Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 8.djvu/374

 304 NOTES AND QUERIES. [i2S.vm. APRIL ie, 1921. purchased by Spooner from Francis Bott. Such was Spooner's declaration. Bott main- tained that Spooner stole them. On July 4, while the town was mourning the death of the Vicar, John Shakespeare; was elected an Alderman in Bott's room. | The election lay with the Bailiff, Master Richard Hill, and his brother Aldermen, of: whom all were present save John Jeffreys. ! The late Chamberlain thoroughly deserved! his promotion. The same day Gilbert! Bradley, the glover (John Shakespeare's fellow-craftsman and neighbour in Henley Street), and Nicholas Barnhurst of Sheep Street (husband of Adrian Quyny's step- i daughter), were appointed by the Council , Principal Burgesses. The three men took j their oaths on Sept. 12. From that day. John Shakespeare was Master John Shake- speare among his fellow-townsmen. EDGAR I. FRIPP. "BRITISHER" v. "BRITON." THE 'N.E.D.' in 1888 described "Britisher" as apparently of U.S. origin, and chiefly used by, or attributed to, Americans. But since that date it has insinuated itself into the current speech of this country ; and now appears in the perorations of politicians, in sermons, popular lectures, plays, and in many places where men and women are gathered together. Some honour- able protests have been made against this foreign importation notably those of Dr. Marie Stopes and of The Saturday Review ; and the masters of our tongue generally avoid it unless the exigencies of the narra- tive forgive its presence. But although it may be inevitable that citizens of the vast Republic across the Atlantic should often describe Britons as Britishers ; and that the great daughter Dominions of the British Commonwealth overseas should follow the lead of the United States in this matter their practice does not excuse the inhabitants of Great Britain from thus styling one another. Yet were the turbu- lent sister isle, in her age-long fight against geography, to call us by no worse name we should, no doubt, be truly grateful. Captain Marryat in ' The Naval Officer, or Scenes and Adventures in the Life of Frank Mildmay ' (1829), has: " Are we going to be bullied by these . . . Britishers ? " But it is an American mate who speaks. And Dr. J. H. Newman uses the word in a special sense when he says, in the fifth chapter of ' The Office and Work of Universities ' (1856) : " And it is as reasonable to expect students, though we [the Catholic University at Dublin] have no charter from the State, provided we hold out the inducement of good teachers, as to expect a crowd of Britishers, Yankees, Spaniards, and Chinamen at the diggings, though there are no degrees for the successful use of the pickaxe, sieve, and shovel." a quotation not included in the ' N.E.D.' Again, The Spectator of Nov. 14, 1868, says : " Mr. Reverdy Johnson . . . was so compli- mentary to England . . . and to Britisher institutions." And in like manner Charles J. Mathews the younger, speaking at the Sir Walter Scott Centenary Dinner, given at the St. James's Club House, Montreal, in 1871, said : " Here we are all ' Britishers ' ; and after all the works of the great man whose centenary we celebrate are in reality cosmopolitan." ('Life,' by Charles Dickens, vol. ii., p. 312.) -President Poincare has told us how the Germans burned his cherished copies of Scott when they destroyed his country house in the Great War. The above are, perhaps, excusable uses of the word ; but it is an ugly and unnecessary word none the less. Jl. L. Stevenson in the ' New Arabian Nights' (1884) has: "His tweed suit. . identified him as a Britisher." But in 1879, T. E. C. Leslie had declared in The Academy, that " even tawdry rhetoric is venial compared with the sin of using such an odious vulgarism as the word Britisher for Englishman or Briton." Prof. E. A. Freeman, however, who thought the word arose during the War of Independence, when the opposing forces were known as American and British, and Britisher was the natural substantive from the latter, says in his ' Impressions of the United States' (1883): '' I always told my American friends that I had rather be called a Britisher than an Englishman, if by calling me an Englishman they meant to It is meet and right to acknowledge hospi- tality in such fair words as we can compass, and every reasonable Englishman ardently desires to live in amity and fellowship with the citizens of the United States ; but here Freeman confuses English-speaking people
 * imply that they were not Englishmen themselves."