Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/207

Rh in such cases, let us take the word "bumble," which not only in the New Forest means, in its onomatopoetic sense, to buzz, hum, or boom, as in the common proverb, "to bumble like a bee in a tar-tub," and as Chaucer says, in The Wife of Bath's Tale—

but is also used of people stumbling or halting. Probably, in The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act iii., sc. 8), in the passage which has been of such difficulty to the commentators, where Mrs. Ford says to the servants, who are carrying Falstaffe in the buck-basket—"Look, how you drumble," which has no meaning at all, we should, instead, read this word. It, at all events, not only conveys good sense, but is the exact kind of word which the passage seems to expect.

Again, the compound thiller-horse, from the Old-English "bill," a beam or shaft, and so, literally, the shaft-horse, which we find in Shakspeare under the form of "thill-horse" (Merchant of Venice, Act ii., sc. 2), is here commonly used.

Then there are other forms among provincialisms which give such an insight into the formation of language, and show the common mind of the human race. Thus, take the word "three-cunning," to be heard every day in the Forest, where three has the signification of intensity, just as the Greek τρίς in composition in the compounds τρίσμακαρ, τρίσάθλιος, and other forms. So, too, the missel-thrush is called the "bull-thrush," with the meaning of size attached to the word, as it does more commonly to our own "horse," and the Greek ἵππος, and the Old-English hrefen, raven, in composition. 189