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CHAPTER THE THIRD.

MOTHER ENGLISH, FOLK-SPEECH, FOLK-LORE, AND LITERATURE.

I.

The language of the time.

At the beginning of English emigration to America the language was the narrow speech of an island people not much given to foreign enterprise. This stay-at-home tongue was very different from the comprehensive English spoken now in many climes and antipodal countries, and heard more world-widely than any other language since speech began. It is the implement of two most powerful, adventurous, and versatile peoples. Then it was held in contempt of scholars, who preferred to use imperial Latin, which made the learned men of Europe one nation and distinguished them from the vulgar.[1] Long after the religious unity of the Western world had ceased, the Roman Empire dominated the language of philosophy and law and religion. English was an insular speech, but it was not by any means the language of the whole island. To the Scottish Highlanders and to the Welshmen it was a foreign tongue; Cornishmen had violently opposed the Reformation mainly because they would not endure to have their service read and their Bible printed in English,[2] to them a jargon

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more unintelligible than the Latin they had been wont to hear in church from childhood.[1] Even in what may be called English England the language was everywhere cleft into dialects and subdialects. It was still a matter of discussion where standard English could be found. The rugged forms of the shires north of the Trent were accounted the purer English; there the language had absorbed a smaller number of French and Latin words than it had in the south.[2] On the other hand, the speech of London and its environs was preferred, because it was “more courtly and more current.” This courtly speech, the language of poetry and the playhouse and the forerunner of our modern English, prevailed in the region that lay within about sixty miles of London “and not much above.”[3] There were gentlemen in all the shires that could “speak good Southerne,” but most of the gentlemen and men of learning—the “learned clarkes,” as they were called—habitually spoke the dialects of the common people of their counties. Even the “good Southerne” of the court was not yet fixed by rule, but was in a state of flux.[4] This gave an advantage to the writer of first-rate power; he might select from the varied and ever-varying storehouse of common speech, and even from homelier dialect sometimes, such vital words and vivid proverbial phrases as fitted his thought. He could bend the yet supple language to his purpose untrammeled by conventional restraint and without fear of the grammarian. The language has never been more

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fresh and effective than it was in the hands of the masters of the Elizabethan time. But the great body of writers, being men of mediocrity, found in it no well-worn grooves through which common-place utterance might flow smoothly without expert guidance.

II.

The exigency of English.

On the side of poetic and imaginative expression English had been enriched before the sailing of the first Virginia emigrants, and it was further enriched in the years immediately following, chiefly through the drama and prose works in theology. But almost the only refining and enlarging influence of that time of literary activity that reached the speech of the common people, to which class most of the emigrants belonged, was the authorized translation of the Bible, which was published in 1611, and which by degrees took the place of the older and ruder versions. The language may have acquired something from the sea ventures of the time to Turkey and Russia and the Spanish main. “Secretaries Marchaunts and trauailours” were already introducing alien words, but England possessed little foreign commerce and did not yet promise to take rank as a sea power.[1] The sudden demand upon this close-cabined island speech in the seventeenth century for means to represent the endless objects, actions, and experiences of the New World and of a widening commerce was one of the most efficient forces for developing modern English.[2]

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III.

Misapprehensions of English

A language carried into a new environment brings with it preconceived notions not in harmony with the surroundings; the ideas that are imbedded in our ordinary speech seem to us a part of the original constitution of the universe, and the traditional notions associated with common words serve to fortify local and national prejudice. In the wilderness of America English speech was a misfit; an Indian chief, however squalid and beggarly, was forthwith translated into a king; the stark-naked little squaw child Pocahontas, turning herself into a wheel in imitation of the boys with whom she played at Jamestown, bore in English the incongruous title of princess. We hear of an “Indian king” in New Jersey who was hired to carry a traveler’s baggage; and after encountering many scrubby royalties, it is a relief to find in New England one chief who was only a duke. The early adoption into colonial speech of the discriminating Indian titles—werowance, sachem, sagamore, and cockerouse—and the application at last of the generic English word chief, helped to dissipate a swarm of erroneous notions. More specific terms were the result of fuller knowledge; the compound bark house in which an “emperor,” like Powhatan, dwelt as co-tenant with numerous families of his wife’s totem, ceased to be a palace and became a wigwam. It was thus that English by degrees adjusted itself to a new environment.

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IV.

Naming the animals.

The settler in America, like Adam in the new-made world, was called upon to give names “to the fowl of the air and to every beast of the field.” This was done in some cases most naturally by descriptive epithets, such as bluebird, mocking-bird, catbird, canvas-back duck, flying squirrel, black bear. But the newcomer was sure to think he recognized in the primitive woods the plants and birds and beasts known or half known to him in the Old World. American creatures thus got second-hand names from real or supposed resemblances.[1] The bison became a buffalo; the plantigrade raccoon does duty in some accounts as an ape or a monkey; the puma, as the largest American cat, became a “lyon” in Virginia, a panther and a catamount in various places, while it remained a “tyger” in South Carolina for more than a hundred years.[2] The ear of the homesick emigrant caught the melody of bird songs that reminded him of the delicious vespers of the nightingale which he was nevermore to hear.[3] Various birds were thus brevetted with the name of the European songster. In Virginia this substitute nightingale was the voluble redbird, according to Clayton, though in earlier lists both redbird and nightingale appear.[4] In New England there were also so-called nightingales “painted with orient colors—black, white, blew, yellow, green, and scarlet,” according to Josselyn’s multitudinous description.[5]

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The Delaware region had its nightingale.[1] The brown-throated song sparrow is unhesitatingly identified with the nightingale of Europe by French Canadians to this day. With one accord English settlers north and south endowed a migratory red-breasted thrush with the name and all the traditional sentiment that belonged to the smaller and more domestic “robin redbreast” of England. The mistake did not go unsuspected, for in some northern regions there is an attempt to rectify it by calling the Baltimore bird “the old-England robin,” a name that misses the mark again, but that from its form must have been set agoing in the earliest colonial time.

V.

The turkey.

In popular thought at the period of American settlement every place beyond the countries of Europe was a region of outer darkness dominated by devils who were worshiped as deities. The typical infidel was the Turk, the ancient foe of Christendom; an idol was therefore called a mawmet, that is to say, a Mahomet, from a notion that the Arabian prophet was a false god. It may have been from this general confounding of all the world that lay without Christendom that some plants and animals from the New World easily got the name of Turkey or Turkish attached to them. The fowl we call by that name was in French a coq d inde or Indian cock, whence the modern French dinde and dindon. The confusion between the East and

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West Indies led no doubt to the curious German name “Calcutta hen,” though even in German “Indian cocks and hens” appear.[1] In England the turkey was sometimes called the Indish peacock or the “peacock of Inde” in the sixteenth century, so that the peacock pies on which judges and others were sometimes feasted at the time may have been concocted of turkeys.[2] If the English name of turkey did not come from a general disposition to trace all outlandish things to the home of the Eastern infidel, it perhaps was borrowed from the bustard, with which the turkey was supposed to be allied in the easy natural history of the time.[3]

VI.

Indian corn and beans.

