[We do not conclude from Mr. Richards's diary that the 150 years between his writing and our reading of it have elevated us English by one hundred and fifty happy differences to a much higher pitch of happiness, or wisdom, or goodness than that of his days. It is true he writes of cockfighting, but does not record the doings of the pugilistic ring of later times. He records the giving of lumps of bull-beef to the goodies and gaffers of his neighbourhood, but tells us nothing of rebellions in overfull union houses. He speaks of parish apprentices, but not of the bayonet or staff that has more recently been needful to shield the squire's house from the bloodthirsty mob. His wife jogged with patience over the roads of the land on a pillion, instead of being wafted on the cushioned seat of a railway carriage; but he does not seem to have known so much as we do of dense populations of worn operatives, winning a scanty livelihood by twelve or fourteen hours of daily labour. There was more oak, but less of painted and veneered deal in folk's houses; more true hospitality, but less of ceremony; more of the middling classes without carriages and armorial bearings, but less of insolvents. There was good and evil in his time, as in our own. As we believe Mr. Macaulay has not quite done justice to the country gentlemen of the seventeenth century, by his sketch of their lives and manners in his History of England, and as Mr. Richards was a gentleman of the seventeenth century, and wrote three years of his diary in it, and only two years of it in the following one, we do not think it unfair to compare Mr. Macaulay's assertions with the facts Mr. Richards has handed down to us. Mr. Macaulay says: "A country gentleman who witnessed the revolution was probably in receipt of a fourth part of the rent which his acres now yield to his posterity." Very likely his rent, in weight of silver or gold, was about one fourth, or one third of that which his land now yields its owner; and we have given, from Mr. Richards's Diary, prices of goods which show us that an ounce of his money would buy as much of labour, or of the goods of which he writes, as three ounces of ours; so that he was as rich with one hundred shillings as the worthy High Sheriff of Dorset for 1852, the lord of Mr. Richards's manor, would be with 300. Mr. Macaulay says again: "It may be confidently affirmed, that of the squires whose names were then on commissions of peace and lieutenancy, not one in twenty went to town once in five years." Mrs. Richards went to London twice in two years; and in another year Mr. Richards's man, and his cousin Mary Symes, went in sundry months; and it is not likely that women travelled more than men. "The heir of an estate," Mr. Macaulay tells us, "often passed his boyhood and youth at the seat of his family, with no better tutors than grooms and gamekeepers; and scarce attained learning enough to sign his name to a mittimus." Mr. Richards's heir was sent to a grammar school, and he engaged a writing master for his servant Pymer; and he himself attained learning enough to write a diary in English and Italian. "His chief pleasures," we are told, were commonly derived from field sports, and from an unrefined sensuality." Are not field sports still the pleasures of princes? And we only hope that sensuality, whether unrefined or refined, may be no longer a pleasure of any English gentleman. Again "His language and pronunciation were such as we should now expect to hear only from the most ignorant clowns. His oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous terms of abuse, were uttered with the broadest accent of his province." This is a charge which we should not think of hearing from a philologist or scholar, since we do not think the speaking of the dialect of a man's birthland is generally any token of coarseness or refinement. We know a gentleman of truly refined mind, whose mother tongue is the Welsh dialect of Gwenedd, North Wales, and he still speaks English with a foreign accent, and we can believe that there may be a Silurian who speaks to his poor neighbours in the dialect of South Wales; and why, therefore, are we to conclude that one of them is more or less refined than the other, or that ether of them is more or less coarse than a gentleman of Brittany who speaks the Armoric form of the Celtic ? or how can either Swedish or Danish be a token of the refinement of a man of Teutonic blood? or why should we think King Alfred a boor since he spoke West Saxon rather than East Anglian. It