Mr. Child, in a passion, knock'd down Mr. Rock,
Mr. Stone like an aspen-leaf shivers;
Miss Poole used to dance, but she stands like a stock
Ever since she became Mrs. Rivers;
Mr. Swift hobbles onward, no mortal knows how,
He moves as though cords had entwin'd him;
Mr. Metcalfe ran off, upon meeting a cow,
With pale Mr. Turnbull behind him.
Mr. Barker's as mute as a fish in the sea,
Mr. Miles never moves on a journey;
Mr. Gotobed sits up till half-after three,
Mr. Makepeace was bred an attorney.
Mr. Gardiner can't tell a flower from a root,
Mr. Wilde with timidity draws back,
Mr. Ryder performs all his journeys on foot,
Mr. Foote all his journeys on horseback.
Mr. Penny, whose father was rolling in wealth,
Kick'd down all his fortune his dad won;
Large Mr. Le Fever's the picture of health,
Mr. Goodenough is but a bad one.
Mr. Cruickshank stept into three thousand a year,
By showing his leg to an heiress:--
Now I hope you'll acknowledge I've made it quite clear
That surnames ever go by contraries.
Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury, England.
* * * * *
Advertising material from the end of the book
By Ernest Weekley, M.A.
Professor of French and Head of the Modern Language Department
at University College, Nottingham.
AN ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF MODERN ENGLISH
Crown 4to. Pounds 2 2s. net.
This is somewhat of a new departure in etymological dictionaries. It
embraces a much larger vocabulary than has been handled by previous
etymologists and pays special attention to the colloquialisms and
neologisms which, to the curious mind, are often of more interest than
the established literary language. The origin and cognates of each
word are given as concisely as possible, but "etymology" has been
taken in its widest sense as a science dealing not only with the
phonetic elements of which words are composed, but also with the
adventures which they have met with during their life in the language
and the strange paths that many of them have followed in reaching a
current sense or use often widely remote from the original. So far as
possible, the date or epoch of the first appearance of each word is
noted, and the book will be found to contain much curious information
for which earlier etymological dictionaries would be ransacked in
vain.
THE ROMANCE OF WORDS
Large Crown 8vo. Fourth Impression. 6s. net.
Observer--"A book of extraordinary interest; every one interested in
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The Times--"Mr. Weekley has so artfully sprinkled his pages with odd
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Works by Henry Cecil Wyld
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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