There has been a certain amount of assimilation from French forms, as hardy, which is the French hardi. Especially has this adjectival form been confused with the French in -if (Latin -ivus), as tardy, from French tardif; jolly, from Old French jolif. In the case of caitiff, however, we have preserved this French ƒ very emphatically.

Chaucer uses jolif; but in Spenser it is jolly:

·

The first of them by name Gardantè hight,

A jolly person and of comely vew.'

The Faerie Queene, iii. I. 45.

Reversely also we find genuine members of this class written as if they belonged to French adjectives in -if. Thus we find in the texts of Chaucer the native word guilty written giltif and gultyf.

This formative is still in the highest state of activity. There is more freedom, for example, about making new adjectives in -y than in -ish.

Illustrations:

corny.

'Now have I dronk a draught of corny ale.'

foody.

Canterbury Tales, 13871.

'Who brought them to the sable fleet from Ida's foody leas.'

buttony.

Chapman, Iliad, xi. 104.

That buttony boy sprang up and down from the box.'-Thackeray, Vanity Fair.

plastery, rubbishy.

'St. Peter's disappoints me; the stone of which it is made is a poor plastery material; and indeed Rome in general might be called a rubbishy place.'-Arthur H. Clough.

moody, unhappy.

Though moody, unhappy, and disappointed, he was a hard-working conscientious pastor among the poor people with whom his lot was cast.'— Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, ch. i.

saucy.

In that clear and saucy style which he knows how to manage.'B. Disraeli.

plashy.

All but yon widow'd, solitary thing,

That feebly bends beside the plashy spring.'

Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village.

An interesting adjective of a rather doubtful kind, but which seems to come under this class, is the 'incony Jew' of Shakspeare.

Pretty is from the same French word as proud, although its sense is not identical with proudie. That famous old French word prud, which forms part of the well-known prud'hommes, was one of the earliest of the French words that made themselves quite at home among us. Already in one of the later Saxon Chronicles prut is substituted for the native word ranc, as a fine word (I suppose) for a vulgar one. When prut was first naturalised, it meant grand, splendid, proud, magnificent, insolent. From this prut, by our Saxon grammatical procedure, we made an abstract noun prit or pritte, which signified grandeur, splendour, pride, magnificence, insolence. The following lines are from a metrical life of St. Chad, in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS. cxlv. :

Al a vote he wende aboute

ne kepte he nan pritte;

Riche man þei he were imad he tolde per of litte.'

All afoot be went about, be kept no dignity;

Rich man though he was made, small count thereof made be.

This form is sometimes found in modern names of places,

as Bushy Park.

In -ing, as

wilding.

'O wilding rose, whom fancy thus endears,

I bid your blossoms in my bonnet wave.'

Sir Walter Scott, Lady of the Lake, Canto iv. init.

'And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers.'
Alfred Tennyson, Enid, p. 17.

But this form is found mostly in combination with an 7, which seems to imply that it was grafted on an adjective in -el, as darling, darkling, flatling, yearling.

These words are now but little used as adjectives; they have either got the substantive habit, as darling, yearling; or the adverbial, as darkling, flatling, for examples of which see the next section.

In -ly. In Saxon this formative was -lic, which was at the same time a noun, meaning body, as it still is in German, Leich. The transition from the substantival sense of body to the symbolic expression of the idea of similarity, provokes a comparison with a transition in the Hebrew, from the word for bone (and body), which is Dy, to the pronominal sense of very or same.

Examples: cleanly, godly, goodly, likely, only, steelly, unmannerly, rascally.

cleanly.

'A cleanly housewife.'

steelly.

'Steel through opposing plates the magnet draws,
And steelly atoms culls from dust and straws.'-Crabbe.

only.

The only prime minister mentioned in history whom his contemporaries reverenced as a saint.'-William Robertson, Charles V, Bk. I. A.D. 1517.

In the adjective likely we have the curious phenomenon of the altered form of a word coming to act as a formative to a better preserved form of itself; the first and last syllables of the word being originally the same word lic.

This form has been the less used as an adjective in consequence of its general employment for adverbial purposes.

And often it happens when we come across it in our elder literature adjectively used, we need a moment's reflection to put us in the train of thought for understanding it. In the following beautiful passage from Chaucer's Boethius, the adjective wepely, in the sense of pathetic, would give most readers a check. The passage is here printed with its marginal summary, as a sample of the excellent way in which the editors of the Early English Text Society turn out their work.

wepely.

'Blisful is þat man þat may seen be clere welle of good. blisful is he þat may vnbynde hym fro þe bonde of heuy erpe. The poete of trace [Orpheus] þat somtyme hadde ryzt greet sorowe for the deep of hys wijf. aftir þat he hadde maked by hys wepely songes pe wodes meueable to rennen. and hadde ymaked pe ryueres to stonden stille. and maked pe hertys and hyndes to ioignen dredles hir sides to cruel lyouns to herkene his songe.' (p. 106.)

In -some-adventuresome, darksome, gladsome, handsome, irksome, wholesome, winsome.

This is the German -sam, as langsam. It looks in spelling as if this termination belonged to our pronoun some, and so it has been interpreted by Dr. Wallis. (See Richardson, v. Handsome.) It is connected however with a different pronoun, namely same.

adventuresome.

'And now at once, adventuresome, I send
My herald thought into a wilderness.'

darksome.

John Keats, Endymion.

'Darksome nicht comes down.'-Robert Burns.

The word buxom belongs here. This might not be

apparent at first sight. It does not look like one of the adjectives in -some; but it is so, being the analogue of the German biegsam, ready to bow or comply.

'Great Neptune stoode amazed at their sight,
Whiles on his broad rownd backe they softly slid,
And eke him selfe mournd at their mournful plight,
Yet wist not what their wailing meant; yet did,
For great compassion of their sorow, bid
His mighty waters to them buxome bee.'

The Faerie Queene, iii. 4. 32.

Hence unbuxum and unbuxumness signified 'disobedient' and 'disobedience,' as in Handlyng Sinne, p. 250 (ed. Furnivall), 'pou art unbuxum.'

Lissom is supposed to be short for lithesome.

This formative is one that is in present activity. In Sir J. T. Coleridge's Memoir of Keble, p. 464, we find a new adjective on this model namely, long-some:—' It is thought to labour under the fault of being long-some.' But perhaps we see here only an imitation of the German langsam. In ed-ill-conditioned, landed, learned, leisured, monied, wicked, wretched.

weaponed.

& hee had beene weaponed as well as I,
he had beene worth both thee & mee.'

Eger and Grime, 1039.

As we can draw no decisive line between participles in -en and adjectives in the same termination, so neither can we distinctly sever between adjectives and participles in -ed. There are many which everybody would call adjectives, and many which everybody would agree to call participles. The ground of distinction would generally turn upon this,-whether they could or could not be derived from a verb. Yet this is not a very positive rule, because of course it is open to any grammarian to say the root must be a verb in order