Then too diminutives are fast disappearing from the language. If we desire to express smallness, we prefer to do it by an auxiliary word; thus a little fist, and not a ‘fistock’ (Golding), a little lad, and not a ‘ladkin’, a little worm, rather than a ‘wormling’ (Sylvester). It is true that of diminutives very many still survive, in all our four terminations of such, as ‘hillock’, ‘streamlet’, ‘lambkin’, ‘gosling’; but those which have perished are many more. Where now is ‘kingling’ (Holland), ‘whimling’ (Beaumont and Fletcher), ‘godling’, ‘loveling’, ‘dwarfling’, ‘shepherdling’ (all in Sylvester), ‘chasteling’ (Bacon), ‘niceling’ (Stubbs), ‘fosterling’ (Ben Johnson), and ‘masterling’? Where now ‘porelet’ (=paupercula, Isai. x. 30, Vulg.), ‘bundelet’, (both in Wiclif); ‘cushionet’ (Henry More), ‘havenet’, or little ‘haven’, ‘pistolet’, ‘bulkin’ (Holland), and a hundred more? Even of those which remain many are putting off, or have long since put off, their diminutive sense; a ‘pocket’ being no longer a _small_ poke, nor a ‘latchet’ a _small_ lace, nor a ‘trumpet’ a small _trump_, as once they were. {Sidenote: _Thou and Thee_} Once more--in the entire dropping among the higher classes of ‘thou’, except in poetry or in addresses to the Deity, and as a necessary consequence, the dropping also of the second singular of the verb with its strongly marked flexion, as ‘lovest’, ‘lovedst’, we have another example of a force once existing in the language, which has been, or is being, allowed to expire. In the seventeenth century ‘thou’ in English, as at the present ‘du’ in German, ‘tu’ in French, was the sign of familiarity, whether that familiarity was of love, or of contempt and scorn{195}. It was not unfrequently the latter. Thus at Sir Walter Raleigh’s trial (1603), Coke, when argument and evidence failed him, insulted the defendant by applying to him the term ‘thou’:--“All that Lord Cobham did was at _thy_ instigation, _thou_ viper, for I _thou_ thee, _thou_ traitor”. And when Sir Toby Belch in _Twelfth Night_ is urging Sir Andrew Aguecheek to send a sufficiently provocative challenge to Viola, he suggests to him that he “taunt him with the licence of ink; if thou _thou’st_ him some thrice, it shall not be amiss”. To keep this in mind will throw much light on one peculiarity of the Quakers, and give a certain dignity to it, as once maintained, which at present it is very far from possessing. However needless and unwise their determination to ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ the whole world was, yet this had a significance. It was not, as now to us it seems, and, through the silent changes which language has undergone, as now it indeed is, a gratuitous departure from the ordinary usage of society. Right or wrong, it meant something, and had an ethical motive: being indeed a testimony upon their parts, however misplaced, that they would not have high or great or rich men’s persons in admiration; nor give the observance to some which they withheld from others.