Page:Notes and Queries - Series 6 - Volume 6.djvu/276

 262 NOTES AND QUERIES. w* s. vl s*». so.'82. " Henry V.," I. iL (6th S. vi. 5).—Mr. H. Hal- ford Vaughan, seemingly thinking of "ladling up," objects to the quarto " lading up," and pro- poses to read " laying up." But we talk of lading up or loading up a ship, in the sense of storing up its cargo; hence it may be taken in this passage as synonymous with "laying up." But Mr. Vaughan would alter it, because Shakespeare, the writer who of all English writers has used the greatest number of English words, has elsewhere twice used "laying up." Or, to put it in another form, William Shakespeare, writing in 1599, preferred, so far as the evidence goes, " lading up," but we who lire in 1882 are to prefer " laying up." Now, to turn to the folio change of " kneading up." Mr. Vaughan speaks of it as an " amendment made by the first folio," as though he took it to be a change made by the editors. Can a single fact be adduced which supports such a supposition ? Can he point to a single change which can be set down to these editors ? The usual belief is that they took too little editorial care, took what came to their hands, and did not even revise the addi- tional blunders of the printers. Lastly, I would ask, Is Mr. Vaughan aware that the folio version diners from the quarto in very many verbal changes (I speak not of probable additions) evidently made on revision, for by far the greater number—nearly all—are manifest improvements ? To our better knowledge "kneading up" is a less correct phrase as applied to honey than to wax making; but this is no reason for saying that Shakespeare, acting on a pre-Huberian knowledge of bees, had to his contemporaries destroyed the effect of this beautiful passage. He wrote up to, but not beyond, the natural history knowledge of his age. When Mr. Vaughan has proved that the kneading up of the honey was then a known vulgar error, omitted by Sir Thomas Browne, it will be time to reconsider the passage. Bread- making is not a series of natural processes, but kneading is one of them. So to our Elizabethan ancestors the honey was a product made by the bees, and in their ignorance the kneading up of the wax may well have applied or extended to the manufacture of honey. We still more commonly speak of " making honey " rather than of gathering it, and to quote only one passage from Batman, b. 18, c. 12, 1582, "And Bees sit on flowers and gather matter, of the which they make both honie and wexe." Br. Nicholson. P.S.—If the reader will look at pp. 890, 896 (bis), 907, 909, of Th. Mouffet, 1658, added to one edition of Topsell, he will see that the then general view was that bees did not gather, but made, honey. From the passages also at pp. 907, 909, I am led to suppose that Shakespeare's " kneading " was the kneading or working up in the bees' stomachs or " ventricles " (Lat. ventriculi) of the pabulum that produced the honey. " Are of more strong constitutions, and therefore are better able and do take more pains, to refine and work the honey in their ventricles " (p. 909). " Hamlet," I. iv. 36 (6"> S. vi. 23).— " The dram of eale Doth all the noble substance of a doubt To his own scandal." The first who saw from the text of the play itself that eale stood for evil, or ill, was, I believe, Dr. George Macdonald. Beading, at a later date, this second quarto, I came across the same proofs, and independently and of myself arrived at the same conclusion. In that line of Hamlet's soliloquy determining on the play test, and which in our usual noting is II. ii. 575, we find :— " The spirit that 1 have scene May be a deale, and the deale bath power." If the writer or the compositor twice in one line spelt devil as deale, even when in the first instance it was to be pronounced dissyllabically, he would spell evil as eale. The sense, too, seems—even as the corrupt passage stands—to point to " evil" or " ill"; still more does it if we alter the evidently erroneous " of a doubt" to " oft endoubt" as pro- posed by me in the Cambridge Shakespeare. The sense is, a little base alloy will depreciate a sove- reign's (or a man's) worth in public estimation) below even its true worth. We have lately had a notable instance of this in the case of an illus- trious writer and thinker. As to D. O. T.'s pro- posed leaven change, I would say, in addition, that Shakespeare's use of a leaven metaphor in 1. 29 is to me a certain proof that lie did not use it in 1. 36. Br. Nicholson. "Lear," IV. vi. 278.— "0 indistingnish'tl tpace of woman's will." I would illustrate Shakespeare as far as the ex- pression italicized is concerned from jEschylus, Agamemnon, 1. 485:— ...o #7}Avs opos t~ivijierai rayxmopii. D. C. T. UNACCENTED WORDS IN MODERN GREEK AND OTHER LANGUAGES. I lately asked a Greek gentleman to pronounce the words to koi'Si'Aioi' /xov, which mean in modern Greek " my pen," and in which the fioxr is a so-called enclitic, its accent having been drawn back to the last syllable of the preceding word. At first (it was in the street I asked him) I heard nothing but to kovSi'AioV ; and when I told him this, he smiled, and said it was what ho expected. But on his repeating the words three or four times, I did, or thoiiebt I did, detect an m after the final v of the kovBvXiov, but this m was scarcely as strong as the to in yes 'm=yes, ma'am.* This pro-
 * I regret I did not ask him also the pronunciation of