Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 3.djvu/296

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. m. APRIL is,

avec cette difference que, dans J'ai ete & Rome, par exemple, J'ai ete fait entendre qu'on y est alle et qu'on en est revenu ; et que, dans II est alle ci Rome, le verbe 11 est alle marque simplement le voyage sans indiquer le ret our."

But our substitution of be for go has been of wider scope than that of etre for aller, and, in some locutions, is so still.

The annexed quotations are among the latest of their kind that I have observed :

" We were, a week ago, to visit a relation of mine whose house has a prospect of the sea, and, happening to look out of one of the windows, while we waited for my cousin's coming down, how do you think he diverted me ? "Mrs. Eliza Hey wood (1744), ' Female Spectator ' (ed. 1748), vol. ii. p. 86.

"I was, Tuesday, for the second time, to see 'Rule a Wife' and 'The Upholsterer.'" Mrs. James Harris (1763), in 'Letters of the First Earl of Malrnesbury ' (1870), vol. i. p. 98.

"I was, Yesterday, to see Lord Botetourt's, a rich and beautiful Scene, but wants Water to com- plete the Landscape." Mrs. Elizabeth Griffith, 'Letters between Henry and Frances' (1766), vol. iv. p. 188.

Phrases like those just instanced, and " I have been up the mountain," may have sug- gested the type of "I have been to the city"; but yet it is not clear that the introduction of this type was not owing to foreign influence. The 'Beau -Philosopher,' cited above, is a translation from the French, and my next oldest quotation for been to occurs in a letter by the wife of the learned author of 'Hermes,' a fashionable lady to whom French may be supposed to have been familiar.

Though she and her son may have chosen to Gallicize their phraseology, it was other- wise with her husband :

"I have been to one opera and to very few plays." Mrs. Harris (1763), in 'Letters,' &c. (ut ante), vol. i. p. 103.

" I have not heard, as yet, anything worth writing ; neither can I properly go out till I have been to Court." James Harris, jun. (1772), ibid., vol. i. p. 251.

"I have been at the Opera; a good house." James Harris, sen. (1775), ibid., vol. i. p. 336.

Of had been instead of went, not instead of had gone, I can adduce only two instances, both of them from Irish authors :

"As soon as Harry's grief for his late Maria would allow him to associate, he had been to seek his old friend and tutor, Mr. Clement ; but he found only a single domestic at home, who told him that the old gentleman had been some time dead." Henry Brooke (1760-72), 'Fool of Quality' (ed. 1809), vol. iv. p. 135.

"When he asked about Molly Price, his father

informed him that she had been married about a

twelvemonth before and had behaved herself

well and decently since he had been away." Anon., ' History of Ned Evans' (1796), vol. ii. p. 222.

Farther, some past tenses of be were once used, in literature, for those of come. 1 gave

an instance, dated 1685, when formerly dis- cussing been to; and here are others, consider- ably later :

' ' Mr. was to pay me a Visit, this Morning,

and we had a good Deal of Conversation about you." Mrs. Elizabeth Griffith, ' Letters,' &c. (ut ante), vol. iv. p. 59.

" The family I resided in had a great-grand-uncle, a Capuchin, at Rome, who, every three years, came on foot to see them ; he had been, the summer before my arrival, at the age of ninety-eight." Anon., 'Unfortunate Sensibility' (1784), vol. ii. p. 92.

To pass to the dialects, one hears, in Suffolk- both before an infinitive of purpose and before a substantive or its equivalent, was for went and came ; thus : "I was to see him this morning, and he was to see me a little while ago "; " I was lately to his house or to his, and he was lately to my house or to mine "; "I find that the tramp was from Framlingham to Saxmundharn yesterday," "yesterday " being stressed on its final syllable. And see Dr. Joseph Wright's admirable 'English Dialect Dictionary.'

In the use of be to denote motion, found in the next quotations, we meet with current idioms anticipated :

"I cannot be back againe in lesse then two moneths." William Browne, tr. Gomberville's ' Polexander ' (1647), vol. i. p. 191.

"I went abundantly farther than any one had before been." R. Pal'tock (1751), 'Peter Wilkins' (ed. 1884), vol. ii. p. 228.

"I and my father and Fanny have been and spent an evening with them." Charlotte Ann Burney (1782), in Frances Burner's 'Early Diary' (1889), vol. ii. p. 297.

"I bore her in my arms to the first gate, which my attendants broke down : scarce were we through it, when the tower fell to crackling ruins." Anon., 'Cicely '(1795), vol. i. p. 86.

" I was half way to the apartment where I was going." Ibid., vol. ii. p. 223.

F. H.

Marlesford.

So common an idiom would scarcely seem to need authority. Such expressions as MR. BENHAM quotes are certainly not local now, though there are localisms in which to is used for at. In New England to hum is equivalent to at home; and, according to Halliwell, the same form is heard in Devonshire : " When were you to Plymouth 1 " In the recently published Browning letters I met yesterday with the sentence, "I have been to the Scotch Church " (E. B. B., vol. ii. p. 460). Thackeray, in his ' Notes of a Week's Holiday ' (' Round- about Papers '), asks, " Have we been to Hol- land ? " In ' Mansfield Park ' I find " having been to Mansfield Common "; in Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Memories and Portraits,' have been to school in both countries." These