Indian corn, an American plant in origin, cultivated throughout almost the whole western hemisphere, was early called Turkish corn by the Italians. The name seems to have been transplanted from Italian into other Continental languages, and in English speech it was also sometimes Turkish wheat. Ralph Lane, Ralegh’s commander in North Carolina, calls it “Gynneye wheat.”[4] From the time of Acosta there have been those who have sought with futile ingenuity to deduce an Oriental origin for maize, founding their argument mainly on the blunder in the Italian name. This prolific mistake may have sprung from a confusion of maize with buckwheat, which on account of its Asiatic origin bore the name of Saracen corn.[5] Maize,

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as another sort of coarse grain, was also called Saracen corn, but usually Turkish corn. Other nations were wont in the sixteenth century to take fashions of all sorts from Italy, and the name there given to maize became common. Even the kidney bean, which was one of the most valued contributions of the American Indians to European food products, was called the Turkish bean, for no other reason perhaps than that it twined about the so-called Turkish corn. It was mistakenly identified with the “Turkish garavance,” the chick pea. The word maize did not come into use in the English colonies; a letter of the Virginia Company calls the plant “maes” and “mace”; but maize remains to-day only a book word in America. In 1651 a Virginia writer calls the plant Indian wheat, and later it appears as Virginia wheat. It gradually came to be called in all the colonies Indian corn, to distinguish it from other cereals. The natural abridgment of the word in popular use has made the generic word corn stand for a particular kind of corn unknown in England. In New England, where the phrase English corn long survived, the other end of the word was dropped, and “Indian” very early came to stand for maize even after it had been ground and cooked. Grotesque combinations like “fried Indian” have lingered in dialect to our time. The season for reaping the familiar English grains was called by the emigrants the English harvest, the later ingathering of maize was the Indian harvest. From this distinction, perhaps,

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came the name Indian summer for the season of balmy weather that befalls in the autumn when a halcyon stillness pervades the hazy air and the whole landscape lies enchanted. The name was probably of merely agricultural origin, but is nowadays full of poetic associations with the delicious season and a vanished people.

VII.

The parts of maize and dishes made from it.

Indian corn became the staple food product of the colonists, and English was put to all its makeshifts to find names for its parts and products and the novel processes attending its culture and uses. Stalk, blade, and ear were easily transferred from other sorts of corn, but for the blossoms the words silk and tassel were felicitous tropes. The envelope of the ear gave trouble. Megapolensis, an early Dutch writer, calls the husks “leaves.” Strachey, in speaking of “a kind of wheat” which the Indians call “poketawes,” describes the ears as growing each “with a great hose or pill about it.” The Virginians applied an English dialect word, “shuck,” to the “hose” about the ear, the New England colonist adopted husk, and in the extreme South the infelicitous phrase “corn trash” came into use, and all three are still living. Husk, which in New England expressed the outer covering of the ear, was in the middle and in some southern regions quite as fittingly given to the bran, the covering of the grain, while in certain regions of Virginia the same word, usually pronounced

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“huss,” meant the cob on which the grains grew; nor is this use yet obsolete. This cob was at first called “the coare of the ear,” the word cob was in New England at first used for the whole ear, as it was in English dialect for ears of wheat or barley. It has at last come to mean in America the spike on which the grains stand. In all this effort of the English language to stretch its vocabulary to embrace the new plant and its parts it strangely disdained to borrow a word from the Indian tongues. But when we come to the dishes prepared from maize, the Indian words incorporated in our speech are living witnesses to the adoption of aboriginal cookery. Bread was called ponap in the dialect of the James River Indians; from this word we get “pone,” variously applied in American English to several sorts of maize bread. Ustatahamen, a name for the grits or coarser parts of the crushed corn, gives us the word hominy. Samp, supawn, succotash are Indian dishes which brought their ancient names with them as a convenient mode of distinguishing them from food preparations of other cereals.

VIII.

American animals.

The animals were not easily fitted with English titles; their skins and flesh were objects of trade between the two races, and many kept a semblance of their ancient names. The Virginia mussascus of Captain Smith is the

of New England poetry, and his skin appears by

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this title in the dull prose of English customs returns. A Pennsylvania form, “musquasses,” appears to be midway between the Virginia and the New England names. With a gravitation toward English forms the word is musquagh in Oldmixon, but it changed more swiftly in America; it was sometimes muscat, a name given to the civet, and as early as 1649 it was “a muske Rat so-called for his great sweetnesse and shape,” as though the Indian original had been forgotten. As early as 1683 Clayton called it mush-rat, a form still generally used in rustic speech. Other Indian words put on bits of English toggery; matchcore was a word in Algonkin dialects meaning a deerskin. When the Indian accepted a colored blanket from the white man in exchange for his matchcore, he gave the same name to his blanket. The colonial trader was impelled to put a semblance of sense into the word by calling it match-coat, and the word in this form was widely used by the colonists. Copyists of old handwriting, not suspecting that it was only a blanket, have made it watch-coat, and in this misleading form it will puzzle posterity in Irving’s prose. The general repulsion to the use of aboriginal words was no doubt increased by the polysyllabic prolixity of the agglutinated vocables that gave stateliness to the intervals of utterance with which a savage broke the monotony of his native taciturnity. Indian words were unhandy vehicles for the ideas of a colloquial and gossiping race. Ustatahamen

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had to be reduced to hominy to match the corresponding English word furmity, applied at first to corn. Pawscohicora was split through the middle to get the English word hickory, and the last syllable of isquontersquash was all that could be transplanted into New England English. Chechinquamen was a hard nut in English mouths until the Virginians made it chinkapin. Wampumpeak, the Indian name for white shell beads used for money, was divided; wampum passed current in one region, and peak or peague in another. The New York Dutch called the shell money sewant from another Indian word, while Virginia shell beads were known as roenoke from the Indian rawrenock. In the course of traffic and friendship between the two races a sort of pidgin English was formed as a medium, a half-breed speech only partly intelligible nowadays. Certain words of greeting, like “netop,” friend, came into temporary use among the colonists along with honorary titles of leadership, such as the “cockerouse” of Maryland and Virginia, and the “mugwump” of parts of New England. Much of it was local and temporary, and the residuum is small. To-day the English language, with the tolerance of a cosmopolitan, begs or borrows from barbarous sources the world over, but the home-bred speech of the period of American settlement seems to have cherished fastidious prejudices against foreign words without Latin ancestry to back them.

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IX.

English dialects.

The absence of a well-established standard for English speech in the early Stuart period produced confusion in the colonies. Travel was not frequent between the several parts of England, and local feeling had the intensity of patriotism. Selden tells us that societies of men from a particular shire were formed in London. The men from a given county might thus allay the homesickness of their exile by meeting those who held to the same customs and sauced their speech with the same local words and accents. When an American region, larger or smaller, was settled by a body of emigrants from the same English neighborhood, many of the words and much of the twang of their ancient dialect would survive for generations. We have here a probable explanation of a marked difference of speech between two adjacent communities. John Lyon Gardiner recorded, in 1798, that on Long Island an Easthampton man might be known from a Southampton man “as well as a native of Kent may be distinguished from a Yorkshire man.” The two towns adjoin and the two communities had been living side by side for more than a hundred and fifty years when this wide difference of speech was found still persisting. In Dorchester, Massachusetts, the land measures retained a local English trait; one finds the old Dorsetshire measure of a goad in the early records. In Groton there are heard to this day “some little expressions

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and quaint uses of words” not known twenty-five miles away. In yet another Massachusetts town such unusual survivals as “dafter” for daughter have been noted in recent years. In some regions the English dialects must have been neutralized by interference; there were many colonial families in which the mother tongue varied from the father’s speech. In a single Virginia parish register between 1660 and 1670 emigrants from Yorkshire, on the one hand, and from Kent and Surrey, on the other, rub shoulders with men and women from the midland of England. Now and then the word “native” against a name in the marriage register marks the young Virginian bred in this babellian confusion of English diversities. It is hard to say how his speech would be affected by the varieties of vocabulary and the contrarieties of pronunciation about him. The peculiarities known in his descendants of to-day as Americanisms, or localisms, he might readily have borrowed from both ends of England without leaving his parish, possibly without leaving his own doorstone.

