Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 2.djvu/571

 s. ii. DEC. 10, 1904,] NOTES AND QUERIES.

471

Killbuck. Hobble Elliott's deer-hound who worries to death one of Elshie's goats (see
 * Black Dwarf).

Crab. The dog of Launce. servant to Proteus in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona/

' Taming of the Shrew,' Induction, sc. i. :

Lord. Huntsman, I charge thee, tender well my

hounds :

Brach Merriman the poor cur is embossed ; And couple Clowder with the deep-mouthed brach. Saw'st thou not, boy, how Silver made it good At the hedge corner, in the coldest fault? I would not lose the dog for twenty pound.

JOHN PICKFORD, M.A.

[We cannot insert more on this subject.]

ANGLES : ENGLAND, ORIGINAL MEANING (10 th S. ii. 407). The answer to the questions as to whether angle is allied to O.H.G. angar, a meadow, or to the G. eng, narrow, should be decisively in the negative. It is wholly innocent of any relationship to them. We do not derive English words from Old High German, but from an old language called English. The recognition of this simple truth would immediately slay hundreds of bad guesses. It has always been a singular craze of many to accept German words as the origin of native ones. We seem to have, in this one particular, no pride in our language. It may be that some of us wish to avoid the study of it.

Angle is not derived from angar, because that will not account for the L It is not derived from eng, because that will not account for the old A. Eng is mere modern German, and Eng-land is mere modern English, and no scholar would start from merely modern forms.

May I suggest that there seems to be a misprint in the editorial note ? The ' N.E.D.' does not refer us to ' Angle 2 ,' but to ' Angle 1 ' ; the former is mere French, but the latter is native.

The standard passage on the subject is in Beda, 'Hist. Eccl.,'i. 15: "Porrode^^hoc est, de ilia patria quse Angulus dicitur." By Angulus he does not really mean the Latin word, but the cognate English one, viz. angul It so happens that the words are allied, and that their forms are similar. Angul, however, in Teutonic, has usually the sense of "a fish- hook," so that pur E. angle, to fish, is directly derived from it. Its earliest sense was "a bend" or "a crook," and it was applied to a certain piece of land which is still com- memorated by the name of Angeln. in

.ri i i v. ' y

bleswik.

The Norse form was ongull, which Vigfusson derives from the Lat. angulus, forgetting that it was rather cognate than borrowed.

However, his account is helpful; he gives us " ongull, an angle, hook; also, a local name in North Norway, and Angeln in Sleswik, whence the name of England (Engle- land) is derived." He also adds the form onguls-ey, i.e. Anglesey. The Greek forms are also helpful. Our angle is allied to Greek ay/cuA.05, bent ; whereas G. eng is allied to Greek ayytw, to compress, from a different root, with a different guttural.

WALTER W. SKEAT.

BACON OR USHER ? .(10 th S. ii. 407.) That the great Francis Bacon was the author of the well-known lines beginning

The world 's a bubble, and the life of man Less than a span,

rests on evidence too strong to be weakened in any degree by the fact that a certain book by H. W., Gent., dated 1708, attributes them to ** Bishop Usher, late Lord Primate of Ireland." MR. DOBELL says that H. W. (Henry Waring) seems "to have been a sensible and well-informed person." That may be so, but I doubt very much that he was well informed either about the authorship of this poem or the proper title to give to Lord Primates. Thomas Farnaby, the great school- master, gave this poem to Bacon in 1629, and it first appeared in a collection of epigrams and translations by Farnaby, and was the only English poem in the whole book, so it may be supposed that some care was taken when it was awarded to such an eminent man as the late Lord Chancellor without a word of hesitation or doubt. It was a favourite poem for seventeenth-century commonplace books, and in MS. copies it has been given to Donne, to R. W., to "Henry Harrington," and possibly to others. Such MS. evidence is not generally very trustworthy, and the printed and published evidence of a man in the position of Farnaby, who had also taken the trouble to translate it into Greek metre, would outweigh all the contradictory MS. evidence extant.

But I can add a little more new evidence gained within the last few years. There was discovered (c. 1899) a Carolinian MS. note - book containing two more verses inserted in the body of the poem. I will give the first new verse, as it is a rather singular composition :

In wedlock each releeves and jointly beares

Each others cares The Virgins like an epicene Phoenix showne

Both turnes in one The children are their own heirs sons give breath

Even after death.

The maiden then and marriage state descry A single payr or double unity.