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and it still retains some vitality. A word so often met with in ages so widely distant, and bearing such a variety of signification, merits a paragraph to itself.

There have been at all periods of history certain prominent and favourite words-words of the day. By way of ready illustration, we might mention fine and elegant as favourite words of last century; and nice and interesting as words that are repeated with great frequency in our own day. Such favourite words are generally adjectives. Such an adjective was quaint in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. In the old French it was written coint, choint, and it has been derived with great probability from the Latin complus, neat, trim, orderly, handsome. At the time of the rise of King's English in the fourteenth century, this was a great social word describing an indefinite compass of merit and approbation. Whatever things were agreeable, elegant, clever, neat, trim, gracious, pretty, amiable, taking, affable, proper, spruce, handsome, happy, knowing, dodgy, cunning, artful, gentle, prudent, wise, discreet (and all this is but a rough translation of Roquefort's equivalents for COINT), were included under this comprehensive word.

In Chaucer, the spear of Achilles, which can both heal and hurt, is called a quaint spear':

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And fell in speech of Telephus the king
And of Achilles for his queinte spere,
For he coude with it both hele and dere.'

Canterbury Tales, 10553.

By the time we come to Spenser it has acquired a new sense, very naturally evolved from the possession of all the most esteemed social accomplishments; it has come to mean fastidious. Florimell, when she has taken refuge in the hut of the witch, is fain to accept her rude hospitalities:

And gan recomfort her in her rude wyse,
With womanish compassion of her plaint,

Wiping the teares from her suffused eyes,
And bidding her sit downe, to rest her faint
And wearie limbes awhile. She, nothing quaint
Nor 'sdeignfull of so homely fashion,

Sith brought she was now to so hard constraint,
Sate downe upon the dusty ground anon:

As glad of that small rest as bird of tempest gon.'

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The Faerie Queene, iii. 7. 10.

Another stage in our national history, and we come to the period at which the word has stuck fast ever since, and there rooted itself. We may almost say that the word quaint now signifies after the fashion of the seventeenth century,' or something to that effect. It means something that is pretty after some bygone standard of prettyness; and if we trace back the time we shall find it in the seventeenth century. As the memory of man is in legal doctrine localised to the reign of Richard the Second, as 'Old English' is (or was, before there was an Early English Text Society, and before Mr. Freeman had arisen to assign a new meaning to the word English) particularly identified with the language of the fifteenth century, so quaintness of diction has acquired for itself a permanent place in the literature of the seventeenth. In the Edinburgh Review, January, 1842, is an article on Thomas Fuller, in the course of which are some excellent remarks bearing on the word now before us :

'In many respects Fuller may be considered the very type and exemplar of that large class of religious writers of the seventeenth century to which we emphatically apply the term "quaint." That word has long ceased to mean what it once meant. By derivation, and by original usage, it first signified "scrupulously elegant, refined, exact, accurate," beyond the reach of common art. In time it came to be applied to whatever was designed to indicate these characteristics-though excogitated with so elaborate a subtlety as to trespass on ease and nature. In a word, it was applied to what was ingenious and fantastic, rather than tasteful or beautiful. It is now wholly used in this acceptation; and always implies some violation of the taste, some deviation from what the "natural" requires under the given circumstances. Now the age in which Fuller lived was the golden age of "quaintness" of all kinds-in gardening, in architecture,

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in costume, in manners, in religion, in literature. As men improved external nature with a perverse expenditure of money and ingenuity-made her yews and cypresses grow into peacocks and statues, tortured and clipped her luxuriance into monotonous uniformity, turned her graceful curves and spirals into straight lines and parallelograms, compelled things incongruous to blend in artificial union, and then measured the merits of the work, not by the absurdity of the design, but by the difficulty of the execution, so in literature, the curiously and elaborately unnatural was too often the sole object. The constitution of Fuller's mind

had such an affinity with the peculiarities of the day, that what was “quaint” in others seems to have been his natural element-the sort of attire in which his active and eccentric genius loved to clothe itself.'

The word sometimes signifies merely a nicety in small things, as in the following:

'But how a body so fantastic, trim,

And quaint in its deportment and attire,

Can lodge a heavenly mind-demands a doubt.'

William Cowper, The Time-Piece.

