Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/206

Rh rustics. To "heft" (from hebban, with the inflexions, hefest, "hefð," still used), signifies to lift, with the implied meaning of weighing. So, "to heft the bee-pots," is to lift them in order to feel how much honey they contain. The substantive "heft" is used for weight, as, "the heft of the branches."

Again, also, the good Old-English word "loute" (lutan), to bend, bow, and so to touch the hat, to be heard everyday in the Forest, though nearly forgotten elsewhere in England, may be found in Longfellow's Children of the Lord's Supper:—

In fact, one-half of the words which are considered Americanisms are good Old-English words, which we have been foolish enough to discard.

Let us now take another class of words, which will help to explain difficult or corrupt passages in our poets. There is, for instance, the word "bugle" (buculus), meaning an ox (used, as Mr. Wedgwood notices, in Deut. xiv. in the Bible, 1551), which is forgotten even by the peasantry, and only to be seen, as at Lymington and elsewhere, on a few inn-signs, with a picture sometimes of a cow, by way of explanation. I have more than once thought, when Rosalind, in As You Like it (Act iii., sc. 5), speaks of Phoebe's "bugle eyeballs," she means not merely her sparkling eyes, as the notes say, but rather her large, expressive eyes, in the sense in which Homer calls Minerva βοῶπις.

To give one more illustration of the value of provincialisms 188