[Footnote 2: Chaucer (_Troilus and Creseide_) imagines the nightingale to "stint" at the beginning of its song, and to be frightened at the least noise.] [Footnote 3: This, and the epithets of "sole-sitting" and "unseen," refer to the nightingale's love of solitary seclusion.] [Footnote 4: "He slep no more than doth the nightingale." Chaucer, _Cant. Pil._] * * * * * ON A PASSAGE IN OROSIUS. In King Alfred's version of Orosius, book ii. chap. iv. p. 68., Barrington, we have an account of an unsuccessful attempt made by one of Cyrus the Great's officers to swim across a river "mid twam tyncenum," with two _tynkens_. What was a _tyncen_? That was the question nearly a hundred years ago, when Barrington was working out his translation; and the only answer to be found then was contained in the great dictionary published by Lye and Manning, but is not found now in Dr. Bosworth's second edition of his Dictionary: "Tynce, _a tench_." How the Persian nobleman was to be supported by two little fishes, which were more likely to land their passenger at the bottom of the river than on the opposite bank, we are left to guess. But, before we proceed with the experiment, let us see that we have got the fishes. That tench was in the Gyndis we have no authority for denying; but, if its Anglian or Saxon name was such as the dictionary exhibits, we have no trace of it {400} in the text of Alfred; for under no form of declension, acknowledged in grammar, will _tynce_ ever give _tyncenum_. We have no need, then, to spend time in calculating the chance of success, when we have not the means of making the experiment. As either _tync_ or _tynce_ would give _tyncum_, not _tyncenum_, the latter must come out of _tyncen_ (query, _tynkin_ or _tunkin_, a little tun, a barrel, or a cask?). Such was the form in which the question presented itself to my mind, upon my first examination of the passage three or four years ago, but which was given up without sufficient investigation, owing to an impression that if such had been the meaning, it was so simple and obvious that nobody could have missed it. An emergency, which I need not explain here, has within these few days recalled my attention to the subject; and I have no reason to be ashamed, or to make a secret, of the result.