Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 12.djvu/155

 is. XIL AUG. 22, loos.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

147

has often been noted. Mr. Churton Collins, in his 'Illustrations of Tennyson,' misses another point of connexion between the two poets. He says that the line in ' The Princess, Our weakness somehow shakes the shadow, Time, is from Wordsworth's

Death, the skeleton, And Time, the shadow,

but fails to trace, as is his wont, Wordsworth's own lines to their source in Vaughan :

And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years,

Driv'n by the spheres, Like a vast shadow mov'd.

C. C. B.

" WATTMAN." This term is employed in France to designate the engineer-driver of an electric carriage. I noticed the legend on Rouen trams lately, "Defense de parler au wattman." This word is distinctively British in appearance. FKANCIS P. MARCHANT.

Brixton Hill.

'DON QUIXOTE' IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. If a monograph were attempted with a view to collecting proofs of the influence upon English literature of the principal work of Cervantes, the following passage might be included :

"You, who are so well acquainted with my Romantic Temper, will easily conclude it must be some Scheme worthy to be preserved in the Annals of La Mancha : And tho' I do not yet dream of the Government of an Island, I will own to you, that I should esteem myself as happy as Sancho, when in Conversation with the Dutchess [sic], had I the Honour to find a Fair Patroness in His Grace's Family."

It occurs on p. vii of ' A Dialogue on Beauty in the Manner of Plato' (London, 1731), the author of which was George Stubbes, Fellow of Exeter College in Oxford.

E. S. DODGSON.

Xfftff,

WE must request correspondents desiring infor- mation on family matters of only private interest to affix their names and addresses to their queries, in order that the answers may be addressed to them direct.

" DOVE-TAIL. "May I ask PROF. SKEAT whether his philological instinct has ever led him to suspect that this word owes its present form to folk-etymology 1 I have been tempted to think that it may be really a transforma- tion of dootle, a word of the same meaning in Northern English, understood as doo-tail or doio-tail, i. e. dove-tail. I found my conjecture on the following evidence. Bay in his ' North- touiitry Words '(1674-91) gives: "A Dootle,

a Notch made in the Pan into which the Bawk is fastened, of this [square] figure. Doo tail, i.e. Dove-tail, because like a Pigeon's tail ex- tended." Dootle, the hole or hollow which receives the dowel, or projecting peg, he derives from dove - tail, as the counterpart or correlative of the projection. Probably it was applicable originally to both alike, as a screw may be male or female. It was both mortise and tenon. It appears to be the same word as Old Eng. " dotelle, stoppynge of a vesselle (al. dottel, dossell). Ducillus, ductildus " (' Prompt. Parv.'), the faucet of a cask. The meaning common to both seems to be a plug or stopper, which is also the signification of the N. Prov. Eng. dottle (' E.D.D.'), all being from Low Lat. ductile or ductulus, a little duct. Hence also come Fr. douille, a hollow socket, and our doivel, a plug, peg, or bolt, a dook ('N.E.D.'), i.e., probably the first part of due-tile, or of duciculum, the stopper of the vent of a cask (Spelman), and dosil. Dowle, a down-feather, O. Fr. dottle, doulle, soft, from ductilis, bendable (Skeat, 'Notes on English Etymology,' p. 73), is virtually the same word. Compare also Fr. andouille, a sausage, from inductile, farced meat stuffed into a pig's intestine. From ductile, something that may be drawn on, or introduced or inserted, came dottle, dotel, and dootle, and this last was (as I conjecture) explained to be doo-tail, dowe-tail, or dove-tail. If this is so, the word has as little to do with the expanded tail of the dove as cur-tail, standing for curtle (an exactly similar mis- take), has to do with the docked tail of a cur.

The folk-etymology would be helped on by the fact that very similarly formed words for a wedge-shaped tenon existed in culver-tail (Bullokar, 1616) and swallow-tail; but the transformation is one of considerable anti- quity (if it be such), as Cooper's 'Thesaurus' (1565-73), s.v. securicula, has "a swallowe tayle or dooue tayle in carpenters workes ' (in ' N.E.D.'). It is, of course, possible that this dooue tayle and dootel, though both mean- ing a tenon, are quite distinct, or that dove- tail may be a contamination of the two. Other derivatives from Lat. ductilis, drawable, worth comparing, are Low Lat. ductile, doitus, O. Fr. doilalle, an aqueduct, watercourse, or canal (Du Cange) ; O. Fr. doitil, a little ditch or conduit (Godefroy). Compare also Fr. douit, douet (from ductus), a brook (Cotgrave). A. SMYTHE PALMER.

S. Woodford.

DUPUY FAMILY. Isaac Dupuy,pf the parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, widower, was married by licence on 24 Oct., 1763, at Hendon n hurch, to Elizabeth Kemp. Their son, Isaac