X.

American dialect.

American rustic lingoes show innumerable expressions detached from the ancient dialects and rearranged not by hazard, but as the result of influences too obscure to be traced. There have been natural selection, modification by intermingling, and changes of use produced by environment; no

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English dialect has bodily survived removal. But the English origin of our rustic words and accents is generally evident. For example, the twang longest associated with America by dialect writers is the distortion of certain words imperfectly represented in the spelling of heouse, teown, and keow, for house, town, and cow. Franklin long ago set down in Poor Richard’s Almanac his observation that the residents of Connecticut and Cape May called a cow a keow “by a certain involuntary twist at the root of the tongue.” This crescendo vowel is the recognized tag of the burlesque Yankee of the stage and comic literature. Its feline drawl may yet be caught in a state of nature in some of the mountain districts of New England, but it also exists far to the southward. There are London small shopkeepers who, along with a mock Latin “dies” for days, have an unmistakable mew in “heouse” and “teown” and “abeout.” There is nothing in English dialect more evidently ancient, for it was a trait of the archaic patois of a portion of County Wexford, in Ireland, which was settled by a colony of English people who crossed St. George’s Channel in the middle ages under Strongbow, full two hundred years before Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were written. These mediæval emigrants took out of England with them in a. d 1169 and a little later such Yankee forms as “greoune” for ground, “pleough” for plow, and “teown” for town. They had other words found in American rustic dialects so widely distributed

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as not to be local, such as “kotch” for caught, “kiver” for cover, “man” for husband. These and other words were transplanted from England to America four or five hundred years after the species had taken root in Ireland. Take another of the many examples of tough survival. The farmer in some parts of northern New York and elsewhere calls a fraction of a wagon load a jag. The word was colonial; in a diary of 1763 a New England parson takes pains to set down among the small doings of his farm that he had “gott in 2 jaggs of Rowens.” This and other bits of American dialect can be explained only by going to the mother country. In Yorkshire some primitive modes of transportation still survive. The pack horse that climbs the steep moor side laden with coals for the limekilns in the mountains that overlook the Dale of the Wharfe is known as the jagging horse and the burden under which he reels is a jag. The American settlers used the jagging or pack horse on narrow forest trails throughout the colonial period. When wheels in summer and sleds in winter took the place of packing or “jagging,” a small load of hay or wheat or rowen, suitable for a horse’s back or to be drawn by a single horse, was still called a jag.

XI.

Negro speech.

Negro speech in the early colonies was of as many varieties perhaps as there were tribes, and

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this may be one reason why there remains no considerable admixture of African words. Broken English, some grotesque examples of which are recorded, succeeded to the African tongues, and as there were large bodies of new negroes it is likely that some habitual distortions persisted in negro speech. Now and then an African word survived for a while. There was “quaqua,” an instrument of music or of noise, but the word and the thing went down together. Buckra, a name for the white man on the African coast, reappeared in the West Indies and in the Carolinas. Perhaps the only old negro word surviving now is “juba,” to which no definable sense attaches. The negro “hit” was court English in Elizabeth’s time; the supposed negro words “den,” “dey,” “dat,” for them, they, that, appear in verses written in the modern dialect of Surrey. African speech has left hardly a trace even upon dialect in the United States. Slave speech caught its first accents from the bond servants and convicts who worked along-side the negro and from illiterate overseers. It probably preserved much that was worst in the English of the seventeenth century.

XII.

Social conditions.

Social conditions in America affected speech; the environment produced practical changes. The old labels applied but imperfectly to new classifications. In England a gentleman did not object

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to the title of servant, which in some cases was even an honorable distinction. But the large number of bond people sold into America to pay their passage, or as a penalty for petty crimes, seem to have gradually brought the word servant into disrepute. The bondage of a redemptioner, who might be sold from owner to owner, was degrading and his treatment was sometimes oppressive. Those who were employed not bound were at pains to be known by a distinctive term; hence the frequent recurrence of the words “hired servant.” When negro slaves were added in large numbers to the servile class, the name of servant was naturally rendered more odious by English race pride and Christian detestation of the heathen. As early as 1651 the phrase “any servant or other helpe in the family” occurs in the Massachusetts Records. “Hired man,” “hand,” and “hired girl” have come into use later from the same disposition to avoid the word servant. This dislike, which seems to have been half latent in the colonies, was greatly helped perhaps by that strange and widespread irruption of democratic sentiment which occurred in the later colonial and Revolutionary times. The distinction between a “Goodman” and a “Mr.” or gentleman had not disappeared in the seventeenth century; it was in general use at Salem in the time of the witchcraft.

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XIII.

Proverbs and proverbial lore.

Along with words the early emigrant ships brought a supply of proverbs, the accepted coin of popular wisdom and almost as long-enduring as words. A writer for children in 1583 has phrases which are familiar to Americans often in a somewhat changed form. He says to his reader “looke before thou leape” and “thinke or you speake,” and he says “A byrd in hand as some men say is worth ten flye at large.” He says “not worth a pin” at a time when a hand-made pin was worth much more than one of those ground out now in myriads. The modern phrase “as plain as a pikestaff” appears in its older form in Hall’s Satires as “pack-staff plaine,” the allusion being perhaps to the rough stick which a pedestrian traveler laid over his shoulders to hang his pack upon. Lord Hunsdon writes to Cecil in 1596 that “beggars may be no chusers,” and two years later he remarks that a “burnt child dreads the fire.” “Down with his dust” in the modern sense is used by Fuller, the quaint church historian. When the birth of a young prince who became Louis XIV took the world by surprise twenty years after the marriage of his parents, an English letter writer alluded to the overthrow of the hopes of the displaced heir by saying, “Monsieurs cake is dough.” “Thereby lies a tale” is older than Shakespeare, who gave the phrase a punning form. In a simple life with little literature sententious

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proverbs abound, and the English of the period of settlement had many more of such allusions than have survived. An Cotton, in her account of Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia, compares the soldiers besieging a camp from which Indians had already escaped to Scoggin’s wife “brooding the eggs which the fox had sucked,” an allusion to a “merry song” of that time. “Fair play from foule gamesters” is another of her phrases. When she says that certain events put Bacon “and those with him shrodly to their trumps believing that a few such deals or shufles . . . might quickly ring both cards and game out of his hands,” she shows us familiar games and popular phrases in primitive forms. “Like the corn, light between the stones which might grind him to powder,” reminds one of the current phrase “between the upper and the nether millstone.” “Resolving with the Persians to go and worship the rising sun,” is an everyday acquaintance very slightly changed more than two centuries after this clever woman wrote in the racy colonial English. Almost all our most current proverbial philosophy has come down to us from the period when people liked to shape their thoughts into epigrams, and lacking light literature were fain to spice their speech with quaint allusions. Proverbs abounded for other reasons in communities where utterance was trammeled and phrases with quaint outshinings were sent from man to man to carry denunciation in enigmas. “No bullets can pierce beaver

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skins” was short and crisp and ambiguous if reported to the authorities, but the angry Virginians expressed in these words their estimate of Berkeley’s motives in not making war on the murdering Indians lest the fur trade from which he levied an enormous personal tribute should be interrupted. Believing at last that their oppressions were made heavier in order to incite them to rebellion, another proverb with a more sinister meaning went like a courier of discontent up and down the river settlements. “Rebel’s forfeitures will be loyal inheritances” was the prophetic phrase repeated from one indignant planter to his next neighbor. Such proverbs do not become folk-lore, they express political passion smothered but ready to burst into flame: There is another sort of ready-made traditional speech that is neither proverb nor politics. Friday was of old a marked day among the credulous vulgar as it is now, but the ancient notion had to do with weather. They called it either king or worling (worlding) “bicause it is either the fairest or foulest of the seauen.” “Oisters,” says Harrison, in 1577, “are generallie foreborne in the foure hot moneths of the yeare, . . . which are void of the letter R.” This rule for oysters must have been much older and prevalent beyond England. The Dutch over their tankards had a humorous variant of it, to the effect that water was to be taken only in months without an r. The familiar mnemonic jingle that begins with “thirty days hath September,” in its older form

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“hath November,” was recited in the days of Elizabeth; its pedigree runs far back to an ancient Latin calendar verse about ideas and nones. Trivial as these instances seem, they enable us to imagine the motley assortment of antique mental furniture with which the emigrants were outfitted for homely thinking and everyday talking in a new hemisphere.

