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as Leonard, Bernard, Everard. It seems to have been very commonly appended to nouns of a contemptuous and depreciatory meaning. Most of the words ending in it that now survive are of this sort. Add to those already mentioned bastard, sluggard, dotard; Trench mentions others now obsolete (English Past and Present). In our text wisards perhaps means nothing more than the Wise Men, without anything of the later sense of magicians attached to it, although in the Middle Ages the three Eastern kings were undoubtedly regarded as "wizards" in the modern sense of the word, and that with all reverence. In Comus, 571, the modern sense appears, and so ib. 872. In Lycid. 55 the word is applied to the personified river Dee. Spenser calls the ancient philosophers "antique wizards" (Faerie Queene, IV. xii. 2), 7. 24 prevent. See Psalms cxix. cxlvii. &c. &c. See Trench's Select Gloss. "prevenient," Paradise Lost, xi. 3; "prevention," ib. vi. 129.

27. the angel quire. See ll. 85-140; Paradise Regained, i. 242-5.

Conip.

28. See Isaiah vi. 6, 7. He has the same allusion in his Reason of Church Government. 29. born is dissyllabic here.

31. all. See Prothal. 1. 56.

32. to him is to be taken in connexion with in awe, rather than with had dofft.

41. pollute is the Latin participle pollutus, with its termination Anglicized.

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42. maiden white. Comp. maiden sword (1 Henry IV. V. iv. 134); maiden walls (Henry V. V. ii. 449); maiden flowers (Henry VIII. IV. ii. 169).

45. cease. Here causal. Comp. "shrink," inf. 1. 203; Lycid. 133. So Bacon: "You may sooner by imagination quicken or slack a motion than raise or cease it." Comp. alse

Ascham's Schoolmaster:

"Therefore, my heart, cease sighes and sobbes, cease sorowes seede to sow."

48. The turning sphear. Comp. Paradise Lost, iii. 416:

"Thus they in heaven above the starry sphere," &c.

In the Ptolemaic System the earth was the centre round which the heavens, with their stars, revolved. Sphere here means this great revolving framework.

On the words orb, sphere, globe, ball, see Smith's Marsh's Lectures on the English

Language.
49. harbinger. Comp. German herberger. See Paradise Regained, i. 71:

"Before him a great prophet to proclaim

His coming is sent harbinger," &c.

See also Midsummer Night's Dream, III. ii. 380; Comedy of Errors, III. ii. 12; Macbeth, I. iv. 46; and V. vi. 10; Hamlet, I. i. 122. Hawkins' Life of Bishop Ken: "On the removal of the court to pass the summer at Winchester, Bishop Ken's house, which he held in the right of his prebend, was marked by the harbinger for the use of Mrs. Eleanor Gwyn," &c. (Apud Halliwell.)

For the form of the word, as messenger from message, scavenger from scavage, porringer from porridge, so herbinger from harb'rage; see Wedgewood. In the Ayenbite of Inwit there is the form herberyeres for innkeepers, harbourers. In Chaucer's Man of Lawes Tale

herbergeour

=

harbinger :

"The fame anon throughout the toun is born,

How Alla King shal com on pilgrimage,

By herbergeours that wenten him beforn," &c.

For harbourage, see King John, II. i. 234. In Pericles, I. iv. 100, "harbourage " is asked for "ourself, our ships." Harbour radically = a shelter for a host.

7. 50. See Collins' Ode to Peace:

52. strikes =

"O thou, who bad'st thy turtles bear
Swift from his grasp thy golden hair,

And sought'st thy native skies;

When War, by vultures drawn from far,
To Britain bent his iron car,

And bade his storms arise," &c.

produces with a stroke, i.e. instantaneously. So Dryden :

"Take my Caduceus:

With this th' infernal ghosts I can command,

And strike a terror through the Stygian strand."

So Richard III. V. iii. ; 1 Henry VI. II. iii. Such, no doubt, is the force of the word here. Otherwise, one might comp. the Lat. fœdus ferire, &c.

i.e.

About the time of the birth of Christ the Temple of Janus was shut; there was peace in the Roman empire. See Merivale's Romans under the Empire, iii. 401, smaller Ed.

=

8. 56. the hooked chariot covinus, variously described or referred to as falcifer, falcatus, rostratus. Comp. Spenser's Faerie Queene, V. viii. 28. It is said to have been a Keltic invention. The Romans adopted it, with certain natural changes, for their domestic use. Their covinus seems to have resembled our cabriolet. See Martial's enthusiastic apostrophe to it (xii. 24), &c. It is curious that so many Roman carriage-names are Keltic. Essedum, petorritum, rheda, are all so.

58. Comp. in Ovid's adjuration to Peace (Fast. i. 716): "And let the wild trumpet sound no signal-blast save for the festal train."

