Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 1.djvu/352

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NOTES AND QUEEIES. DJ* s. i. APKIL so, m

under the Great Seal he returned to Scot- land prior to September, 1702, when the IOL lands of Stapleton, in Dumfries, were settled on him by his brother. In 1707 he was in London, and in 1 7 1 5 at Stapleton. His brother arrested him in Dumfries in that year, and placed him in prison to prevent his joining the rebel forces.

In McDowall's 'History of Dumfries' ap- pears a letter from John Johnston to the Provost of Dumfries. The letter is dated 30 Aug., 1730, so the writer was sixty-five years of age at the time. As stated above, the date of his death is, apparently, not generally known, nor the contents of his will, if, indeed, he ever made one. F. A. J.

GEORGE ELIOT : THE PSEUDONYM. IN 'William Black wood and his Sons,' chap.xxiii., the authoress, Mrs. Oliphant, alluding to ' Amos Barton,' describes it as

" the first, yet one of the most perfect of the pro- ductions of the woman of genius whose name of George Eliot, fictitious as it is, and without con- nexion with anything in her history, has been now nscribed in all the lists of fame as one of the great writers of her time."

Again, J. W. Cross, in his 'Life of George Eliot,' says :

" My wife told me that the reason she fixed on this name was, that ' George' was Mr. Lewes's Christian name, and ' Eliot' was a good mouth- filling, easily-pronounced word."

Well, it is probable that there may have been something behind all this, and that the name was not so casual and so destitute of con- nexion with her history as the great novelist apparently wished the world to suppose. My reason for this belief is as follows.

Many years ago some time in the forties a young officer of the Bengal cavalry (a very fine young man, I believe), called George Donnithorne Eliot, was drowned in the lake of Nynee Tal, in the Himalayas. Now, Donnithorne is an. uncommon name; yet we have Arthur Donnithorne in 'Adam Bede,' and George Eliot as the novelist's pseudo- nym. I think there is something in this. It is too remarkable a coincidence to be due to mere chance. Who knows but that the George Donnithorne Eliot of Nynee Tal was an old friend, flame, or ideal of Marian Evans, and hence her adoption of the name George Eliot? PATRICK MAXWELL.

Bath.

A NOTE ON THE WORD "RHYME." It is known that I have frequently taken the opportunity, when the printers will permit me to do so, of using the spelling rime instead of rhyme ; see ante, p. 284. I wish to say that

the notion did not originate with me, but with Thomas Tyrwhitt, whom all lovers of literature will ever hold in deserved respect.

What I now have to say affects, in a certain measure, the etymology of the word. It has usually been held that it is derived from the A.-S. rim, "a number" a statement sup- ported in my ' Etymological Dictionary.' A careful attention to the word's history tells a somewhat different tale, though the result is, as will appear, to strengthen the case against the useless h.

The A.-S. rim, "number," naturally became rim, rym, rime, ryme, in Middle English, but is an extremely scarce word. It occurs, how- ever, spelt rime, in the ' Ormulum,' 1. 11,248. It was very soon supplanted, for practical purposes, by the extremely common Old French rime, a cognate word of Frankish origin, identical in form and in original meaning, but used in Old French with the newly acquired sense of verse, song, lay, rhyme, poem, poetry.

The whole story is long and complex ; even the account in Diez is incorrect. It is more clearly given by Kluge and Korting. I can only give a mere outline here.

As this same sense of " verse " occurs in all the Romance languages, it is obvious that it existed in the original type. Formally, its origin is the O.H.G. rim, " number."

The O.H.G. rim means "number" only ; but the M.H.G. rim had two senses, viz., (1) number, (2) verse. The new sense was due to the influence of Lat. rhythmus, rhythm, and was imported into the M.H.G. word by the accident of similarity in form.*

In order to fit this M.H.G. rim for existence as a Romance word, it had to be provided with a final vowel. In doing this, its gender was changed from masculine to feminine, so that it became rima.

It was then introduced into nearly all the Romance languages, remaining as rima in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Prove^al, and becoming rime, dissyllabic, in Old French. Old French exhibited many deriva- tives, such as rimage, a piece of poetry, rimerie, a poem, rimoier, to put into verse, rimoieur, a versifier. Anglo-French employed rime, verse, sb., and rimer, to versify, vb. Hence Mid Eng. rime, ryme, sb., and rimen, ryinen, rime, ryme, vb.

rightly says that the Lat. rhythmus would 1 become rimmo in Italian. Just so ; the Ital. word was derived from the M.H.G. rim, which had t* up the sense of the Lat. rhythmic, owing t> similarity of form, before the Italian word was borrowed from it.
 * This explains the difficulty raised by Diez. He