MILITARY VIRTUE 9
weak indeed compared with the original: 'Advocate' will not do at all, because it is juristic, and suggests a man in a wig who is paid to make special pleading.
The word 'Comforter' might have served once upon a time; for its etymological meaning is 'one who strengthens very much'. Confortare used not to mean anything soothing: it is recorded of a schoolmaster in the Chronicles of the Monastery of St. Edmund that he confortavit pueros baculo, 'he comforted his boys with the stick.' But 'comfort' has suffered a steady deterioration, and only retains its original meaning in legal usage, as of those who bring comfort to the king's enemies. It was used in this sense by Hooker—'doth not a little comfort and confirm the same.' But already by the time of Shakespeare and the Authorized Version the word had come to stand generally for consolation or relief, the sense of 'fort', 'fortify ', and 'fortitude' having dropped out.
'Had you such a loss as I,
I could give better comfort than you do,'
says Constance in King John.[1]It had already acquired also its bottom meaning, as when Othello says:[2]
'I prattle out of fashion, and I dote
In mine own comforts.'
This is the only sense retained in the adjective