59. awfull. So Richard II. III. iii. 76. It has its more usual sense in Taming of the Shrew, V. ii. 108; 2 Henry VI. V. i. 98, &c. Awless, in King John (I. i. 266), may have either an active or a passive meaning.

60. sovran. Old French, souverain. Our erroneous modern spelling has probably arisen from the popular tendency to force strange word-forms into, or at least into some proximity to, familiar ones. Comp. beaf-eater, sparrow-grass, sweetheart, island, Charles' Wain, lanthorn, emerods, colleague, could, gooseberry, liquorice, frontispiece, shamefaced, Jerusalem artichoke, cray-fish, country-danse, Bag-o'-nails (as an inn name), Goat and Compasses (ditto), Bull and Mouth (ditto), loadstone, Billy Ruffian (as a ship's name), &c.

64. whist hushed. I. ii. 77-82:

So Spenser's Faerie Queene, VII. vii. 59.

"Come unto these yellow sands,

And then take hands;

Courtsied when you have and kissed,

The wild waves whist,

Foot it featly here and there;

And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear."

See Tempest,

where Johnson takes whist to be a verb = are silent; but it is probably a participle, as in our text, the phrase the wild waves whist standing in an adverbial relation to the predicate, just as thus done the tales in L'Allegro, l. 115. No doubt the word is originally a sort of interjection commanding silence. Comp. the Latin st, Italian zitto, French chut.

So our

hush, hist, &c. Then whist is used as a verb to say whist-i.e. to silence. It is also used to be silent, as in Surrey's Translation of Virgil:

"They whisted all, with fixed face intent."

=

Comp. hush. Whisper is from the same root. There is a provincial form whister whisper. (Halliwell.) Then we have whist for the name of a game at cards, where the players are supposed to keep silence (it was frequently called whisk); whist, as an adjective, as in Euphues and his England: "So that now all her enimies are as whist as the bird attagen," &c. (H. & W.'s Nares.) The forms whish and whisht are also found.

=

8. 68. birds of calm halcyons. See the story of Alcyone, told by Ovid, one of Milton's favourite authors, in Metam. xi. There was an ancient belief, that during the seven days preceding and the seven succeeding the shortest day of the year, at which time the alcyon was breeding, a great tranquillity prevailed at sea. When it "sat brooding," the "wave was charmed." Frequent allusions to this belief occur in the Classics, as in Aristophanes' Birds and his Frogs, in Theocritus, &c. &c. The Greeks spoke of "alcyon days" (àλκvovides uépa); the Latins, of Alcedonia, the halcyon time, alcedo being the old Latin name for the bird. Thus the Prologue-speaker of Plautus' play, the Casina: "There is a calm. All about the forum [= pretty much our "the City "] 'tis halcyon-tide;" i.e. there is no bustling and tumult. See "halcyon beaks" in Lear, II. ii. 84; "halcyon days,” 1 Hen. VI. I. ii. 131. 70. stedfast. Fast, in the form fæst, is an Anglo-Saxon word, denoting firm. Soothfast firm in truth, &c. In the modern editions of our Bible translation shamefast is corrupted into shamefaced, and shamefastness into shamefacedness. Rootfast has become obsolete.

=

71. influence. Here used in its original sense of the rays, or glances, or aspects, flowing from the stars to the earth. These aspects were believed to have a great mysterious power over the fortunes of men; and hence influence came to have its modern meaning. "The astrologers," says Bacon (Essay ix.), "call the evill influences of the starrs evil aspects." Job xxxviii. 31: "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades?" Paradise Lost, ii. 1034:

"But now at last the sacred influence
Of light appears."

Measure for Measure, III. i.: "the skiey influences." King Lear, I. ii. 135: "planetary influence." Comp. L'Allegro, l. 122.

Other astrological terms still surviving are 'disastrous," "ill-starred," "ascendency," "lord of the ascendant,” “jovial," "saturnine," "mercurial." (See Trench's Study of Words.) See what Gloucester and Edmund respectively say of the old faith, in King Lear, I. ii.; and this verse in Fletcher's lines Upon an Honest Man's Fortune (quoted in Bible Word-Book):

"Man is his own star, and the soul that can

Render an honest and a perfect man
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early, or too late."

So also Paradise Lost, x. 659. Fuller's Scripture Observations, xviii.

73. for

= in spite of, notwithstanding. So frequently, as in Davies (apud Johnson):

"But as Noah's pigeon, which return'd no more,
Did show she footing found for all the flood," &c.

Probably the full phrase would be "for all the flood, or the morning light, or &c. &c. could do." Certainly, the all does not qualify "the flood," or "the morning light," or &c.

74. often. As if Lucifer gave several separate admonitions, instead of, by his very appearance, one long one.

8. 75. Comp. Midsummer Night's Dream, III. ii. 61:

"Venus in her glimmering sphere."

