Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 1.djvu/32

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NOTES AND QUERIES.

[9 th S. I. JAN. 8, '98.

infinitesimal jotting on the leaf of Aaron Hill's ' Athelwold ' " Two or three lines I have with great timorousness written," says p p e to be for a moment seriously con- sidered. The work of the second reviser in importance that of Thomson's own accreditec revision.
 * The Seasons ' nearly equalled in extent anc

3. Thomson was in the habit of employing an amanuensis. His brother John, at any rate, acted in that capacity about the year

4. In the one passage of any length which is noted by ME. TOVEY as " corrected to text ' of Pope that including the splendid critical pronouncements on the great English poets in 'Summer,' 11. 1566-1579 internal evidence, it seems to me, decidedly supports the view that the poet who changed it from its ori- ginal to its present reading was the same as penned the fifty-second stanza of ' The Castle of Indolence ' and, in all probability, the vivid and epigrammatic monody on Congreve.

5. A further item of internal evidence appears to be readily drawn from the radical dissimilarity in style between Pope and Thomson. The diction of each is entirely different in descriptive quality ; and, although the corrections in question are merely verbal it is difficult to understand how they could have come appropriately from Pope. I sub- join a passage from 'Windsor Forest,' and another from the new material of the 1744 edition of ' The Seasons.' In the one may be clearly traced the worker in rococo ; in the other the creative artist in natural descrip- tion.

.Pope writes :

There, interspers'd in lawns and op'ning glades, Thin trees arise that shun each other's shades. Here in full light the russet plains extend : There wrapt in clouds the bluish hills ascend. Even the wild heath displays her purple dyes, And 'midst the desert fruitful hills arise, That crowned with tufted trees and springing corn, Like verdant isles the sable waste adorn.

' Windsor Forest,' it is true, was published thirty years before the finally revised edition of ' The Seasons ' ; but Pope, in the rest of his works, never varied from his tinsel delinea- tions of nature. So far as style is concerned, Pope had absolutely nothing in common with this (' Spring,' 11. 951-962) :

The bursting prospect spreads immense around ; And snatched o'er hill and dale, and wood and

lawn.

And verdant field, and darkening heath between, And villages embosomed soft in trees, And spiry towns by surging columns marked Of household smoke, your eye, excursive, roams ; Wide-stretching from the hall, in whose kind haunt The hospitable genius lingers still,

To where the broken landscape, by degrees Ascending, roughens into rigid hills ; O'er which the Cambrian mountains, like far clouds That skirt the blue horizon, dusky, rise.

It is possible, of course, but not probable, that Pope may have developed a greater gift of " natural magic " in his later years ; and if any certainty could be thrown upon his claim in this question from the matter of hand- writing one might be convinced, if surprised. But when there is superadded to all the his- torical and internal array of evidence against such a claim the fact that the best authori- ties at the British Museum to-day, as well as Prof. Courthope, discredit the plausibility of the opinion that the handwriting referred to is Pope's, I think the " suspense " on the whole subject for which ME. TOVEY pleads is vir- tually unnecessary. W. B.

Edinburgh.

SYNTAX OF " NEITHEE." Your readers' attention was recently drawn by ME. BAYNE (8 th S. xii. 367) to a choice sample of Satur- day Review grammar, namely, "neither of

whom have a right." Here the word is

a pronoun ; but erroneous syntax is often

observed after the conjunctional pair

neither nor." Thus, in a book recently

C 1 lished, Archdeacon Baly's ' Eur- Aryan ts,' vol. i., I find two examples of the solecism in question. The first occurs at p. 101, " Neither the Sanscrit nor Zend have an original name for wine," where also the omission of the definite article before " Zend " noticeable as characteristic of slipshod English. The second is at p. 185 : " Neither Vigfusson nor Kluge cite O.N. Hala." I have been told that the author's grammar in the latter passage was disputed while the work was in the press, and that he stoutly de- fended his phrase, on the ground, to the best of my recollection, that neither and nor are here copulative, the predicate being of two subjects taken together, so that the sen- tence is equivalent to " Vigfusson and Kluge do not cite."

It is trifling with grammar to assert that these joint particles, neither, nor, are copula- tive as well as disjunctive. There is but one conjunction which is copulative, namely, ind, though or is frequently used with the syntax proper to and, as vel was by Tacitus :

' Mqx rex vel princeps audiuntur" ('Ger-

mania,' xi.). Granted that " Neither A nor B cites " is equivalent to " A and B do not cite," this is no reason for pluralizing the verb. The two sentences are negative forms f different affirmatives, the former being the negation of " Either A or B cites," and the atter the negation of " A and B cite." Nega-