Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 1.djvu/143

 10 th S. I. FKR. 6, 1904.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

115

But the writer is here dealing with single words, and not with double monstrosities such as those we are considering. If he had been told that a comparative adjective, used absolutely, like prior, followed by the pre- position to, was an adverb, immense would have been his astonishment, and very violent the language of his condemnation. And yet that is what we are told by the compilers of the ' Century Dictionary,' whose labours I do not _ wish to undervalue. Perhaps they, seeing it was a prepositional phrase, based their assertion on what Ben Jonson says in chap. xxi. of his 'English Grammar': "Pre- positions are also a peculiar kind of adverbs, and ought to be referred hither." But that masculine genius, in this case, would have called the one word an adjective and the other a preposition, but never the two together either preposition or adverb.

DR. KRUEGER singles out one of the ugliest and absurdest of these neologisms, which he justly declares to be " a disgustingly lengthy thing." Here is an example, taken from one of the best magazines of the day, and the oldest :

"The king, preparatory to causing them to be trampled to death by elephants in the hippodrome, ordered Hermo, their keeper, to dose them the day before with frankincense and undiluted wine." Gentleman's Magazine, July, 1903, p. 13.

Who were dosed the victims or the elephants? Such a monstrous way of saying before makes one think that the ancient proverb, which Horace had in mind, should be reversed, and that it was not the parturient mountain which gave birth to a mouse, but that the "wee, sleekit, cowrin', tim'rous beastie," in her portentous and unparalleled travail, did the other thing: Parturiuut mures; nascetur ridiculus mons ! I do not credit the writer of the interesting article from which I quote with originating this lumbering phrase ; it was used before his time, though this is the only instance I have at hand.

All these inkhorn expressions, which one cannot call "vulgarisms,'' because they never came from the mouth of the people, seem to have crawled into being after "prior to" made its appearance, which happened some- where between the years 1830 and 1840, as I think I can show. Of course, a few instances of its employment may be produced before that date, but the writers doubtless fancied they were using a comparative adjective in a perfectly legitimate manner, as in the example from Sir John Hawkins (9 th S. xii. 66).

In my search for the phrase in its present absolute sense, I have looked through Haz- litt's 'Table Talk' (1821), Lamb's 'Essays of

Elia'(1823), Coleridge's ' Table Talk' (1835), Dickens's ' Pickwick ' (1836), Carlyle's ' French Revolution ' (1837), Thackeray's ' Paris Sketch- Book ' (1840), and have only found one example, which is contained in Lamb's ' Vision of Horns,' where he writes :

" But [they] were thought to have antedated their good men's titles, by certain liberties they had indulged themselves in, prior to the ceremony."

But it was not until after John Poole's clever and most amusing book 'Little Pedlington and the Pedlingtonians ' was published in 1839 that the phrase began to push its way into notice. There are three examples of its use in this volume, the first of which shows it to be of theatrical origin. It will be re- membered that Poole was the author of the comedy 'Paul Pry' and other pieces, and there can be no doubt that he is ridiculing the inflated language of playbills in that of 'The Hatchet of Horror; or, the Massacred Milkmaid,' of which this is a sample :

" To be preceded by an occasional Address, to be spoken by Miss Julia Wriggles. Prior to which, the favourite Broad-Sword Hornpipe, by Miss Julia Wriggles." P. 156, ed. 1860.

I may observe that on the foregoing page we have " previous to," the whole gamut of before and after being exhausted in this piece in a most ludicrous fashion. At the foot of p. 186 there is the following note :

"The five chapters in this volume, upon the Little Pedlington theatricals, were written prior to the month of April, 1837."

An extract from the " Life of Captain Pomponius Nix, by Felix Hoppy, Esq., M.C.," contains the last example :

" Toiling with unwearied step through the mouldering archives of Little Pedlington, I find mention of the name of Nix (sometimes written Nyx, sometimes Nicks) as far back as the early part of the reign of our third George, or, in other words, about thirty years prior to the close of the eighteenth century." P. 283.

Not long after the publication of this book, we find the expression in Edgar Allan Poe's ' Adventure of one Hans Pfaall,' where it is written :

" At twenty minutes before nine o'clock that is to say, a short time prior to my closing up the mouth of the chamber the mercury attained its limit, or ran down in the barometer, which, as I mentioned before, was one of an extended con- struction."

Mr. Augustine Birrell is a great admirer of Cardinal Newman's style, and has perhaps been led to adopt the phrase after reading the 'Apologia pro Vita Sua,' which appeared in 1864. But I hope I shall be excused if I say that that famous work would have been