[Footnote 1: _The Works of William Shakspeare_. Edited, etc., by RICHARD GRANT WHITE. Vols. II., III., IV, and V. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1858.]
[Footnote 2: As where Ben Jonson is able to say,--"Men may securely sin, but safely never."]
[Footnote 3: "Vulgarem locutionem appellamus eam quâ infantes adsuefiunt ab adsistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt: vel, quod brevius dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus _quam sine omni regulâ, nutricem imitantes, accepimus_." Dante, _de Vulg. Eloquio_, Lib. I. cap. i.]
[Footnote 4: Gray, himself a painful corrector, told Nicholls that "nothing was done so well as at the first concoction,"--adding, as a reason, "We think in words." Ben Jonson said, it was a pity Shakspeare had not blotted more, for that he sometimes wrote nonsense,--and cited in proof of it the verse
"Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."
The last four words do not appear in the passage as it now stands, and Professor Craik suggests that they were stricken out in consequence of Jonson's criticism. This is very probable; but we suspect that the pen that blotted them was in the hand of Master Heminge or his colleague. The moral confusion in the idea was surely admirably characteristic of the general who had just accomplished a successful _coup d'état_, the condemnation of which he would fancy that he read in the face of every honest man he met, and which he would therefore be forever indirectly palliating.]
[Footnote 6: We use the word _Latin_ here to express words derived either mediately or immediately from that language.]
[Footnote 7: The prose of Chaucer (1390) and of Sir Thomas Malory (translating from the French, 1470) is less Latinized than that of Bacon, Browne, Taylor, or Milton. The glossary to Spenser's _Shepherd's Calendar_ (1579) explains words of Teutonic and Romanic root in about equal proportions. The parallel but independent development of Scotch is not to be forgotten.]
[Footnote 8: We believe that for the last two centuries the Latin radicals of English have been more familiar and homelike to those who use them than the Teutonic. Even so accomplished a person as Professor Craik, in his _English of Shakspeare_, derives _head_, through the German _haupt_, from the Latin _caput_! We trust that its genealogy is nobler, and that it is of kin with _coelum tueri_, rather than with the Greek [Greek: kephalae], if Suidas be right in tracing the origin of that to a word meaning _vacuity_. Mr. Craik suggests, also, that _quick_ and _wicked_ may be etymologically identical, _because_ he fancies a relationship between _busy_ and the German _böse_, though _wicked_ is evidently the participial form of A.S. _wacan_, (German _weichen_,) _to bend, to yield_, meaning _one who has given way to temptation_, while _quick_ seems as clearly related to _wegan_, meaning _to move_, a different word, even if radically the same. In the _London Literary Gazette_ for Nov. 13, 1858, we find an extract from Miss Millington's _Heraldry in History, Poetry, and Romance_, in which, speaking of the motto of the Prince of Wales,--_De par Houmout ich diene_,--she says, "The precise meaning of the former word [_Houmout_] has not, I think, been ascertained." The word is plainly the German _Hochmuth_, and the whole would read, _De par (Aus) Hochmuth ich diene_,--"Out of magnanimity I serve." So entirely lost is the Saxon meaning of the word _knave_, (A.S. _cnava_, German _knabe_,) that the name _nauvie_, assumed by railway-laborers, has been transmogrified into _navigator_. We believe that more people could tell why the month of July was so called than could explain the origin of the names for our days of the week, and that it is oftener the Saxon than the French words in Chaucer that puzzle the modern reader.]