of Latin, that forsooth and wont have been kept alive, by schoolboys construing scilicet and soleo in the time-honoured way. It is pleasant to find one bough of the great Aryan tree lending healthy sap to another offshoot.[1]
Some of the best English verse of our time may be read in the pages of Punch, whenever great Englishmen die. Moreover, that shrewd wight is always ready to nail up vermin on the barn door; as lately in the case of the word elasticity, employed by three Bishops. Upon this he remarked (June 7, 1873): ‘An upstart expression foisted into the Text would be like a patch of new cloth, and that shoddy, sewn into an old garment of honest English make. That web is of a woof too precious to be pieced with stuff of no more worth than a penny a line.’ But sound English criticism too often calls forth a growl of annoyance from vulgar vanity. If any one in our day sets himself to breast the muddy tide of fine writing, an outcry is at once raised that he is panting to drive away from England all words that are not thoroughly Teutonic. The answer is: no man that knows the history of the English tongue, can ever be guilty of such unwisdom. Our heedless forefathers in the Thirteenth Century allowed thousands of our good old words to slip; out language must be copious, at any cost; we therefore by slow degrees made good the loss
- ↑ One of the good deeds of our boys is that they have kept alive the old substantive let (a hindrance) used in the game of fives. In a letter of Horace Walpole's, written about 1737 from the Christopher at Eton, we see some of the venerable slang of that College; the words are still fresh as ever. Mr. Kinglake, in his account of Colonel Yea at the Alma, has almost made rooge classical; none who have played football in the Eton way can forget this verb.
