a shortened form, through the French, of the word cadence-from Latin cadentia, things that fall. 9. He does not understand the rules of expediency, but only the law of what is eternally right. 10. His ruin cannot help to raise those who attack him. 11. He begs God to send his own Spirit, rather than to bestow on him external gifts-which are in their own nature indifferent, and may or may not bring with them happiness and strength. 12. A modern writer would have said slavish. 13. This line seems to have been running in Mr. Tennyson's head when he wrote the song in Geraint and Enid : Smile and we smile, the lords of many lands; Frown and we smile, the lords of our own hands; Ex. 9.—Prepare the passages from Sir T. Browne with the following notes: 1. Bribed. 2. The writer means that the time during which our earth existed without any record in history far exceeds that period of which we have some record; and no man can tell the middle point between the two. 3. Juno Lucina-the goddess who presided over births. The meaning is: Death is the birth into a new and genuine life. 4. The short arch (or circuit) which the sun makes in winter. The sun on the 22nd December, for example, makes a very small arch in the sky, because he does not rise nearly so high in the heavens as in June. 5. Sleep. 6. Long life is a dream; and it is folly to expect it. 7. By man. 8. Shadowing forth. 9. Simulachrum, image; light is the shadow of God upon created things. Milton comes near, but not quite up to, the same idea, when he says:— Dark with excess of light thy skirts appear! Ex. 10.-Prepare the passage from Fuller with the following notes:1. Perfunctorily or superficially. 2. The use of a relative, the antecedent of which is in the previous sentence, is Latin, but was very common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The cause of this is to be found in the fact that scholars then wrote quite as much Latin as English, and perhaps more. A modern writer would have said: And the reasons of this. 3. Perchance-a rightly formed word, both parts being Latin. It is probable that perhaps was formed from a false analogy with this word. 4. The rod was for the back; and the ferula for the hand. 5. A modern writer would have said profitable. 6. By. 7. Proxy, in Old English written prokecye, a contracted form of procuracy, taking care (cure) of something for (pro) another. So procurator is shortened into proctor. 8. Usher, from French huissier, from Old French huis, a door. The usher leads the boys through the door (or elements) of each subject. 9. Different. From the verb sever. The word several has hardly any specific meaning now-a-days; it means a number midway between many and a few. 10. Who undertake it. 11. Dexterity, from dexter, right-handed. The opposite notion is that of awkwardness, from awk, left-handed. Compare the French saying: "Both hands of an Englishman are left hands; and all his fingers are thumbs." 12. Characters. 13. Classes. 14. Then than. 15. Nimble-from an old verb to nim to take. Nimble is therefore quick in taking up. 16. Orbilius was a Roman schoolmaster notorious for his extreme severity. He was the Dr. Busby of Rome (see p. 268). Ex. 11. Select from the BIBLE six verses which strike you as very rhythmical. Ex. 12.-FRANCIS QUARLES (1592-1644) was a Cambridge man, a member of Lincoln's Inn, cup-bearer to Elizabeth Queen of Bohemia, secretary to Archbishop Usher, and chronologer ("poet") to the City of London. His best known volume of poems is called The Emblems; and here and there his verses are not without quaintness, vigour, and beauty. QUARLES. Ah! whither shall I fly? what path untrod Shall I seek out to 'scape the flaming rod Of my offended, of my angry God? Nor sea, nor shade, nor shield, nor rock, nor cave, Nor silent deserts, nor the sullen grave, What flame-eyed fury means to smite, can save. 'Tis vain to flee, till gentle Mercy show Great God! there is no safety here below; Thou art my fortress, Thou that seem'st my foe; 'Tis Thou, that strik'st the stroke, must guard the blow. But Ex. 13.-Prepare the passage from Jeremy Taylor, on p. 197, with the following notes: = 1. Countenance-from French contenir, to contain. 2. Hears it talked about. 3. Equally would be better before when. 4. Boastful. We now use brag only as a verb or as a noun; and from the latter we have braggart. 5. Evenly and pleasedly with equal pleasure. This is a Greek and Latin idiom (called hendiadys one thing through two), of which Taylor was extremely fond. So he has showers and refreshment for refreshing showers. See others in the text, p. 217. 6. Prodigal, from Latin prodigo, I drive forth. 7. It is from this passage evident that the word charity was beginning in Taylor's time to take its modern meaning of alms. The classical meaning of the word is love, affection, or good-will. 8. A possessive before sake had no sign of the possessive. 9. The two most public of public places. 10. Manages. 11. Ready. 12. Count, which is a contradiction of compute. Compute comes to us straight from Latin; count, through the medium of the French count is therefore Latin at second-hand. The French have generally squeezed words into few syllables: thus blaspheme has become blame; ratiocinare, raisonner; dissimulare, dissembler, etc. 13. Zodiac and circleanother instance of Taylor's fondness for doublets. The zodiac is the circle or path of the sun. 14. We should now say such as. 15. Taylor's meaning seems to be, that evil or doubtful actions-as they do not contribute to the building up of the inner man-cannot be counted as actions at all; but that good actions are the seeds of a future glorified and spiritual body. he is too verbose; and, if he had written less, would have been read more. After reading the two following sets of verses, that by Quarles and a shortened version, let the pupil write a short paper pointing out where words have been introduced merely to fill up the measure of the line-and in general comparing the two versions :— SHORT VERSION. Ah! whither fly? what path untrod Of my offended, angry God? Nor sea, nor shade, nor rock, nor cave, What Judgment means to smite, can save. 