friend seemed to be hovering about him, and, in his imagination, would haunt him to the grave. The nature of these manuscripts; the cause of the earnest desire of retaining them by the widow; the evident unfriendliness of her conduct to Des Maizeaux; and whether these manuscripts, consisting of eight octavo volumes with their transcripts, were destroyed, or are still existing, are all circumstances which my researches have hitherto not ascertained. HISTORY OF NEW WORDS. NEOLOGY, or the novelty of words and phrases, is an innovation, which, with the opulence of our present language, the English philologer is most jealous to allow; but we have puritans or precisians of English, superstitiously nice! The fantastic coinage of affectation or caprice will cease to circulate from its own alloy; but shall we reject the ore of fine workmanship and solid weight? There is no government mint of words, and it is no statutable offence to invent a felicitous or daring expression unauthorised by Mr. Todd! When a man of genius, in the heat of his pursuits or his feelings, has thrown out a peculiar word, it probably conveyed more precision or energy than any other established word, otherwise he is but an ignorant pretender! Julius Cæsar, who, unlike other great captains, is authority on words as well as about blows, wrote a large treatise on 'Analogy," in which that fine genius counselled to "avoid every unusual word as a rock!"* The cautious Quintilian, as might be expected, opposes all innovation in language. "If the new word is well received, small is the glory; if rejected, it raises laughter." This only marks the penury of his feelings in this species of adventure. The great legislator of words, who lived when his own language was at its acmé, seems undecided, yet pleaded for this liberty. "Shall that which the Romans allowed to Cæcilius and to Plautus be refused to Virgil and Varius ?" The answer to the question might not be favourable to the inquirer. While a language is forming, writers are applauded for extending its limits; when established, for restricting themselves to them. But this is to imagine that a perfect language can exist! * Aulus Gellius, lib. i. c. 10. Instit. lib. i. c. 5. The good sense and observation of Horace perceived that there may be occasions where necessity must become the mother of invented words : Si forte necesse est If you write of things abstruse or new, ROSCOMMON. But Horace's canon for deciding on the legality of the new invention, or the standard by which it is to be tried, will not serve to assist the inventor of words: licuit, semperque licebit, * Signatum præsente nota procudere nummum." This præsens nota, or public stamp, can never be affixed to any new coinage of words: for many received at a season have perished with it. The privilege of stamping words is reserved for their greatest enemy-Time itself! and the inventor of a new word must never flatter himself that he has secured the public adoption, for he must lie in his grave before he can enter the dictionary. In Willes' address to the reader, prefixed to the collection of Voyages published in 1577, he finds fault with Eden's translation from Peter Martyr, for using words that “smelt too much of the Latine." We should scarcely have expected * This verse was corrected by Bentley procudere nummum, instead of producere nomen, which the critics agree is one of his happy conjectures. Henry Cockeram's curious little "English Dictionarie, or an Interpretation of hard English words", 12mo, 1631, professes to give in its first book "the choicest words themselves now in use, wherewith our language is inriched and become so copious." Many have not survived, such as the following: To give one a box on the ear. Strenuitie Curiously enough, this author notes some words as those ". now out of use, and onely used of some ancient writers," but which we now commonly use. Such are the following: Abandon to find among them ponderouse, portentouse, despicable, obsequious, homicide, imbibed, destructive, prodigious. The only words he quotes, not thoroughly naturalised, are dominators, ditionaries, (subjects), solicitute (careful). The Tatler, No. 230, introduces several polysyllables introduced by military narrations, "which (he says), if they attack us too frequently, we shall certainly put them to flight, and cut off the rear;" every one of them still keep their ground. Half the French words used affectedly by Melantha, in Dryden's Marriage à-la-Mode, a sinnovations in our language, are now in common use, naïveté, foible, chagrin, grimace, embarras, double entendre, equivoque, eclaircissement, ridicule, all these words, which she learns by heart to use occasionally, are now in common use. A Dr. Russel called Psalm-singers Ballad-singers, having found the Song of Solomon in an old translation, the Ballad of Ballads, for which he is reproached by his antagonist for not knowing that the signification of words alters with time; should I call him knave, he ought not to be concerned at it, for the Apostle Paul is also called a knave of Jesus Christ.