Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 2.djvu/35

 10*8.11. JULY o. MM.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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appeals to Cecil, ** I beseech you not to blame me if I be desirous to strike while the iron is hot"; and on the following 9 November Lord Dunsany reminds the same statesman that " with empty hands a man may lure no hawks."

Two familiar friends are to be found in a communication of 27 April, 1598, from John Udale to the Earl of Essex :

"The King [James VI. of Scotland], as it is said, is at a stand whether to cherish a bird in the hand or two in the wood " ; and of another person, " he hath two strings to his bow." Udale was evidently a proverb- lover, for to the same correspondent he wrote on the following 15 May, reminding Essex of his own phrase, " that an opportunity well taken is the only weapon of advantage" ; and having in the earlier letter used the illustration, " this is a practice underhand : a fowl to match his sound with my Lord Treasurer's mes[h]" (?jess), he now writes, 44 1 have been more [lless] busy than the bee, yet not so idle as the drone." And in a letter to Queen Elizabeth in the same year he proves himself a fantastic phrase-maker, while in 'A Description of the State and Government, together with the Land as it | lieth, in and upon the West Marches of i England,' he quotes an old Border phrase, "Fy gownes fy, shame gownes shame," as well as the proverb, "When the steed is stolen, steek the stable door." All his letters, indeed, deserve study from this point of view, for, if he has not an English proverb to hand, he is ready with " an Italian phrase, parole non pagano debiti."

Essex himself is to be found using on 4 January, 1598/9, the striking phrase in a letter to Lord Willoughby, " Reasons are not like garments, the worse for the wearing"; and three days later Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper, wrote to Essex, " The cure of dangerous distrusts is to flee cito et procvl and return tarde" The queen on 13 August, 1599, commissioned Thomas Windebank to write to Cecil " that there should not be too much taken out of an empty purse, for therein was no charity." Cecil was further informed in the same month by the Earl of Nottingham that "a house is sooner broken down than builded," and that "one fair day breeds not opinion that it will be never foul weather again." Lord Henry Howard, in a contemporaneous letter to the Earl of South- ampton, likewise was in the proverb-quoting vein. "They are rather to be pitied than complained of, as a wise man says," and " Showers lay great winds, and choler purged leaves the veins more temperate," are two of

his samples. And just at the same time Sir Edward Coke was writing to Cecil of "croco- dile's tears," while Sir Anthony Standen was- telling a friend that " You may stretch my love to your pleasure like an Oxford glove."

These are only samples from the voluminous sack supplied by the Historical Manu- scripts Commission ; and they suggest that there would be a very fruitful result from a systematic search. ALFRED F. BOBBINS.

"TALENTED."

IN a foot-note to Aphorism XII., one of those which are introductory to his 'Aids to Reflection,' Coleridge writes as follows :

" In a language like ours, so many words of which are derived from other languages, there are few modes of instruction more useful or more amusing than that of accustoming young people to seek for the etymology, or the primary meaning of the words they use. There are cases, in which more knowledge* of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign."

The particular word' which led to these remarks is substance, whose derivation from Quod stat subtus, if useful to know, can: scarcely be said to afford amusement to people either young or old, and is eclipsed in interest by the dramatic opening of the momentous war now raging. It does not appear that Coleridge has given us an example, fully worked out, of one of those words which are so full of historical value. We- need not, perhaps, regret the omission, for when he mentions substance it is not unlikely that he -was reminded of the famous con- troversy in the fourth century between the Homoiousians and the Homoousians, on which he could have monologized from hooting owl to singing lark. But if he did not tell us the story which is enshrined in someone vocable, he has condemned the use of another with whose origin and meaning he seems to have been unacquainted. On 8 July, in the year 1832, he is reported to have spoken as follows :

" I regret to see that vile and barbarous vocable talented, stealing out of the newspapers into the leading reviews and more respectable publications of the day. Why not xhillinged, fart hinged, ten' penced, &c. ? The formation of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very peculiar felicity can excuse. If mere convenience is- to justify such attempts upon the idiom, you cannot stop till the language becomes, in the proper sense of the word, corrupt. Most of these pieces of slang come from America." 'Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,' Routledge & Sons, 1884, pp. 159-60.

There is much in these random utterances which seems unworthy of the speaker, and "surprising to hear," if I may employ the expression so often repeated by one of his