'Tis vain to flee, till Mercy show The child, corrected, doth not fly Great God! no safety here below! Thou strik'st the stroke, thou guard'st the blow. Ex. 14. From the Scripture passages given select all those words which are of Latin origin; and compare the number of them with the number of purely English words. Ex. 15.-Prepare the passage On Prayer, on p. 195, with the following notes: 1. Alienation, from alius, another. Hence also alien, alienate. 2. Right straight. 3. Soar-from French essorer, Provençal eisaurar, from Latin aura, a breeze. 4. Libration-balancing and steadying itself. 5. Services. 6. Business is here used in the old sense of being busy. 7. Discipline bringing a person to his senses or reason. 8. His prayers went up without meaning or intention-proper direction of the will. 9. Taylor piles up all kinds of illustrative circumstances-any that may bring out his meaning more clearly-until he has got confused, and mixes his metaphors and introduces contradictory images. = Ex. 16.-Prepare the two passages on p. 196, with the following notes:1. He is redundant; the sun is the nominative. 2. Matins = morning songs. 3. Is speaking. 4. Disguises-an improperly formed word. Dis is a Latin prefix; and guise is an Old French form of the English word wise = manner. 5. Servants. 6. Freed. 7. Surroundings. 1. CHAPTER XII. MILTON AND BUTLER. OHN MILTON, the son of John and Sarah Milton, was born at the sign of the Spread Eagle,* in Bread Street, Cheapside, in the City of London, on the 9th of December, 1608. This was twenty years after the defeat of the Armada, about which people still talked with the deepest thankfulness in Milton's boyhood, eight years before the death of Shakspeare, and five years after James I. came to the throne. He was baptized on the 20th of the same month, at All-hallows' Church, in Cornhill. His father was a scrivener, the term then applied to an attorney who drew up wills, leases, and other business agreements. In this business he worked hard, and grew rich. He was also well known as an able musician, high in the second rank. Sarah Milton's maiden name is unknown. 2. From his childhood, his father had destined him to the "study of letters; and, throughout his studies, father and son worked with the most earnest co-operation. Milton's first tutor was a Scotchman,―Thomas Young,-"a Puritan who cut his hair short." He was then sent to St. Paul's School, the head-master of which was at that time Alexander Gill, "an ingenious person," who, however, had now and then "his whipping fits." Milton was a hard student from his child * Houses were not then known by numbers, but by the coat of arms of the persons who lived in them; or, if they were shops, by some sign adopted as significant of the trade or commerce carried on. The public-houses" are the only houses that have preserved this custom. Bread Street is opposite Milk Street; and these two streets were the quarter where bread and milk were sold in the ancient West Cheap of the City of London. The word cheap means market; and it reappears in many words and phrases. Chipping Ongar and Chipping Norton, Chippenham, etc., are all names showing the presence of a market. So with Copen-hagen. The phrase cheap was originally at a good cheap, then good cheap (or, by inversion, dog cheap), then simply cheap. We have also chapman, like German Kaufmann. hood. "From my twelfth year," he says, "I scarcely ever went to bed before midnight, which was the first cause of injury to my eyes." 3. In 1625, at the age of seventeen, he entered Christ's College, Cambridge, where he continued to work with the same earnestness and love of learning. A dispute between him and his tutor resulted in his rustication for a term in 1626. Dr. Johnson, in his "Lives of the Poets," says that "Milton was one of the last students at either University who suffered the public indignity of corporal punishment;" but later inquiries have shown that there is not a particle of evidence for this statement. In 1629 he was admitted B.A., and, in 1632, at the age of four and twenty, M.A., when he finally left the University," regretted by most of the fellows of his college, who held him in no ordinary esteem." He received the degree of M.A. from Oxford also, in 1635. 4. His father had bought a small country-house at Horton, in Buckinghamshire; and to this quiet country place he retired for five years' close study. His time was spent chiefly in reading the best Greek and Latin authors, in mathematics, and in the study both of the theory and the practice of music. He now and then visited London to take lessons in science, such science as was then known. Two sad incidents broke the tranquil current of his life at Horton. The first was the death of his mother, on the 3rd of April 1637; and the second, the death by drowning of his college friend, Edward King, on the 10th of August, in the same year. King had taken a passage from the mouth of the Dee, for Kingstown, near Dublin, in a rickety vessel, which foundered with all hands on board, near the Welsh coast. Milton wrote his Lycidas in memory of his friend, and mentions the ship as "That fatal and perfidious bark, Built in the eclipse and rigged with curses dark,* 5. Milton now resolved, with the permission and by the advice of his father, to make a tour on the Continent; not merely for the purpose of seeing foreign countries and remarkable scenes and *This line has been applied by a great orator to the Alabama, the escape of which from Liverpool in 1861 went near to involve the United States and Great Britain in a terrible war. |