Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/374

 304 NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s.ix. OCT. 15,1921. Once only Shakespeare has the older I say, without characters fame lives long. {' Ric. III.,' III. i. 81.) And after him, Heywood ' A Woman killed with Kindness ' 'has On whose white brows thy shame is character 'd. And yet that older accent has lingered long. Nigh a century after Shakespeare, in Dryden's ' Hind and Panther ' : They gape at rich revenues which you hold. (iii. 1442.) And a century after that, in Young : Where men now great, from their revenues spent. . . . Indeed Shelley had always revenue ; as in the 1819 ' Cenci ' (i. 265) : I know the Pope Will ne'er absolve me from my priestly vow But by absolving me from the revenue Of many a wealthy see. And Aubrey de Vere, half a century later still, in the 1876 < St. Thomas ' (II. iv.) : Then came his last demand, revenues stored. Which pronunciation was a sort of parlia- mentary preserve even in our day.* Perdurable a word almost dropped, from 1600 to 1800, marked obsolete by Dr. Johnson in 1755 -has hesitated in dic- tionaries, and the latest have perdurable as it was in Chaucer : The blissful life that is perdurable. But it is perdurable, from ' Henry V.,' IV. v. 6: O perdurable shame, let's stab ourselves, to Swinburne's (1864) c Atalanta in Caly- don ' : But death is strong and full of blood and fair And perdurable and like a lord of land. Yet, on the way, perdurable ; in Southey's (1814) 'Roderick,' xvi. 267: Leaving a name perdurable on earth. Converse (sb.), so in modern dictionaries, which note converse as earlier. And yet it has hesitated chronologically, in poets. Cer- tainly in Shakespeare : Out of the way, that your converse and business May be more free." (' Othello,' III. i. 40.) and, as certainly, in Pope : Formed by thy converse happily to steer From grave to gay, from lively to severe. (' Essay on Man,' iv. 379;) and so in moderns. But then Byron, midway between Pope tary speaker insists on pronouncing ' revennue '." " Now obsolescent." ' N.E.D.' and us, found with Shakespeare against his Pope : 'Tis but to hold Converse with nature's charms, and view her stores unrolled. Portent, always, down to nineteenth century, we are told ; as in Shakespeare ; and still so, in some present dictionaries. Yet Pope, 'Triumph of Fame' (1711), 452, had Of prodigies and portents seen in air. Shelley has access : And I should be debarred from all access. (' Cenci,' I. ii. 71.) Shelley once has access* Wordsworth, also-, once. The word early became access in English (notes * N.E.D.') it is so in Milton ; so in Dryden (though Shakespeare always has access ; the only doubtful passage, ' Hamlet,' II. i. 110, " Denied his access to me," is better so, in sound and sense) and Tennyson, typical of modern usage, has made it go again the natural new English way j as Sir Henry Taylor had, in Tennyson's- earliest day : To block them out from access of provision. (' Philip van Artevelde, 1834.) and Swinburne has, in his later Craves leave of access to your majesty. (' Bothwell,' II. ix.) Coventry Patmore still (e. 1850) has Grown weary with a week's exile. Successor, almost all dictionaries will have. But Shakespeare's Great Alexander Left his to the worthiest, so his successor Was like to be the best. (' Winter's Tale,' V. i. 48.) and Not propp'd by ancestry whose grace Chalks successors their way. (' Henry VIII.,' I. i. 60.) To which there is poetic succession, from Dryden's ' Secret Love,' V. i. : I here declare you rightful successor ; the only practice, for the ' Century Dic- tionary's ' theory, of successor through Wordsworth's To Caesar's successor the Pontiff spake. (' Ecclesiastical Sonnets,' i. 38.) (while Shelley, So think their fierce successors, and so always), down to A. de Vere's ' St. Thomas of Canterbury,' 111. i. 3 : My steps are to St. Peter's successor. In the strong hand of Peter's successor. Dryden,, it is true, while illustrating,
 * Cornhill, Nov. 1860 : " Every parliamen-