which have put to flight the commonest of Teutonic words. Strange it is that these French terms should have won their way into our hovels as well as into our manor houses.
I give a few instances of Manning's use of French words; his lines on Confirmation show plainly how much foreign ware we owe to the clergy. He sticks pretty close to the French poem he was translating, as in page 107, une cote perece is Englished by a kote percede; and this gives us some idea of the number of new words that must have been brought in by translators. We see the terms verry (verus), oure (hora), prayere, anoynt, age, renoun, morsel, tryfyl, savyoure, straitly, in vein (frustra), bewte, usurer, valeu, a fair, affynyte, sample, trespas, spyryt, revyle, moreyne (pestis), pestelens, veniaunce, hutch, tremle. It may be laid down, that in his diction this writer of 1303 has more in common with us of 1873 than he had with any English poet of 1250.
A few other changes must be more specially pointed out. Hitherto Englishmen had talked of cristendom, but Robert (page 346) speaks of crystyanyte.
He has dropped the old word syfernes, and translates the kindred French sobreté by soberte, our sobriety.
He has both verement and verryly: the first in its foreign adverbial ending points to mind, the second in its English adverbial ending points to lic (body). In page 149 charyte stands for alms, coming from the French line, la charite luy enveia. In the same page, nycete stands for folly.[1]
- ↑ This French word has had a most curious history in England. Nice stood for foolish down to about 1580; then it came to mean precise; and a hundred years ago it got the meaning of pleasing. Mrs. Thrale, in Miss Burney's Diary, is the earliest instance I can recollect of any one using nice in the last-named sense, in free everyday talk. The young lady of our time who is helped through her hoop at croquet by some deft curate, thinks to herself, ‘O nice creature!’ These are the very words that Chaucer, in his Second Nun's Tale, puts into the mouth of St. Cecilia, when that most outspoken of maidens wishes to call the Roman governor ‘a silly brute.’ Nice is now applied to a sermon, to a jam tart, to a young man; in short, to everything. The lower classes talk of ‘nice weather.’ We have become mere slovens in diction; the penny-a-liners now write about ‘a splendid shout.’
