Gleanings from the Harvest-Fields of Literature: A Melange of Excerpta
General
Gleanings from the Harvest-Fields of Literature: A Melange of Excerpta
Literary curiosa; Literature -- Dictionaries
That not very elegant adjective _bully_, though found in Bartlett, and
used by Washington Irving cannot be claimed as an Americanism. Friar
Tuck sings, in Scott’s _Ivanhoe_:—
“Come troll the brown bowl to me, bully boy,
Come troll the brown bowl to me.”
But to go further back, we find it in the burden of an old three-part
song, “We be three poor Mariners,” in Ravenscroft’s _Deuteromelia_,
1609:
“Shall we go dance the round, the round,
Shall we go dance the round;
And he that is a bully boy,
Come pledge me on the ground.”
One of the words which the English used to class among
Americanisms—ignorant that it was older and better English than their
own usage—was _Fall_, used as the name of the third of the seasons. The
English, corrupted by the Johnsonese of the Hanoverian reigns, call it
by the Latinism, Autumn. But the other term, in general use on this side
of the Atlantic, is the word by which all the old writers of the
language know it. “The hole yere,” says scholarly Roger Ascham in his
_Toxophilus_, “is divided into iiii. partes, Spring tyme, Sommer, Faule
of the leafe, & Winter, whereof the hole winter for the roughnesse of
it, is cleane taken away from shoting: except it be one day amonges xx.,
or one yeare amonges xi.”
This statement, by the way, that exceptionally mild winters were in the
ratio of one to eleven, is worth noting with reference to the recent
announcement of science that the spots on the sun have an eleven-year
period of maximum frequency.
NO LOVE LOST BETWEEN THEM.
In the ordinary acceptation of the words, “No love was lost between the
two,” we are led to infer that the two were on very unfriendly terms.
But in the ballad of _The Babes in the Wood_, as given in Percy’s
_Reliques_, occur the following lines, which convey the contrary idea:—
No love between this two was lost,
Each was to other kind:
In love they lived, in love they died,
And left two babes behind.
THE FORLORN HOPE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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