XIV.

Folk-superstitions.

Cotton Mather accounts the visitation of witches in 1692 a retribution for the little sorceries of the young people who “would often cure hurts and spells and practice detestable conjurations with sieves and keys and peas and nails and horseshoes to learn things for which they had a forbidden and impious curiosity.” Such minor “conjurations” are still known in by-places, and this mode of pretending to satisfy “an impious curiosity” must have been very ancient. That a knife, fork, or a pair of scissors which sticks in the floor is lucky was an article of folk-faith in the good old colony time, and for how long before no one knows. Certain texts of Scripture were in use for divination in colonial New Jersey, perhaps by the same kind of charm that has been used down to our own time, to tell whom the rustic swain or the curious kitchen maid will marry. The very ancient European tradition that the horned cattle uttered audible prayers at midnight on each return of the anniversary of Christ’s birth in a stable was still handed

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down to children in the up-country and elsewhere in the first half of the nineteenth century. The American back-country man, finding his horse’s mane almost hopelessly tangled in the morning, remarks as he tries to extricate it that the “witches” have done it. This faded relic of a picturesque superstition that came down through a long line of English ancestors from the middle ages Shakespeare touched into poetry:

The same ancient belief in small deviltries is embalmed in the name “feather-bed witches” yet applied to the knotted feathers in a bed. Count-less other bits of folk-wisdom were transported to American shores as part of the intellectual kit of uncritical people. To call such surviving mediæval and ancient beliefs quite useless would be rash; they at least supplied material to the imagination and rudely served as substitutes for literature.

XV.

Folk-literature.

The higher forms of folk-lore may be called folk-literature. The rustic classic of other days was carried in the memory as folk-tale and ballad and transmitted orally from generation to generation. Legends of place and fairy myths, the achievement of giant-killing Jack, and the romantic

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tic tale of lucky Cinderella, now relegated to the nursery, delighted men and women for thousands of years. For ages in one form and another innocent simplicity, wearing a red riding hood, and crafty ferocity in the form of a wolf, afforded a needed excitement in the long wintry evenings. Ballads of love and bloody ballads of slaughter were sung while the flicker of failing firelight on the wide hearth peopled the remote corners of the room with grotesque shadows in motion. Chevy Chase and other ballads, the heritage of the English generations, were chanted to young people, keeping alive British tradition and feeling in the American woods. The merry mirth-provoking old English songs of primitive humor reappear in Virginia. One of these, the Song of Scoggin, is preserved to us by title only in a proscription of it by the eminent and godly Mr. Perkins. As the ideas and feelings embodied in the old unwritten ballads brought over the sea grew dim and remote, these same ballads absorbed by degrees, and with no more change than was necessary, a flavor of America. The highly interesting Scottish-English ballad of Young Beichan, or Lord Bateman, for example, the versions of which in Great Britain are many, became American when repeated by generations who had forgotten the crusades. Susan Pye, the Saracen girl, became Suky Fry, an American, who, having cared for an English nobleman in prison, goes to England to have the same incredible adventure that befalls the heroine of the older

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ballad, and she wears the same jewels and is described in almost the same lines. Other ballads and songs, manifestly of English origin, were current with slight changes in the older States until recent times. But American events sometimes gave birth to American rhymes: Bacon’s rebellion was versified in Virginia, and Lovewell’s gallant but disastrous fight in Maine gave rise to a gory ballad that put Chevy Chase out of countenance, and became “the most beloved of all” in New England. Very curious and perhaps very antique forms of English folk-tales were brought to America. For example, there was in New England a version of the world-old tale of Cinderella known as Rose, Pink, and Piney (or Peony), a version apparently unknown to collectors of English folk-lore, and yet other traditional tales were long preserved in ancient forms that have been lost in the mother country.

XVI.

Literature in the colonies.

Some collections of books were brought to the colonies at the outset that might be called large libraries in a time when entire libraries of average size were often kept in a single chest. Elder Brewster, of Plymouth, who had been a printer in Holland, left some hundreds of books. John Eliot, the Indian apostle, if one may trust family tradition, brought twenty-three barrels of literature with him. “Worshipful Mr. Winthrop,” of Connecticut, had the most princely library of the time

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in the colonies, though it contained but about a thousand volumes. He prized alchemical, astrological, and other esoteric trumpery; some of his books of this character that yet remain are bound in sheets of ancient black-letter with illuminated initials and in bits of manuscript missals in color. Antiques were thus sacrificed as superstitious, perhaps, and used to wrap up favorite essays on the philosopher’s stone and potable gold, superstitions dear to the heart of the learned fellow of the Royal Society. Winthrop had also many unpractical works on practical themes—books on agriculture and medicine by followers of Pliny and Paracelsus. John Harvard had a library which was a part of his gift to Harvard College. There were a considerable number of books in the colonies, but in the first period there was very little literature in the strict sense of the word. Theology dominated in every collection. If George Sandys, the traveler and poet, consoled his lonely hours in Virginia with a few books of English literature we have no record of it, but he brought with him a copy of “the sweet-tong’d Ovid,” which he rendered into English verse in Jamestown “by that imperfect light which was snatcht from the hours of night and repose,” while the unhappy colony of which he was an officer was agitated by the alarms of Indian war and pestilence. Most of the books read in the colonies were far removed from the “never-discontinued rhymes” of Ovid. There is ever a literature below literature

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that has to do with the hopes and fears, the beliefs and aspirations of uncritical people. In 1619 many little sub-colonies were fitting out for Virginia. With one of these there were sent by the share-holders, along with arms and armor, axes and beetle rings and provisions, certain necessary books. The original list is preserved. There were two church Bibles and two books of common prayer. The literary outfit was completed by “2 books of the practice of piety, 3 books of the playne man’s pathway,” and “halfe a reme of paper.” Bishop Bayly’s “Practice of Piety directing a Christian how to walke that he may please God”is at once half mediæval and wholly Puritan in tone. Its popularity and its almost divine authority with the men of that age is a remarkable literary phenomenon. It turns up in almost every Virginia probate inventory, and is found far into the eighteenth century, often associated with its running mate, Dent’s “Plaine Man’s Pathway to Heaven wherein every man may clearly see whether he shall be saved or damned.” At the urgent request of the eminent Robert Boyle, the Practice of Piety was translated into the Indian tongue of Massachusetts. In a Virginia library of five volumes, in 1648, the inevitable Practice of Piety has for companions “Mr. Calvin’s Institutions”—that is, Calvin’s Institutes—“the true watch,” “Christ’s combat with Satan,” and “effectual Calling.” A Virginia clergyman three years earlier left “thirty great books in folio, most of them old authors,”

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and “about fifty books in quarto, most of them being lattin books.” We have here two typical libraries—the cumbrous folios and the handy square small quartos, mostly Latin, of the scholar, on the one hand, and the half dozen more or less guide books to piety, sound doctrine, and paradise which gave a sense of security to a reputable family. It was not until the latter half of the century that one finds among the richer planters those encyclopedic books on various subjects that gave their owners an air of general information, and it is only in the last quarter of the century that we can trace in the houses of a few educated Virginians such masterpieces of real literature as Ralegh’s History of the World and Bacon’s Advancement of Learning. There were also the Essays of Montaigne, who figures in the inventories as “Michael, Lord Montague,” and the Religio Medici. In an inventory of 1699 a copy of Macbeth turns up opportunely to give notice that the slowly widening fame of Shakespeare had reached the New World before the century closed.