is true that the dialect of Wessex is not now the court language, though we conceive it would have been so if Winchester had remained the seat of our government; but, inasmuch as the court settled in another part of England, it took the provincial dialect of its place, and has made it the national speech; and as it is now taken by the upper ranks, the provincial speech, which is left only with the poor, may seem to us to have been always a token of a coarse mind. We need not tell Mr. Macaulay that there is a Teutonic dialect, called broad Scotch, and if we are not wrong in our belief, that before the time of King James I. it was the speech of the king and nobles; and, therefore, it could be no token of coarseness. If, by the broadness of the provincial accent, Mr. Macaulay means broadness of vowel sounds, then, inasmuch as some words in the provincial dialects have closer sounds than they have in the national language, it is not easy to understand in what they are broader; but we can easily understand, that if even our English in its best form, were given up for French by all ranks but the poor, it would then and not till then become a mark of low life. 66 "He troubled himself little about decorating his abode, and if he attempted decoration seldom produced anything but deformity. The litter of a farmyard, gathered under the windows of his bedchamber, and the cabbages and gooseberry bushes grew close to his hall door." Mr. Richards's notes on the mowing and rolling of his lawn and walks, forbid us to believe this was true of Warmwell, as the fine old houses, and old kitchen gardens of some of his friends, even now show it was not true of their abodes. "As his fortune did not enable him to intoxicate large assemblies daily with claret or canary, strong beer was the ordinary beverage. The coarse jollity of the afternoon was often prolonged till the revellers were laid under the table." Mr. Richards often bottled off wine, port, malaga, and claret; but gives us no intimation of intoxication at any of the boards where he so often met his neighbours; and makes a servant promise never to frequent any alehouse. "He examined samples of grain, handled pigs, and, on market days, made bargains over a tankard, with drovers and hop merchants." I.-4 29 Mr. Macaulay almost seems to have forgotten that if all gentlemen were farmers they might make bargains with each other. They would fill the places of the farmers of their lands in our days; and the market would be of landowners, as it is now of tenant farmers. Mr. Richards bought wheat of Mr. Williams of Lewell, pease of Mr. Skinner of Denbigh, and oats of Capt. Sydenham. Still it must be allowed that he must have bought or sold with others than gentlemen, and so still must some of the gentlemen of Dorset who have farms in their own hands to this day, though whether they have ever examined samples of grain or handled pigs, we know not. It may be answered that they buy and sell through bailiff's or farm stewards, but so might the gentlemen of the seventeenth century, since we find that Mr. Richards, on the 27 January, 1701, twenty-seven days after the seventeenth century, engaged "John Eyre as working bayly to buy or sell for him." "His opinions," says Mr. Macaulay again, "respecting religion, government, foreign countries, and former times, having been derived, not from study, from observation, or from conversation with enlightened companions, but from such traditions as were current in his own small circle, were the opinions of a child." Mr. Richards betted on the domestic and foreign policy of his time; was visited by men from London, Bilbao, and Constantinople; and read at least a book on China. It may be said that Mr. Richards was an exception to the squires of his time, and was better educated and more refined than his neighbours. It appears, however, that he was a man of lower breeding than many of them, since he had a cousin John Long, who was a shopkeeper and a cousin Hodder who was in ill circumstances, and we should not think that his neighbours, heirs of broad lands, and fine old halls-were men of less refinement than himself: nor does he anywhere write a word, in English or Italian, to show us that he despised them; though he once told Mr. Hemming of his late unkindness; and tells us that Mr. Bound was rude in a message. Something might be also gathered from Mr. Richards's diary in defence of the clergy. Mr. Bound, the rector of Warmwell, whom, among all his clerical friends, he most lightly esteemed, kept a man