* Unquestionably, NEOLOGY opens a wide door to innovation; scarcely has a century passed since our language was patched up with Gallic idioms, as in the preceding century it was piebald with Spanish, and with Italian, and even with Dutch. The political intercourse of islanders with their neighbours has ever influenced their language. In Elizabeth's reign Italian phrasest and Netherland words were imported; in James and Charles the Spanish framed the style of courtesy; in Charles the Second the nation and the language were equally Frenchified. Yet such are the sources from whence we have often derived some of the wealth of our language! * A most striking instance of the change of meaning in a word is in the old law-term let-without let or hindrance ;" meaning void of all opposition. Hence, "I will let you," meant "I will hinder you ;" and not as we should now think, "I will give you free leave." Shakspeare makes "Ancient Pistol" use a new-coined Italian word, when he speaks of being "better accommodated;" to the great delight of Justice Shallow, who exclaims, "It comes from accommodo-a good phrase!" And Ben Jonson, in his "Tale of a Tub," ridicules Inigo Jones's love of two words he often used : If it conduce There are three foul corruptors of a language: caprice, affectation, and ignorance! Such fashionable cant terms as "theatricals," and " musicals," invented by the flippant Topham, still survive among his confraternity of frivolity. A lady eminent for the elegance of her taste, and of whom one of the best judges, the celebrated Miss Edgeworth, observed to me, that she spoke the purest and most idiomatic English she had ever heard, threw out an observation which might be extended to a great deal of our present fashionable vocabulary. She is now old enough, she said, to have lived to hear the vulgarisms of her youth adopted in drawing-room circles. To lunch, now so familiar from the fairest lips, in her youth was only known in the servants' hall. An expression very rife of late among our young ladies, a nice man, whatever it may mean, whether that the man resemble a pudding or something more nice, conveys the offensive notion that they are ready to eat him up! When I was a boy, it was an age of bon ton; this good tone mysteriously conveyed a sublime idea of fashion; the term, imported late in the eighteenth century, closed with it. Twaddle for a while succeeded bore; but bore has recovered the supremacy. want another Swift to give a new edition of his "Polite Conversation." A dictionary of barbarisms too might be collected from some wretched neologists, whose pens are now at work! Lord Chesterfield, in his exhortations to conform to Johnson's Dictionary, was desirous, however, that the great lexicographer should add as an appendix, "A neological dictionary, containing those polite, though perhaps not strictly grammatical, words and phrases commonly used, and sometimes understood by the beau-monde." This last phrase was doubtless a contribution! Such a dictionary had already appeared in the French language, drawn up by two caustic critics, who in the Dictionnaire néologique à l'usage des beaux Esprits du Siècle collected together the numerous unlucky inventions of affectation, with their modern authorities! A collection of the fine words and phrases, culled from some very modern poetry, might show the real amount of the favours bestowed on us. We * The term pluck, once only known to the prize-ring, has now got into use in general conversation, and also into literature, as a term indicative of ready courage. + Such terms as "patent to the public"-"normal condition"—"crass behaviour," are the inventions of the last few years. The attempts of neologists are, however, not necessarily to be condemned; and we may join with the commentators of Aulus Gellius, who have lamented the loss of a chapter of which the title only has descended to us. That chapter would have demonstrated what happens to all languages, that some neologisms, which at first are considered forced or inelegant, become sanctioned by use, and in time are quoted as authority in the very language which, in their early stage, they were imagined to have debased. The true history of men's minds is found in their actions; their wants are indicated by their contrivances; and certain it is that in highly cultivated ages we discover the most refined intellects attempting NEOLOGISMS.* It would be a subject of great curiosity to trace the origin of many happy expressions, when, and by whom created. Plato substituted the term Providence for fate; and a new system of human affairs arose from a single word. Cicero invented several; to this philosopher we owe the term of moral philosophy, which before his time was called the philosophy of manners. But on this subject we are perhaps more interested by the modern than by the ancient languages. Richardson, the painter of the human heart, has coined some expressions to indicate its little secret movements, which are admirable: that great genius merited a higher education and more literary leisure than the life of a printer could afford. Montaigne created some bold expressions, many of which have not survived him; his incuriosité, so opposite to curiosity, well describes that state of negligence where we will not learn that of which we are ignorant. With us the word incurious was described by Heylin, 1656, as an unusual word; it has been appropriately adopted by our best writers, although we still want incuriosity. Charron invented étrangeté unsuccessfully, but which, says a French critic, would be the true substantive of the word étrange; our Locke is the solitary instance produced for "foreignness for remoteness or want of relation to something." Malherbe borrowed from the Latin, insidieux, sécurité, which have been received; but a bolder word, dévouloir, by which he proposed to express cesser de vouloir, * 66 Shakspeare has a powerfully-composed line in the speech of the Duke of Burgundy, (Henry V. Act v. Sc. 2), when, describing the fields overgrown with weeds, he exclaims |