XVII.

American literature.

Nothing that can properly be called American literature was produced in the colonies in the early seventeenth century—nothing worthy of the name in its later time. Narratives of American travel were written by Captain John Smith and others. George Sandys, an English poet, translated Ovid while sojourning in Virginia; and Anne Bradstreet,

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whose birth and education were wholly English, wrote in Massachusetts some clever verses in imitation of Sylvester’s translation of Du Bartas—“divine Du Bartas,” as he was called, translated by “silver-tongued Sylvester,” admiration for whom was the literary vogue in England in the seventeenth century. But all such productions in the first generation belong to English letters; they have no relation of any kind to American literature; and all have gone into an oblivion as profound as that which has enveloped the admired Du Bartas himself. Vigorous works of polemical theology were produced by the great lights of English Puritanism exiled to New England, but they were addressed to an English audience, and were mostly printed in the mother country, where they were part of the current debates on church government and theology. Notwithstanding the ability of their authors, these books have no permanent value except as documents of historical reference.

XVIII.

The Day of Doom, and other poems.

Nor can much be said for the writings of the period following, when the valetudinarian Wigglesworth produced his Day of Doom, in which the Christ is alternately a country judge and a fierce Moloch, and where the pious reader confronts such scenes as the damnation of non-elect infants for the guilt of Adam’s sin, though they are assigned to “the easiest room in hell.” The poem

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is done in the characteristic doggerel of the Bay Psalm Book, without taste or humor. Its hideous descriptions, irresistibly comic to a modern reader, were suited to the temper of the time; they seemed realistic forecasts of the almost imminent final catastrophe, and edition after edition was sold. Only ten years before the outbreak of the American Revolution a Boston paper could speak of Michael Wigglesworth’s “divine poems.” Versification was an unreproved amusement in all the colonies, but most of the wooden rhymes of the time rested in manuscript. In New England the habitual use of the printing press gave opportunity for prolific facility to win something like distinction. Benjamin Tompson was a later and less lugubrious writer than Wigglesworth, and he achieved fame enough to have it graven on his tombstone that he was the “renowned poet of New England.” The histories of the Indian wars of New England, the political tractates, and the accounts of Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia and the poems about it, the indigestible tales with which Increase Mather filled his books on illustrious providences and ominous comets, the Quaker and anti-Quaker diatribes of gall and wormwood, as indeed all the writings in all the colonies during the seventeenth century, are almost without exception utterly non-luminous. Their lack of any inspiration is witness to the truth that notwithstanding intellectual activity artistic creation is impossible in an unsympathetic environment. Life was too material,

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human energy and thought were spent in the battle with circumstances and the more bootless struggle of petty religious and theological debate. There were no detached minds, there could be no production of true literature. The odds would have been against Shakespeare himself.

XIX.

The anti-naturalistic sentiment of the time.

The age was partly responsible. If there had been any love of Nature in the seventeenth century, American settlers would have shown some appreciation of its aspects in a new world. But the prevailing sentiment of the time was that Nature had long been steadily deteriorating, and that the everlasting frame of the universe was in a state of rack and decay. For the sublime in external Nature there was no taste. An accomplished English traveler in 1621 describes the “hideous” Alps, which he had crossed, as “uncouth, huge, monstrous excrescences of Nature.” This, we may suppose, represents the sentiment of English settlers toward the grand primeval wilderness about them. “Uncouth” is Captain John Smith’s only epithet for the picturesque wilderness trails through which he marched; and George Sandys, though a poet, never seems to look upon the wilderness except as an obstruction and an enemy. The colonial verse writer does not suffer any intrusion into his meditations of the overawing effects of Nature, primitive and unsubdued, as he encountered it. What

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contemplation there is in the books and letters of the time expends itself on the supernatural or revels in the merely grewsome.

XX.

Men of the Woods

This “uncouth, huge, monstrous” wilderness puts its thumb mark on the character of the people otherwise than by contemplation. They grew up in the earlier generations woodsmen. Distinctively English characteristics fell away from them. The exigencies of a new country made them quick-witted and shifty. The dignity and repose of bearing that belong to a fixed position in an older civilization were lost, for the time at least. The American was pushing, aggressive, inquisitive. He was also more open-minded than his ancestors; a change of circumstances broke up the conservative crust of centuries of English life. The “go” of a new country came into the new life and a hundred years after the early settlement of the colonies an English clergyman in Virginia sketches the American as we have known him—nimble-witted, but less patient and profound than the Englishman.

XXI.

The old books

The survivors of seventeenth century libraries let us know what the old books were like. They varied greatly in size. There was the princely tome in folio, sometimes at least stoutly corded

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and honestly bound in good leather, now and then it was gilded and richly tooled. Then there were small quartos thick and small quartos thin, some bound and tooled, but many stitched and home-bound by the owner in parchment sewed through and through by strings of sheepskin or clad in scraps of old missals or merely covered with leaves of old books. Below this the sizes and shapes are too various and often too nondescript to be set down, running all the way to twenty-fourmos or something of the sort. Regularity in size or shape was not important in libraries that usually were not shelved but stored in chests. If there were Latin works, there would be many in parchment cover, or if from the Rhine country some would be elaborately stamped in pigskin and held together by ockumy clasps. A few manuscripts one would be pretty sure to find—a diary or a journal of travel, or a controversial tract, or some poems innocent of print. From college the owner brought in his own handwriting a carefully copied digest of logic, metaphysics, divinity, with arithmetic, or geometry. He may have added some rules and diagrams for land surveying. Many of the manuscripts were transcripts of printed books not easily come by in those days. Some professional men of the time saved money and learned their texts by transcribing from books borrowed from others; and lawyers bound later laws in manuscript in the same volume with printed statutes. Works on alchemy, with some on the art of war, have come

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to us in transcripts. The elegance of the old decorative “secretary’s hand,” learned by patient application under a writing master or his usher, shames the slovenliness of modern scribbling, and sometimes excels in beauty the fine old typography which carried over the traditional taste and pains-taking of the mediæval copyist into a rare mechanical art.

ELUCIDATIONS.

Note 1, page 96.

James Laing, a Scottish writer of the Reformation period, expresses this contempt for vulgar tongues as proper only to barbarians and heretics: “Tres sunt linguæ elegantes et ingenum, Hebraica, Greca, et Latina quæ nobilibus principibus sunt dignæ—Ceteras linguas cum sint barbaræ barbaris et hæreticis tanquam propriis relinqu.” Quoted in McCrie’s Life of Knox, 472.

Note 2, page 97.

Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie, published in 1589, is a principal authority, but the condition of the language may be mainly deduced from the literature of the period. One of the sources of corruption noticed and lamented is “the peevish affectation of words out of primative languages” by “schollers.” Many “inkhorne termes” were brought in by preachers and schoolmasters. The words “penetrate,” “penetrable,” and “indignitie” are examples of these fresh intruders. Arber’s Puttenham, 156-159. In Alexander Gill’s grammar of 1619, quoted in Masson’s Milton, i, 55, is a denunciation of the intrusion of words of Latin origin, such as “common, vices, envy, malice” and “virtue, study, justice, pity, mercy, compassion, profit, commodity, color, grave, favor, acceptance.” “But whither pray,” demands Gill, “in all the world have you banished those words which our forefathers used for these new fangled ones? Are our words to be exiled like our citizens?” The enriching of the language with Latin and French terms was inevitable; the three languages had been in juxtaposition in England for centuries, and they were sometimes jumbled together unconsciously. In Brayley and Britton’s History of Hertfordshire is an example of a three-ply interweaving of the languages in an old Description of the Manor and

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Manor House of Rye: “Item granarum, 16 equi et vaccæ, cum le storehous mercandizarum 2000 marcae, Item le byldyng de le inner court edificat cum bryke,” etc. Many such triple macaroni passages could be accumulated.

Note 3, page 97.

“And certaynly our langage now vsed varyeth ferre from that whiche was vsed and spoken whan I was borne. For we englysshe men ben borne vnder the domynacon of the mone which is neuer stedfaste. . . . And that comyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother.” Caxton’s Prologue to the Eneydos, a. d. 1490. The changes in speech in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were nearly as rapid as in the time of Caxton. Take this intimation from Evelyn’s Diary in the year 1654: “Here [at Beverly] a very old woman shew’d us the monuments, and being above one hundred years old spake the language of Queen Marie’s daies, in whose time she was born.”

Note 4, page 98.

“Victories, plantations, frontieres, staples of commerce,” etc., are enumerated by John Evelyn as “reasons both of additions and corruptions, of the English Language.” All changes of usage were accounted corruptions, and stay-at-home men have grieved for three centuries over the “corruptions” introduced into the tongue from the various offshoots of the mother country.

Note 5, page 102

The word “turkish” had perhaps come to signify “foreign” or “outlandish” in European tongues. It is to be noted that a third German name for the turkey was wälsches huhn, the foreign fowl. This may indeed be sufficient reason for “turkish corn” in several languages, as wälsch-korn or foreign corn is one of the designations of maize in German.

Note 6, page 102.

John Clayton, the parson, says in a letter to the Royal Society in the seventeenth century about Virginia: “There’s a great sort of ravenous Bird that feeds apon Carrion as big very nigh as an Eagle, which they call a Turkey Bustard, . . . whence its name; it is nothing of the same sort of Bird as our Turkey Bustard.” Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 defines “bustard” by “a wild turkey.” We may not conclude from Clayton’s term that the great vulture was called a turkey bustard before he became a buzzard, for a dozen years earlier in these Transactions, xi, 631, Glover writes “Turkie Buzzard,” and very much earlier yet, in 1614, Hamor has “Turkie Bussards.” The author of the True Declaration of Virginia, 16 to, does not know either name; he calls the birds “cormerants.” One might suspect that the name is a corruption of “bastard turkey” (compare “bastard plover” in the

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regulations of Henry VIII’s household, Forsyth’s Antiquary’s Portfolio, i, 187), or that it has some relation to the French dindon batard, but there is no evidence in favor of such a conjecture. The vulture was often mistaken for the turkey. Castiglioni Viaggio negli Stati Uniti, i, 225. We have indeed a tangle of the names of two large European birds, the buzzard and the bustard, with the American turkey and turkey buzzard.’ It is with pleasure that I pass the puzzle to philologists. Apropos of the possible confusion one way or the other between dindon bastard and turkey bustard or buzzard, there is in Le Page du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane, 1738, ii, 418, a curious distortion of another English name of this same vulture, which he calls “Carencro” [that is, carrion crow], “qui est aussi noir qu’un Merle & aussi gros qu’un Dindon.”

Note 7, page 102.

The suggestion of Acosta is that since the Italians call maize grano turco, Pliny’s description of millet may have been intended for maize, and that the plant may have been known to the ancients. It was as hard to believe in that day that there was anything of value unknown to Pliny as that there could be any truth of philosophy not deducible from Aristotle. The confusion between buckwheat, or “saracen wheat” as it was called, and the newer maize, though not heretofore suspected, is almost beyond doubt. Lescarbot, in La Conversion des Savvages, 1610, gives a list of plants cultivated by the Iroquois. In it there appears “du blé mahis (ou Sarazin).” In the Burrows reprint of the Jesuit Relations, i, 85, this passage is Englished by “maize wheat (or Buckwheat).” If this rendering were correct, it would still show the confusion of the two, but Lescarbot did not suppose any grain but maize to exist among the Indians. “Sarazin” is here but an-other name for maize, in explanation of the less familiar “blé mahis,” or more properly “mays.” The name in French or Italian was conferred, no doubt, when it was yet not well distinguished from buckwheat, and it was probably used at first interchangeably with blé de turquie, the notion of origin conveyed being identical in the two names. “Grano saraceno” appears to be still applied in Italian to both maize and buckwheat. Baretti’s Italian-English Dictionary, edition of 1854. has no other definition of “grano saraceno” than maize, while it defines maize by “fromentone, grano saraceno, grano turco.” Yet Castiglioni adheres to “frumento saraceno” or “grano saraceno” for buckwheat, and “grano turco” for maize. Viaggio negli Stati Uniti (1785, 1787), i, 36; ii, 7, and passim.

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Note 8, page 503.

Strachey, in his account of Virginia in the “yearely dales” of the colony, to imitate his expression, says of the beans of the Indians, “Their beanes . . . are the same which the Turks call garvances,” an identification as wide of the mark as most of those on which names of American plants are founded. In 1633 De Vries, the Dutch explorer, was making his way up the Delaware to secure some of the “Boonen van de Wilde,” or Indian beans, and these on the next page he calls “Turchse Boonen”—that is, Turkish beans. Korte Historael, etc., 101, 102. In the English version of Acrelius “Turkish beans” and “large beans” appear as two of the garden vegetables cultivated in New Sweden. The original Swedish at p. 167 has “Turskska Bönor “ and “störa Bonor,” which in our common speech would be Turkish beans and pole beans, indicating that the so-called Turkish beans were not grown on poles, but, as we know, twined themselves about the growing corn stalks. In the papers reviewing and, it might be said, enriching De Candolle’s Origin of Cultivated Plants, the learned authors, Gray and Trumbull, have missed the passage above in De Vries, which would have shown the error in Van der Donck that they suspect. See American Journal of Science for August, 1883, p. 134. Van der Donck is so far misled by the name “Turkish” as to suppose the Indian bean to have been introduced by the Dutch. The name gallivance is applied to some plant in Pennsylvania soon after Penn’s settlement, and in a Complete Discovery of the state of Carolina. 1682, the name appears as “Callavance,” from which we need not infer the presence of the garabanzo as cultivated in Spain, Mexico, etc., but merely a confusion of very different plants by people who had not seen both.

Note 9, page 103.

The New England “rye and Indian” was known in the eighteenth century, and perhaps earlier; it figures strangely in Castiglioni’s Italian as “grano turco misto con segale formano delle crescenze senza lievito.” The phrases “English grain” and “English grass” appear to have survived in New England until the American Revolution abolished all things English, in name at least. In a manuscript diary of Rev. Justus Forward, of Belchertown, Mass,, in my possession, it is set down, under date of June 15, 1763, that “grass and English grain look extraordinary well”; and on the preceding May 11th the diarist notes that there is “considerable feed in English pasture.”