servant; and of Mr. Read of Morton and Mr. Knight of Knighton, in whose churches inscriptions still record. their worth, he seems to have had a high opinion. One of them lent Mr. Richards a book, but still we cannot, therefore, know that he had more than eleven others among the pots and pans on his shelves. It cannot be denied that there were poor low-paid clergy in the seventeenth century, as there are now. We know one who for some years, till within the last, held a curacy of £13 a year. W.B. SCRAPS IN ENGLISH AND LATIN. From a Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century, in the Library of the Corporation of Leicester. Woys hatawyf aud le3t fort to suync, Lige longe in hyr bed, and lef fort drinc, Qui pravam habet conjugem qui odit laborare, In mari ipsa fuit digna procul a margine, Lord Jhesu Crist 3at sitit abow hous, Of 30s foul glotunis delivir 3is hous, Wan 30w lochist on me as cat doth on 3e mous, Jhesu Christe Domine, qui supra nos sedes, Al clerkyn lov, clercyn low, Ys y-wyrt at Oxinfort on je scolows dor. Omnis amor clerici, amor clerici, Sicud flores virides discendunt ab arbore. W. NOTE TO THE POEM IN THE LANCASHIRE DIALECT. No. III. PAGE 307. THE omission (for want of room) of glossarial notes to the wild ditty of the Lancashire wizard in our last, and the printing of the piece with some apparent haste, makes it necessary for me to request the insertion of a few remarks in the next number of the Retrospective Review.-E. T. Line 1st "Mounday" as printed in Finlay's Historical Ballads, and in the Catalogue of the Cottonian MSS., may perhaps be an error for "Monnday;" in Scotland pronounced Monenday, A.-S. Monandæg. Line 39, Ekdelik or Ehdelik or Elidelik seems to have been originally written, but the i or latter part of k or h erased so as to read Eldelik, i. e. worldly, earthly man, ordinary human being, he was none; from eld age, which nearly coincides with the original sense of world-wer-eld, age of man, a sense not obsolete in the plural, “world (i. e. ages) without end." In one line, which I cannot quote, as I have not the printed copy near me, the word that has been repeated towards the end, where it should only have occurred once near the beginning of the line. I have also to notice with many thanks to the contributor, G. S., a valuable though small addition to our stock of genuine Anglo-Saxon from a Copenhagen MS. in No. II. February. The accompanying translation of the second paragraph presents a nice instance of such interpretation as gives the true result of the whole by reversing the sense of each part. For "of" is as contrary to on as "eard" in that passage is to earth." Se the bith of earde and feor of his kyththe," -"of" must be the same in the first as in the second clause, and cannot be on in the one, and from or off in the other. It is equally clear that eard, originally in A.-S. geard, German 'gart,' can be no synonym of earth eorthe, erde, which nearly resemble hearth, heorth, herd, the Ger. d. never representing, the same letter in Saxon or English except in cases of modern corruption, as burden (bürde) for burthen, &c. Besides, the initial vowels are quite different, eard leads back to the Gothic gard, primary vowel a, eorthe or erde to i, which comes to light again in irdisch.-Not to weary ourselves by any further pursuit in this direction, we may just glance at "of" af, ab, in 'bergab' off or down the hill, contrasted with auf, iup, up, (or on) in bergauf' up the hill. Now to our theme again : So far from meaning earth, the word here evidently, though figuratively, means heaven.-Man, whose home, treasure, and heart, are above while he is on earth, is represented as a pilgrim, out of his native element, his dwelling-place, and far from his country. So King Alfred, after Boëthius, has sung (Metre xxiv.) in the name of Mind or the human soul-" Ic hæbbe fithru-fugle swiftran, &c." I have wings swifter than a fowl, &c. It soars above the remotest of the stars-contemplates the glory and blessedness of the place where dwells the honour of the wise King and Judge of allthen exclaims, "This is eallunga―min agen kyth-eard and ethel;" this is altogether my own country, dwelling, and birth-place. The same sentiment is elegantly expressed by a great ancestor of our own Royal Family, one of the immediate successors of our Chaucer : O besy goste ay flikkering to and fro, Till thou cum to that place that thou cam fro, James the First of Scots, A. D. 1423. Though the subject is not nearly exhausted, this may, for the present suffice. |