And as it is here with an historic fact, so still more often will it happen with the subtler changes which words have undergone. Out of this it will continually happen that they convey now much more blame and condemnation, or convey now much less, than formerly they did; or of a different kind; and a reader not aware of the altered value which they now possess, may be in continual danger of misreading his author, of misunderstanding his intentions, while he has no doubt whatever that he perfectly apprehends and takes it in. Thus when Shakespeare in _1 Henry VI_ makes the gallant York address Joan of Arc as a ‘miscreant’, how coarse a piece of invective this sounds; how unlike what the chivalrous soldier would have uttered; or what one might have supposed Shakespeare, even with his unworthy estimate of the holy warrior Maid, would have put into his mouth. But a ‘miscreant’ in Shakespeare’s time had nothing of the meaning which now it has. It was simply, in agreement with its etymology, a misbeliever, one who did not believe rightly the Articles of the Catholic Faith. And I need not remind you that this was the constant charge which the English brought against Joan,--namely, that she was a dealer in hidden magical arts, a witch, and as such had fallen from the faith. On this plea they burnt her, and it is this which York means when he calls her a ‘miscreant’, and not what we should intend by the name. In reading of poetry above all what beauties are often missed, what forces lost, through this assumption that the present of a word is always equivalent to its past. How often the poet is wronged in our estimation; that seeming to us now flat and pointless, which at once would lose this character, did we know how to read into some word the emphasis which it once had, but which now has departed from it. For example, Milton ascribes in _Comus_ the “_tinsel-slippered_ feet” to Thetis, the goddess of the sea. How comparatively poor an epithet this ‘tinsel-slippered’ sounds for those who know of ‘tinsel’ only in its modern acceptation of mean and tawdry finery, affecting a splendour which it does not really possess. But learn its earlier use by learning its derivation, bring it back to the French ‘étincelle’, and the Latin ‘scintillula’; see in it, as Milton and the writers of his time saw, ‘the sparkling’, and how exquisitely beautiful a title does this become applied to a goddess of the sea; how vividly does it call up before our mind’s eye the quick glitter and sparkle of the waves under the light of sun or moon{200}. It is Homer’s ‘silver-footed’ (ἀργυρόπεζα), not servilely transferred, but reproduced and made his own by the English poet, dealing as one great poet will do with another; who will not disdain to borrow, but to what he borrows will add often a further grace of his own. {Sidenote: ‘_Influence_’}