Note 10, page 105.

The use of husk for the bran or covering of the grain was in accordance with English usage at the time. A Virginia writer,

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in the Transactions of the Royal Society for 1666, uses the verb “ un-husk” in speaking of rice and barley. Clayton, the clergyman, in writing of Virginia in the Philosophical Transactions, speaks of husks of the kermes or little galls on oak trees. The application of the word to the bran of the corn, the skin or husk of the grain, was thus very natural. In some doggerel by Davy Crockett when a boy these lines occur:

This use of husk I found still extant in Charleston, S. C., in 1884. “Nubbin,” used in English provincial dialects for the stump of a tree, came into general use in America for a dwarfed ear of corn, and I suspect that some analogous use of the word existed in colloquial English at the time. Roasting ears, an early name for green corn in the Chesapeake and middle colonies, is yet applied to green corn however cooked, and whether cooked or not, over a large part of the United States. Compare Beverley’s Virginia, book iii, 15, and Rush’s letter in Castiglioni, Viaggio negli Stati Uniti, ii, 44. Acosta speaks of a large round variety of corn that the Spaniards ate roasted “as a delicious food, more savory than roast beans or peas.” Livre iv, chap. xvi.

Note 11, page 106.

The aroughcun of John Smith goes through innumerable forms. There is raconne very early in Morton’s New English Canaan, p. 79, and in the perfect Description of Virginia of 1649; ratoons in Wilson’s Account of Carolina, 1682; and roacoans in the State of England, 1683, p. 63. Barrett’s maps, of about 1775, have three forms—“Aroughena, a sort of badger,” and “roscones,” in the same Virginia list; in the New England list the animal is “rackoon.”

Note 12, page 107.

It is pohickory in some early writings, as in Baltimore’s “ Relation” of 1634, where it is said to be a “wild sweet wall-nut.” The hickory nut is still called a walnut in parts of New England and New York; it is the white walnut in contradistinction to the black. But Gronovius’s Flora Virginica, 150, calls the butternut white walnut thus: “Juglans alba . . . Anglice white walnut, Clayton”—that is, on the authority of Clayton, the Virginia botanist. It is still usually so called in communities of Virginia derivation.

Note 13, page 107.

Barbecue is generally accounted a West Indian word, but it was in general use in the colonies, and may have been known to

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some of the Indians of the mainland. Beverley, in his history of Virginia, 1705, says that the Virginia Indians have a second way of “broyling . . . by laying it upon Sticks raised upon Forks at some distance above the live Coals, which heats more gently . . . this they, and we also from them, call Barbacueing.” The word is elsewhere among the colonists “barbecute,” and is applied to the roasting of venison wrapped in leaves in the ashes. Compare also Bossu’s Nouveaux Voyages, 1777, where barbecue is traced to an Indian word, barboka, which signified the wickerwork—“les claies”—on which the meat was laid. Page 178 and foot-note.

Note 14, page 109.

Compare this word dafter, for daughter, with the old pronunciation “oft,” for ought. In the Order of Orthography, by Joseph Prat, London, 1622, the word ought is thus given “oft.” Prat lays it down as a rule that where “s” precedes the terminal “tion,” the sound shun must not be given, by which rule the accepted form of such words in good speech would be, for example, combos-ti-on. Honor and honour, favor and favour, are “indifferently written,” says Prat. The word mile is unchanged in the plural, as “one mile, twenty mile.” As an example of the “barbarous speech of the common people,” he has “yerbs” for herbs, “dater” for daughter, “twonty” for twenty, “feale “ and “finegar” for “veale and vineger.”

Note 15, page 109.

This mixing of variant forms of rustic English was kept up by fresh arrivals from England, and in the eighteenth century it was complicated by the great exodus of people to some of the colonies from the north of Ireland. Manifest traces of this Scotch-Irish admixture may be found in Pennsylvania, in the Ohio Valley and westward, and along another line of emigration in the Appalachian valleys and the table-lands of Virginia and the Carolinas.

Note 16, page 111.

“Gom,” in this dialect of the Forth and Bargy, means a simpleton; in other local English it is, as in America, “gump.” “Goss” in various dialects means gorse or furze. As gorse is not known in the United States the word has no popular meaning, but it has survived in the single dialect phrase often heard in certain places, “Give him goss!”—that is, a chastisement as with gorse or furze.

Note 17, page 112.

The following nonsensical verse was remembered by my father as sung by the Virginia slaves in his boyhood—that is to say, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century:

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In the coast region of South Carolina, where the negroes are much the larger part of the population, and where “new negroes “ were run in from Africa at a late period, the corrupt speech is called the Gullah dialect, from the Gullah or Angola negroes. The vocabulary has few words that are not evidently English in origin, The effect is somewhat that of English badly spoken by a foreigner, who ignores the natural quantity of the vowels. There is a French nasal in the sound of final n—fine, for example, takes the sound of the French fin.

Note 18, page 113.

In Smyth’s Tour, i, 235, he remarks on the unwillingness to be called a servant by the frontiersman of the late colonial period. The use of the word servant was evidently narrower in the colonies than in England, though Mr. Albert Matthews has furnished me with several references to “hired servant”and “hired servant man” in the first half of the eighteenth century. As some of these were in advertisements of runaways, the hired servant must have been bound by contract for a year, according to the custom at that time. Even in such advertisements for runaways in New Jersey, Mr. Matthews notes the term “an Irish hired man,” and he has furnished me with a number of instances of the modern use of the word “help” in England for a person employed in a capacity a little above that of a domestic servant. Under date of Philadelphia, December 6, 1748, Kalm says that a distinction was made by the English inhabitants of Pennsylvania between a servant and a “serving or bond servant” for a term of years. As the phrase does not occur in any advertisement of runaways or elsewhere, so far as I know, its use must have been local. Servant was applied to a slave, and thus the depth of infamy was reached.

Note 19, page 113.

In Halliwell’s English Dialects, 28, there is a Lovers’ Dialogue, a Wiltshire piece. “Hold not so breach now,” says the maiden to her wooer. The word is in the exact sense of the popular American word “brash,” and sheds some light on its derivation, regarding which both the Oxford Dictionary and the Century Dictionary grope a little for want of this instance. In a fifteenth century Essex poem in Halliwell

is an older form of an Americanism—“too smart to take advice.”

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Chief-Justice Morris, of New York, in 1937 said in the Zenger trial, “An ingenious man has smartly enough observed,” etc. In the couplet—

quoted in Halliwell’s Dialects, p. 7, from a MS., the word “holly,” for wholly, suggests the “New England umlaut,” as it has been called. In Hearne’s works there is an extract from a version of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede which closes with the words—

where the difference between the words “holy” and “wholly” appears to be that which one often hears in New England, even among educated people. I have pointed out in a previous note, on the authority of Franklin, the early existence in parts of Pennsylvania of what are now deemed New England peculiarities. John Bartram, the Pennsylvania botanist, probably used the umlaut pronunciation like a Vermonter. In his Observations he writes, “We rod over middling land,” p. 66. “To get shut of,” for to get rid of, appears in various English and American dialects. “Bail” for the handle of a pail or kettle is still used in dialect in England. It appears in a will of 1463, where the English editor finds it needful to explain it. Compare Bury Wills, 23, 242. It is in general use in the southern and western parts of the United States, and accounted a preferable word. “My woman” appears more than once in Braithwayt’s Drunken Barnaby, 124, 171, as a respectful equivalent for my wife, with “uxor” on the opposite page as the Latin. This is precisely the usage of the rustic people in New England; farther south the farmer says “my old woman,” though his wife be never so young. “Party” for person, which modern purists account recent and reprehensible slang, was in abundant use in older times. Increase Mather has the “sick party recovered,” Providence., 192, and one even hears of dear parties. The Camden Miscellany, vol. iii, quotes from MS.:

In northern regions of the United States a sick person is said by the country people to be “handled” by his disease. In Howard’s Collection of Letters, 273, the Duke of Norfolk writes to Henry VIII, “I have ben so sore handeled with myne old Disease,” and there are other examples. “Fall” for autumn is now mainly American, but there are English precedents enough for it, and it would be a pity to lose from literary use so good a word.

