Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 12.djvu/145

 10 s. xii. AUG. 7, im] NOTES AND QUERIES.

117

25, " There is a league between my good j man and he " ; ' Merchant of Venice,' III. ii. 321, " All debts are cleared between you ' and I " ; ' Hamlet,' II. ii. 196, " Between who ? " The other Shakespearian examples, however, of the use of " between " agree with modern usage. Later examples are : Vanbrugh, 'The Provoked Wife' (1697), V. ii., "Between you and I, Belinda, I'm afraid the want of inclination seldom protects any of us " ; and Defoe, letter to J. Dyer, 17 June, 1710, "To state the matter fairly between you and I." The phrase " between you and I " was put by Chester- field into a letter written in the character of his footman to the Countess of Suffolk, 6 Nov., 1766. This is not likely to have been an intentional vulgarism, for in writing to his son, 9 Dec., 1749, he says : " But let you and I analyse and simplify this good speaker " (so Bradshaw's edition, 1893, with sic after the " I " ; a less careful edition, with the imprint of W. Gibbings, London, 1890, reads " me "). The explana- tion suggested by Prof. A. S. Napier of Oxford, when lecturing on historical English syntax (1898), was that "you and I," occurring so often as the subject of a sen- tence, was felt to be an indivisible group, and was treated as such. Abbott, ' Shake- spearian Grammar,' 205, 209, suggests that me was replaced by / after dental sounds (i.e., after such words as " and," ." but ") for the sake of euphony.

L. R. M. STRACHAN.

Heidelberg.

C" Between you and I " has already been discussed at great length in N. & Q.' : see o S. ix. 275, 412 ; x. 18, 139, 190, 237, 291, 331, 357, 397 J

" THE EVILS," FIELD-NAME (10 S. xi. 468). I venture to query whether this is not another instance of a vernacular word transformed in the process of its passage from a spoken to a written form. " The Eels " and " The Eales," names for low- lying grounds by riversides, pronounced eelz and ee-ilz, would lend themselves, in strange ears, to a mistake like this. See ' Bale ' in * E.D.D.,' and compare its cross- references to ' Hale ' and ' Haugh ' in ' N.E.D.' R. OLIVEB HESLOP.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

"TUDOR" SPELT "TYDDER" (10 S. xi. 347, 453 ; xii. 78). In Mr. Gairdner's 'Paston Letters,' vol. iii. p. 316 (1900), there is a proclamation of the second year oJ Richard III. in which the royal name of Tudor is spelt " Tydder."

EDWARD PEACOCF.

"CHOPS OF THE CHANNEL" (10 S. xii. 27, 70). Sir W alter Scott makes use of this expression in a letter to his elder son, written on 15 May, 1821. The young man, who was at the time in Ireland with his regiment of Hussars, seems to have spoken somewhat superciliously of " the lawyers and gossips of Edinburgh," which naturally provoked his father to the expression of a salutary and characteristic retort. After warning his correspondent against the delusion that young military men are the observed of all observers, and quoting appositely from Fielding, he proceeds im- pressively as follows :

" Avoid this silly narrowness of mind, my dear boy, which only makes men be looked on in the world with ridicule and contempt. Lawyer and gossip as I may be, I suppose you will allow I have seen something of life in most of its varieties ; as much at least as if I had been, like you, eighteen months in a cavalry regiment, or, like Beau Jackson, in ' Roderick Random,' had cruised for half a year in the chops of the Channel. Now, I have never remarked any one, be he soldier, or divine, or lawyer, that was exclusively attached to the narrow habits of his own profession, but what such person became a great twaddle in good society."

If the reference to Beau Jackson concerns what that adventurer says of himself in Smollett's sixteenth chapter, then we are afforded here an interesting illustration of Scott's tendency to give the general drift of his author while depending upon himself for effective details. According to the narrator, what Jackson said was, " that although he had seen a great deal of the world, both at land and sea, having cruised three whole months in the Channel, yet he should not be satisfied until he had visited France." There may, of course, be another passage which contains the phrase used in the letter, but this seems unlikely.

THOMAS BAYNE.

It may be of slight interest to record that the alliterative collocation, in the primary senses of the jaw and the thr6at, occurs c. 1400. In ' The Laud Troy Book,' 1. 5538, it is said of Hector and the Greeks : Here [their] armes vayled not an hoppe, He smot In-two bothe ehanel and choppe.

This is an early quotation for what is now familiar as a Bath chap.

As to " hoppe," it is equivalent to "a flax-bete," ibid., 1. 5315. H. P. L.

POLLY KENNEDY : POLLY JONES ( 10 S vii. 344 ; ix. 97, 236). There is a small medallion portrait of Kitty Kennedy the lady who saved her two brothers from the