Here we may bring our French list to an end, but not without the observation, which has been already made above under the substantive, that the line of division between our French and Latin groups is much blurred. The general case is this: We took the form from the French; but the great bulk of the words that now constitute the group, have been derived to us from the Latin. And it may be added that many words seem now most easily traceable to the Latin, which we originally borrowed from the French. In the great latinising tyranny, many words were purged from the tinge of their originally French nationality, and reclaimed to a Latin standard. The delitable of Chaucer and Piers Plowman had become delectable long before Bunyan wrote of the Delectable Mountains.

When the learned of the nation were steeped in Latin, vast quantities of French words in our language had a new surface of Latin put upon them. And the Latin invasion did not stop here; many old Saxon forms were modified in a Latin sense.

Our list of the Latin formatives begins with one which was erected upon a Saxon basis. This is the form in -ous,

-eous, Latin -ius, or -osus.

In adopting this form we seem to have been continuing and gradually modifying the Saxon adjectives in -wis. Thus rihtwis became righteous.

Examples: boisterous, covetous, dexterous, disastrous, erroneous, glorious, gracious, jealous, luxurious, meritorious, multitudinous (Shakspeare), necessitous, noxious, obstreperous, outrageous, pious, poisonous, riotous, tedious, zealous.

joyous, courteous, gracious, spacious.

'Long were it to describe the goodly frame,
And stately port of Castle Joyeous,
(For so that Castle hight by commun name)
Where they were entertaynd with courteous
And comely glee of many gratious

Faire Ladies, and of many a gentle knight,
Who, through a Chamber long and spacious,
Eftsoones them brought unto their Ladies sight,
That of them cleeped was the Lady of Delight.'

The Faerie Queene, iii. I. 31.

'And all . . . wondered at the gracious wordes, that proceeded out of his mouth.'-Luke iv. 22.

barbarous.

'The Scythian counted the Athenian, whom he did not vnderstand, barbarous so the Romane did the Syrian, and the Iew, (euen S. Hierome himselfe calleth the Hebrew tongue barbarous, belike because it was strange to so many) so the Emperour of Constantinople calleth the Latine tongue, barbarous, though Pope Nicolas do storme at it: so the Lewes long before Christ, called all other nations, Lognazim, which is little better than barbarous.' The Translators to the Reader, 1611.

rhizopodous.

'Spongilla is a rhizopodous animal.'

fastuous.

'In reforming the lives of the clergy he was too fastuous and severe.'Jeremy Taylor, ed. Eden, vol. v. p. 139.

slumbrous.

'And awaken the slumbrous state of conscience in which too many of us habitually live.'-Sir J. T. Coleridge, Memoir of Keble, ch. xiv.

erroneous.

'Mr. said the right hon. gentleman who had just sat down had made statements which, from his experience, he would show to be entirely false. The SPEAKER-The hon. member means to say erroneous. (A laugh.) 'Mr. begged to apologise for using a word which was not Parliamentary. He had been but a short time in the House, and was therefore not well versed in Parliamentary terms (a laugh), but if there was any Parliamentary term stronger than the word "erroneous," he would beg leave to use it with reference to some of the statements of the right hon. gentleman.' -House of Commons, June 17, 1870.

stercoraceous.

The stable yields a stercoraceous heap.'

William Cowper, The Garden.

obstreperous.

Nor is it a mean praise of rural life
And solitude, that they do favour most,
Most frequently call forth, and best sustain,
These pure sensations; that can penetrate
The obstreperous city; on the barren seas
Are not unfelt.'

William Wordsworth, The Excursion, Bk. IV.

luxurious.

A free nation ought not to provoke war; but it ought not to be too luxurious and ease-loving to fight, if the occasion should arise.'-Llewelyn Davies, The Gospel and Modern Life, p. 45.

generous, conspicuous, illustrious.

'As belonging to the old blood he had especially recommended himself to Elizabeth's favour by his loyalty, and in 1572 he had been rewarded for his services by the earldom of Essex. He was young, enthusiastic, generous; the first conspicuous representative of that illustrious company who revived in the England of Elizabeth the genius of medieval chivalry. He was burning to deserve his honours; and in Ireland . . . he saw the opportunity which he desired.'-J. A. Froude, History of England, vol. x. p. 551.

Bumptious was a slang Oxford adjective which started about 1841. It is now sometimes seen in literature:

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