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There are instances of its early use in the colonies sometimes in the full form, as “this last fall of the leafe.” Virginia Calendar, 1688. (But what is “the fall of the leafe” directed to be taken out in drawing a fowl in the Compleat Cook of 1658?) Parson Clayton, writing of Virginia, says, “When they go a Shooting or Hunting, as they call it,” etc. He marks here an early difference of usage that has persisted. It has been asserted that “rooster” is a word produced by American mock modesty. But “roost-fowl,” at least, was a form that appeared as early as 1701, Sewall’s Diary, vi, 33, and I have seen “roost-cock” in English use earlier than the beginning of colony planting. “Toat railes” appears in the Remonstrance of Gloucester County, Virginia, as early as 1677. State Paper Office, Virginia Papers, 62. Tote must have been of English origin. It appears in a Boston paper before the Revolution, and is found in the old “tote roads” of Maine. But there are words of distinctly colonial origin. “Gum” for beehive in some local dialects, came from the use of a section of a hollow gum tree for hiving bees and other purposes. Compare “a large cask or gum” in Virginia Gazette, June 21, 1744, and the Western pioneer’s proverbial boast that he was cradled in a “bee-gum.” The number of illustrative instances that might be given from my own notes alone would require a volume. See two papers in Century Magazine, April and October, 1894.

Note 20, page 120.

For Sukey Fry and other ballads I am indebted to my daughter, Mrs. Elizabeth Eggleston Seelye. They were taken from the lips of an old lady of New England birth and lineage who may have been the last person treasuring these bits of colonial folk-lore. She could remember only a few verses of Sukey Fry, supplying the rest by narrative. “A young nobleman coming to America met a young girl, Sukey Fry, and they fell in love. He was put into prison, and she visited him and carried him things to eat. He agreed, when released, to wait for her seven years unmarried. He returned to England:

He at length married some one else. The scene is at the wedding. The servant at the door says:

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The father of the bride says:

Lord Bateman replies:

See the many versions of the ballad in Child’s Scottish and English Ballads, and especially Child’s learned treatment of its variations in the quarto edition, part ii, 454-483. One can not but regret that Professor Child did not have the pleasure of knowing that the “Isbel,” “Dame Essels,” “Susy Pye,” and “Sophia,” of other versions had emigrated with the colonists and assumed the name of Sukey Fry. Many comparisons with the Scottish and the English versions suggest themselves, but they must be left for folk-lorists. But is it on account of the name “Susy Pye” in the ballad, or perhaps on account of the sense of colored or painted in the word “pie,” or “pye” that this seems to have been a name for a Moor? In the Records of Massachusetts Colony, 1638, p. 239, “George Pye, a Moor,” appears. Rose, Pink, and Piney is among the tales collected by Mrs. Seelye. Piney is the most frequent pronunciation of peony in rustic speech. There is an allied story in the little collection referred to called Pussy Catskin. It is substantially the same story as that given in Catskin’s Garland in Child’s Ballads, but the American version is in prose and much more antique than the ballad as Child gives it. The word trencher is preserved in it, though the meaning of the word must have been very obscure to those who recited it last. The tale is known in many tongues. See Child’s English and Scottish Ballads, viii, 172 ff. See also Marian Roalfe Cox’s Cinderella.

Note 21, page 122.

In 1697 All Faith’s Parish received a library from “the Honorable Kenellem Chiseldene.” It was composed as follows: “foure Bibles, one booke called the whole duty of man, three bookes in defence of the Common prayer, three Catekisme, and one lecton

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booke”—that is, a “lecture” book as it is elsewhere called, perhaps a book of homilies. Vestry Book of All Faith’s, Manuscript in Maryland Historical Society. We have here, and in the instance cited in the text, traces of the ancient custom of keeping certain books in the churches, sometimes chained. Compare Marsden’s early Puritans, 236. See the seventeen books provided for the use of the first clergyman in New Netherlands, O’Callaghan’s History of New Netherlands, i, 454.

Note 22, page 122.

After much seeking I found a copy of the Practice of Piety where it was least to be expected, in the Graham Library at the Century Club, New York. It owes its preservation from the destruction that has befallen a myriad other copies to the chance that Samuel Butler once owned it and wrote some lines in it.

Note 23, page 123.

Prof. C. E. Norton, in his Life of Anne Bradstreet prefixed to a modern edition of her poems, says, “There is, I believe, no evidence that there was a copy of Shakespeare’s plays in Massachusetts during the seventeenth century.” Apropos of a line of Mrs. Bradstreet’s which resembles the line in Hamlet, v, 337, 388, this remark is made. But, as Mrs. Bradstreet was an inmate of the family of the Earl of Lincoln in her youth, and a late and reluctant adherent to New England Puritanism, she may have seen Hamlet on the stage in England. Shakespeare was never mentioned or quoted by any American writer in the seventeenth century, so far as I know. Even in England his fame was of slow growth. Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman, 1660, calls George Buchanan, whose fame rests on his Latin poems, “the prince of poets of our time,” and he does not think Shakespeare worth naming at all. The bare word “Macbeth” in the Virginia inventory of Captain Arthur Spicer, 1699, is the first allusion to his work from an American source that I know. Another Virginian, Edmund Berkeley, who’ died in 1718, had Shakespeare’s works. William and Mary Quarterly, ii, 134, 250, and passim.

Note 24, page 124.

Nathaniel Ward, a contemporary, says of Anne Bradstreet that she is “a right Du Bartas girle.” A single verse of hers will serve to illustrate her method and her admiration for her model:

The reader who cares to see what the so-called American literature of this time was, may consult Mr. Tyler’s History of

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American Literature, or Mr. Stedman’s Library of American Literature.

Note 25, page 125.

The custom of making a library by transcription prevailed among the lawyers in Edward I’s day, according to Lord Campbell. Lives of the Chancellors, i, chap. xi, cited in Allibone’s Dictionary, p. 1993. The Reverend Edward Taylor, of Westfield, Mass., in the last quarter of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth century, copied more than a hundred borrowed books. Nearly all his professional books were copied by himself, and “his manuscripts were all handsomely bound by himself in parchment.” Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, ii, 410. There are volumes of old Virginia statutes in the Library of Congress partly manuscript. As late as 1715 (chap. xxv) Maryland enacted that all acts passed should be transcribed on parchment and sent to each county, to be lodged with the clerk after they had been “published and proclaimed in court.” A like usage prevailed in other colonies. The Mennonites in Pennsylvania were advised from Europe to transcribe the colossal Martyr Book for their own edification. Many examples of books written which were never destined for print might be given. President Stiles’s manuscripts and those by William Byrd, of Westover, are notable examples. In my own collection are manuscripts some of which seem to be sixteenth century copies of books probably in print, others are manuscripts of the seventeenth century not intended for print. There are also manuscript books on various studies, especially geometry and surveying, that appear to have belonged to old New York families. The custom of college students making manuscripts came with the first settlers. Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, vi, 102, 103.

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