It is not very uncommon for a word, while it is derived from one word, to receive a certain impulse and modification from another. This extends sometimes beyond the spelling, and in cases where it does so, would hardly belong to our present theme. Still I may notice an instance or two. Thus our ‘obsequies’ is the Latin ‘exequiæ’, but formed under a certain impulse of ‘obsequium’, and seeking to express and include the observant honour of that word. ‘To refuse’ is ‘recusare’, while yet it has derived the ‘f’ of its second syllable from ‘refutare’; it is a medley of the two{265}. The French ‘rame’, an oar, is ‘remus’, but that modified by an unconscious recollection of ‘ramus’. ‘Orange’ is no doubt a Persian word, which has reached us through the Arabic, and which the Spanish ‘naranja’ more nearly represents than any form of it existing in the other languages of Europe. But what so natural as to think of the orange as the _golden_ fruit, especially when the “_aurea_ mala” of the Hesperides were familiar to all antiquity? There cannot be a doubt that ‘aurum’, ‘oro’, ‘or’, made themselves felt in the shapes which the word assumed in the languages of the West, and that here we have the explanation of the change in the first syllable, as in the low Latin ‘aurantium’, ‘orangia’, and in the French ‘orange’, which has given us our own. It is foreign words, or words adopted from foreign languages, as might beforehand be expected, which are especially subjected to such transformations as these. The soul which the word once had in its own language, having, for as many as do not know that language, departed from it, or at least not being now any more to be recognized by such as employ the word, these are not satisfied till they have put another soul into it, and it has thus become alive to them again. Thus--to take first one or two very familiar instances, but which serve as well as any other to illustrate my position--the Bellerophon becomes for our sailors the ‘Billy Ruffian’, for what can they know of the Greek mythology, or of the slayer of Chimæra? an iron steamer, the Hirondelle, now or lately plying on the Tyne, is the ‘Iron Devil’. ‘_Contre_ danse’, or dance in which the parties stand _face to face_ with one another, and which ought to have appeared in English as ‘_counter_ dance’, does become ‘_country_ dance’{266}, as though it were the dance of the country folk and rural districts, as distinguished from the quadrille and waltz and more artificial dances of the town{267}. A well known rose, the “rose _des quatre saisons_”, or of the four seasons, becomes on the lips of some of our gardeners, the “rose of the _quarter sessions_”, though here it is probable that the eye has misled, rather than the ear. ‘Dent de lion’, (it is spelt ‘dentdelyon’ in our early writers) becomes ‘dandylion’, “_chaude_ melée”, or an affray in _hot_ blood, “_chance_-medley”{268}, ‘causey’ (chaussée) becomes ‘causeway’{269}, ‘rachitis’ ‘rickets’{270},