12 s. ix. OCT. 29, 1921.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 349 from Cambridge, in his 1918 old age, will have consummate. Our ears have heard not only demonstrate but remonstrate (defended by analogy dan- gerous to invoke by a Cambridge man of three score and ten ; and, in 1914, by Cam- bridge, from Eton, at nearer one score) ; not only demonstrator now, but conservator. They used to be imitators in older -fashioned Ireland, where, in parts, still live imitate, dis- sipate,* and others already cited. There was, more than half a century since, in Mangan's
- Disaster,' in Ireland :
Chill Habitude, steeling The breast, consecrates it to Pride. And Dr. Johnson's mid-eighteenth-century ' Dictionary ' acknowledged ' Goldy ' right, in his postscript to the ' Retaliation ' : Ye tame imitators, ye servile herd, come, f Now, in parts of America, you already make inquiries J as to insurance ; and an Irish M.A. in 1914 calculates his results ; and another denounces profilers no longer spelling profiteers, and feeling for the first syllable slap, followed by the rattle, tumble or mumble. " Things are very unstable" is said in 1918 ; and thus repeated ; until, to make things intelligible, translated to unstable. So the wretched 1914 gave compulsory, disrepute-, and already in 1913 there were opponents ; and a R.E. colonel had lectured, in 1912, on. projectiles from a defile ; the latter allowed him, by misled dictionaries. Now the Poet Laureate's ' New Poems ' tells how His vdlise from his steed unbound. To these soundings, and to so many more and still there's more to follow what would be said by Rogers (1763-1855), with his " Contemplate is bad enough, but balcony makes me sick " ? (The poet would love, the more, at least one peer no aged, aged man who, in 1918, says he contemplates the Commons' House from its balcony.) In 1782 John Gilpin's loving wife From the balcony spied Her tender husband, wondering much, To see how he did ride. And still, in 1817, ' Beppo ' (xv.) said that like a picture by Giorgione Venetian women were, and so they are, Particularly seen from a balcony.
- Old-fashioned, in another way, Oxford,
home of lost causes, likes to dwell still on optative perhaps more often than not. t Echo of Horace, Ep. I. xix. 19 : " O imitatores servum pecus." t Boston would say she never heard of them. But you hear them made in Philadelphia and further south. Byron's common Scots folk would till now say so ; if of such things they took note. And indeed the ' Encyclopaedic Dic- tionary,' ending 1888, gives both balcony and balcony. For better or worse the * N.E.D.' gives only thanksgiving which, to some in Scot- land, sounds, they say, more Scots than English. ( The whole matter ' ' stands tickle . " ) Of course Shakespeare : Rosaline : And yours from long living ! Biron : I cannot stay thanksgiving. (' Love's Labour's Lost,' II. i. 193.) And so at every yearly recurrence of a high feast, a V 'americaine, November's Thankgiving. The English Poet Laureate, too, declares himself full of thanksgiving in November, 1918, on termination of war : Keep our love living Till all men neath heaven's dome Sing Freedom's harvest home In one thanksgiving. And pretext ' N.E.D.' notes pretext until c. 1840-50. So ' Philip van Artevelde * (1834), V. ix. : If through pretexts of justice I am doomed. Then, ' The Gardener's Daughter ' (1842) : Light pretexts drew me : sometimes a Dutch love For tulips. The older in this case less melodious stress (French still with the difference) may have the merit of perhaps better suggesting the whistling voice of the bird, in Crabbe's (1819) ' Tales of the Hall ' : With not a sound, beside, except when flew Aloft the lapwing, or the grey curle'w. A newer, perhaps, " licence " note is in Keats' s ' To Fanny ' but heard perhaps in 'Lear,' III. iv. 72, and still more in ' Othello,' V. ii. 348 : Ah ! if you prize my subdu'd soul above The poor, the fading . . . which she did not. At any rate, to repeat, the later -in-the- word accent nearly always gives space and better " vowelling." One allows, that though less often than some suppose the love for the better sound has been happy licence * on the part
- What might not a Cambridge scholar thus
criticizing what would he not say to Rupert Brooke on what was his own ? " For England's the one land I know Where men with Splendid Hearts may go, And Cambridgeshire, of all England, The shire for Men who Understand." And yet, the sounds there have some sense.
