words: among them are air and round. It is strange to contrast the language of this with the obsolete English of a treatise on Astronomy, put forth three hundred years before, and printed in the same book of Mr. Wright's.
To these early forefathers of our leechcraft we owe a further change in our tongue. There are many English words for sundry parts and functions of the human frame, words which no well-bred man can use; custom has ruled that we must employ Latin synonyms. The first example I remember of this delicacy (it ought not to be called mawkishness) is in Robert of Gloucester, writing about 1300. When describing the tortures inflicted by King John on his subjects in 1216, and the death of the Earl Marshal on an Irish field in 1234, the old rimer uses Latin terms instead of certain English words that would jar upon our taste.[1] But a leech who flourished eighty years after Robert's time is far more plain-spoken, when describing his cures, made at Newark and London.[2] Indeed, he is as little mealy-mouthed as Orrmin himself. It was not, however,
- ↑ On this head there is a great difference between Germany and England. Teutonic words that no well-bred Englishman could use before a woman may be printed by grave German historians. See Von Raumer's account of the siege of Viterbo in 1243, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen. Of course I know that this does not prove Germans to be one whit more indelicate than Englishmen; custom is everything.
- ↑ John Arderne's Account of himself, Reliquiæ Antiquæ, I. 191. Charles II. was the best bred Englishman of his time, yet he writes to his sister: — ‘Poor O'Nial died this afternoon of an ulcer in his guts.’ — Curry's Civil Wars in Ireland, I. 308. So swiftly does fashion change!
