.’”

Neither the proposed etymology nor the illustration requires any remark from us. We will only say thatpoint-deviceis excellently explained and illustrated by Wedgwood.

We will give a few more examples out of many to show Mr. Hazlitt’s utter unfitness for the task he has undertaken. In the “Kyng and the Hermyt” are the following verses,

“A wyld wey, I hold, it wereThe wey to wend, I you swere,Bot ye the dey may se,”

meaning simply, “I think it would he a wild thing (in you) to go on your way unless you wait for daylight.” Mr. Hazlitt punctuates and amends thus:—

“A wyld wey I hold it were,The wey to wend, I you swere,Ye bot [by] the dey may se.” (Vol. I. p. 19.)

The wordbotseems a stumbling-block to Mr. Hazlitt. On page 54 of the same volume we have,

“Herd i neuere bi no leuediHotehendinesse and curteysi.”

The use of the wordbyas in this passage would seem familiar enough, and yet in the “Hye Way to the Spittel Hous” Mr. Hazlitt explains it as meaningbe. Any boy knows thatwithoutsometimes meansunless(Fielding uses it often in that sense), but Mr. Hazlittseems unaware of the fact. In his first volume (p. 224) he gravely prints:—

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