Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/373

 12 s. ix. OCT. is, 1921.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 303 Hospital, Roome received a medal for Trafalgar. From the Registers of Greenwich Hospital are gleaned the following further particulars which round off John Roome' s career : He was admitted to the Hospital on July 1, 1847, and stated to have been 76 years of age. He served 8 years and 2 months in the Royal Navy, and 7 years 10 months in the Merchant Service. His trade was that of a fisherman, and the last ship in which he served was the Hecate as A.B., but in her only muster extant for 1805-06 his name does not come up, and there is a gap between 1806 and 1809. John Roome belonged to Lambeth parish in 1847, was a widower, and died in Greenwich Hospital, Dec. 26, 1860. E. H. FAIRBROTHER. PASSING STRESS. (See 12 S. ix. 241, 263,283.) Dictate it is, in Pope's ' Odyssey,' xvii. : Fair truth alone (the patient man reply'd) My words shall dictate, and nay lips shall guide. Cowper's (1785) 'Task,' v. 317, allows settlings That his own honour dictates. And still Crabbe's (1810) ' Borough ' (ii.) : To all the praise which on the tomb is read, To aU that passion dictates for the dead. And is that accentuation asserting its modern English rights again ? The ' N.E.D.' gives dictate and dictate equal rights. Ben Jonson's *' rule " that all verbs from the Latin have accent as in first pers. pres. has not been holding here. Acceptable so in all poets to the present day is noted now as changing to acceptable ; under rule of accept. It has been com- pared thus, above, with confessor. St. Augustine lives as Augustine in Calvin's Scotland. And in the American tradition of the Pilgrims. Vide Longfellow's St. Augustine, well hast thou said. The contraction Austin is proof of that older, if exceptional, accent ; even as 'squire, squire, is proof of the older esquire, still the common Americanism ; as already noted. Then Bnrabbas is the (c. 1590) ' Jew of Mjiltn, ' ; and Would any of the stock of Bdrabbas Had been her husband rather than a Christian, was the expresssed wish of Shakespeare's con- temporary Jew. ' Hamlet,' again, has, of Polonius, His means of death, his obscure funeral. Though always obscure in Shakespeare, his friend Ben Jonson has He will come here in a hired coach, obscure. (' Alchemist,' III. ii.) And in Wordsworth's (c. 1800) ' Prelude ' (i. 606), that word is still hesitating about going with the multitude : by force Of obscure feelings representative Of things forgotten. and (ii. 317) the soul Remembering how she felt, but what she felt Remembering not, retains an obscure sense Of possible sublimity. Yet in vii. 87, the modern exceptional obscure : fell short, far short, Of what my fond simplicity believed And thought of London held me by a chain Less strong of wonder and obscure delight. Shelley too : obscure and obscure. Is the word still hesitating in Swinburne ' Both- well,' I. i. ? And the unlit earth and obscure air are seen Pale as the lamp's self yet not well alight. If commendable is anywhere not quite sure of itself now (against commendable), in Shakespeare, surely, it is always already commendable ; spite of the pretestings which the late Professor R. Y. Tyrrell said he made to Henry Irving, who spoke ' Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, and who would not give in to tho pro- fessor's commendable there.. In Shakespeare, some words were hesi- tating, but, of course, not, generally, thus falling forwards. If he has always access and aspect, and the noun converse, and, with Massinger, canonized ('Virgin Martyr,' III. i.), he uses both forlorn and forlorn ; re- venue and revenue ; exile and exile exile, commonly in the later authentic plays ; though some of his earliest contemporaries use it. And the first scene of the ' Comedy of Errors ' has His goods confiscate to the Duke's dispose ; but the second Lest that your goods too soon be confiscate. And this last word hesitated from mouth to mouth, down to our own day. Johnson gave only confiscate ; yet (as usual, without remark), cites Shakespeare, or another poet, against his own accenting.