Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 1.djvu/393

 9 th S. I. MAY 14, '98.3

NOTES AND QUEEIES.

385

i i America that campus, meaning college i rounds, was first used, and it has there } .een long a familiar household word.

The present writer would gladly chronicle i or Dr. Murray's volume of Addenda the date j,nd place of its Transatlantic birth. This 'sober certainty," however, concerning the advent of the term is unluckily beyond his reach. Yet two dates in its rise and progress must be stepping-stones up its stream of lime. In the College Mercury (Racine, Wis- consin, U.S.A.), 5 Aug., 1868, we read, ^ The college campus has been mowed." Again, in 4 Harvard Songs,' published about 1859, there is a poem perhaps more than one showing campus. The opening lines were : When at first we trod this campus We were freshmen green as grass.

These citations carry American usage a long way beyond that in Funk's ' Standard,' which is the only one as yet discovered, and which was extracted from the Cosmopolitan of April, 1890. But at the earliest of the dates above the word was evidently not new.

JAMES D. BUTLER. Madison, Wis., U.S.A.

" NYND." This curious-looking word is in some parts of North Notts the pronunciation of "nigh -hand," meaning close or near, another form being "gain-hand." Nynd is, or was, in common use. "Nynd yon lad wer run o wer " = that lad was nearly run over. "Yon woman nynd yon man " = that woman standing near that man. " Where does Bill live?" "Nynd us." "Are you going to Balder ton to - day ? " " Nynd arm goin' ; nynd arm not." The last example shows that nynd also means "maybe" or "perhaps." Nynd does not appear to be used except in the district of Newark. The y in nynd is long. THOS. RATCLIFFE.

Worksop.

COLERIDGE. (See ante, p. 180.) In a notice of two books on Lichfield and Winchester Cathedrals there occurs this remark : "As Hartley Coleridge says of his mistress : You must know her ere to you She doth seem worthy of your love." I have not Hartley Coleridge's poems at hand, but supposing the lines to be his, as assigned, he must have simply altered Words- worth's well - known lines in ' A Poet's Epitaph':

And you must love him, ere to you He will seem worthy of your love.

C. LAWRENCE FORD, B.A.

BOSWELL'S ' JOHNSON.' In Boswell's 'Life of Johnson,' near the end, there is a descrip-

tion of the monument which was erected in memory of Dr. Johnson in St. Paul's Cathe- dral and in that description it is stated that on that monument the figure of the doctor tiolds in its right hand a scroll bearing the following inscription :

ENMAKAPE2SinOM2NANY#AI02IEH- AMOIBH.

Now great part of this alleged inscription is palpably absurd, the Greek having been mercilessly mangled by the printer a i/vaio- o-ic, for example, being sheer gibberish. Yet this extraordinary error has never been corrected, so far as I know, in any of the many editions which have appeared of that popular book; certainly it stands in all its pristine atrocity in Augustine Birrell's edition of 1896 (Constable), and I do not think it has ever even been noticed by any- body.

If left to his own devices, any person pos- sessed of a moderate knowledge of Greek would find it easy enough to imagine what the tenor of the inscription ought to be. However, let the monument speak for itself. On it the line, for it forms an hexameter line, runs as follows :

ENMAKAPE22IIIOM2NANTA/27I02EIH-

AMOIBH, or, in small Greek characters,

lv fJ-aKapecro-t TTOVWI/ avraios *r) dfJLOi/3rj. That is to say : "Amid the blest may he have a reward commensurate with his labours." Even to this line some persons would be inclined to take exception, inasmuch as avraios, though a compound adjective, is one of those winch have three terminations, and therefore, in strictness, it ought to be in the feminine, avrdgia, in order to agree with the feminine substantive duoi/Stf. But the probability is that the line is a quotation from some late Greek writer, and it is well known that, in the later Greek, adjectives of three terminations are often treated, like most compound adjectives, as if they had but two terminations.

But, to pass over this as unimportant, and to return to the inscription as given in Bos- well, I contend that it amounts to a curiosity of bibliography that so ridiculous a blunder and that, too, in so famous and popular a book should have so long passed, not only uncorrected by successive editors, but abso- lutely unnoticed by the reading public ; and I regard it as a lurid example of the amount of error which the said public is capable of calmly swallowing.

I verily believe that they would never wink if an author of celebrity were solemnly