Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/574

 570 Draper y-prefix in The Shepeardes Calender, reveals the interesting fact that his twenty uses of it are all correct. 51 On the other hand, however, this does not preclude the possibility that Spenser, writing of the old perfective prefix, in the role of poet rather than scholar, might not have noted it merely as "a poetical addition" even though he knew quite well what its grammati- cal significance was. Blent seems to be a phonetic variant of Middle English blynt for the purposes of rhyme. The foregoing lists are intended to include all of the words which E. K. defines or etymologizes in his twelve glosses. It remains to discuss the bearing of the compilation upon several problems of Spenserian scholarship. Perhaps most fundamen- tal of these is the question as to how great a part Spenser had in the making of the gloss. The list of words taken from Middle English is extensive; and many of them are distinctly unusual: 52 accloieth, accoied, assote, breeme, contek, corbe, and crags, to cite cases only from the first three letters of the alphabet. Of course the context would often help E. K. in his definitions; but one cannot imagine such a multitude of good guesses based on no previous knowledge of the word. Elizabethan annota- tors had no Stratmann's Dictionary incomplete as it is nor any convenient glosses to Chaucer or Gower. Of course, some of the words may have lingered in Elizabethan speech; but the necessity of glossing shows that they must have been uncom- mon. If one imagines the youthful Spenser reading his Middle English poets and noting mentally if not actually on paper interesting and attractive words for future reference, one can understand how the author of the eclogues acquired such a 61 Spenser's knowledge of ME. grammar was not by any means vague. Y-, as the descendant of the OE. ge-, should be prefixed only to a past participle or to a verb that had it in OE. Nineteen of Spenser's uses fall into the former case; ypent (I), ytorne (IV), yclad (V), ygoe (V), ytost (VI), ytake (VI), yclad (VII), ygirt (VII) ypent (VII), apaide (VIII), ywrought (VIII), ycrouned (VIII), yclad (X), ygoe (X), ystabled (XI), ygo (XI), ygoe (XI), yclad (XI), and ybent (XII). The other use is of the second sort; yshend as an infinitive from M. E. geshend. (See N.E.D., shend). His use of ywis (V) also, seems to be correct. In short, Spenser must have known what ge- signified; errors of this sort in The Faerie Queene, probably arise not so much from ignorance as from intentional neglect. 62 At any rate, they do not appear in either Emerson's Reader or Skeat's Havelok.