76. bespake = spake. So Lycid. 112; Paradise Lost, i. 43. has its transitive-making force, as e.g. when Dryden writes:

"Then staring on her with a ghastly look
And hollow voice, he thus the queen bespake."

Sometimes the prefix be

Paradise Lost, ii. 849:

"No less rejoiced

His mother bad, and thus bespake her sire."

Comp. bewail, bemoan, &c.

So Paradise Lost, In the case of the

bid. The weak preterite is here preferred to the strong form. ii. 514. The form bidde occurs in The Vision of Piers Ploughman. preterite of bite the weak form has with us altogether superseded the strong form. In Piers Ploughman we have boot, Ed. Wright, 1. 2642:

"That he boot hise lippes.'

In that same poem both the forms sitte and sat are found.

77. Comp. Spenser's Shep. Cal. April.

78. her may refer either to shady gloom, i.e. night, or to day.

79. withheld. Comp. withdraw.

81. as. So commonly in modern English we should say as if; but in older English, when the force of the subjunctive was livelier, the if was not needed.

84. axle-tree. Comp. Comus, 95–7. Tree in Old English

dore-tree= door-post, Piers Ploughman, roof-tree, &c.

wood, beam, &c. So

Lawn seems to denote

So launde in Piers

9. 85. lawn = pasture; commonly any open grassy space. radically a clear or cleared space, where the view is unobstructed. Ploughman. Comp. lane, an opening, a passage between houses or fields (see Wedgewood). Comp. Paradise Lost, iv. 252, where the groves of Eden are described:

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With the sense here, comp. L'Allegro, l. 71.

86. or ere= before ever.

See Daniel vi. 24; Hamlet, I. ii. 147; Psalm xc. 2. From the same root as or come our ere, erst, early. Or is common enough in Old English, as in Mirror for Magistrates:

66 And, or I wist, when I was come to land."

This same form occurs in Tempest, I. ii. 11; King John, IV. iii. 20 (Ed. 1623), &c. As for ere, in or ere, it probably stands for ever: it increases the force of the adverbial clause of time in which it appears; thus in King Lear, II. iv. :

"I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws

Or ere I'll weep:

where the ere gives intensity.

Ere in this and such cases has the same grammatical value as

twice, in Measure for Measure, IV. iii. 92:

"Ere twice the sun hath made his journal greeting

To the under generation, you shall find
Your safety manifested."

Or yet in Paradise Lost, x. 584:

"Ere yet Dictaan Jove was born."

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Hence the phrase or ere,

our mod. "ere ever," is nearly

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66

I.e. ever is an adverb of time. invariably used with a clause, and not as a preposition. We could say 'ere long," ere now," but not "ere ever long," ere ever now." The phrase in our text is to be explained as parallel to "for all the morning light,' ," "against their bridal day;" where the full construction would demand a verb. (See notes, l. 73, and Prothal. 1. 17.) It is, so far as we know, unique. Others interpret the ere in or ere as, in fact, a mere reiteration, the ere added as a sort of gloss, when the meaning of or had ceased to be generally known. In Greek, πρίν and πρότερον are found in the same sentence, Tротероv antecedent; but this is obviously no parallel. Nor can the phrase 'an if," which appeared for a time in our language, be said to justify the above explanation. Moreover, can we not say, "before ever," as him, he acted nobly"? Does "ever" translate "before"?

9. 86. point of dawn. French, point du jour.

90. Warton quotes Spenser's Shep. Cal. May:

"When great Pan account of shepheards shall ask.”

before ever he knew

92. was.

The idea of the subject is singular, though the form is plural. wages of sin is death," &c.

So "the

The

silly. A.-S. salig, happy; then simple, then foolish. Cf. German selig. form seely is found in the Faerie Queene, &c.; sely in Chaucer, Leg. of Fair W.: "O sely woman, full of innocence: "

and in Piers Ploughman.

For the degradation of meaning, comp. simple, innocent. See Trench's Study of Words, and Select Gloss. Comp. euntis.

95. strook, i.e. strook out. Of course, the word more properly applies to the notes of stringed instruments, as in Dryden's Alexander's Feast, 99:

"Now strike the golden lyre again."

Other forms of the participle are stricken, strucken, struck. The form strook is found in Piers Ploughman, &c. Comp. the participial forms, took, forsook, &c.

as, though seemingly, is not really the relative, nor yet the subject, in this and such phrases. The relative is in fact omitted, as is not uncommon. The full phrase would be "as (music) which never was, &c."

VOX.

96. divinely warbled voice.

Voice = something uttered by the voice, as often Latin

Or perhaps, better, warbled = trilled, made to trill or quaver. Comp. Arcad. 87:

"Follow me, as I sing,

And touch the warbled string."

In Com. 854 it means trilled forth, sung:

"If she be right invoked in warbled song.

So, in the active form, in Midsummer Night's Dream, III. ii. 206:

"Both warbling of one song."

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