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قراءة كتاب Notes and Queries, Number 50, October 12, 1850
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NOTES AND QUERIES:
A MEDIUM OF INTER-COMMUNICATION FOR LITERARY MEN, ARTISTS, ANTIQUARIES, GENEALOGISTS, ETC.
"When found, make a note of."—CAPTAIN CUTTLE.
| No. 50. | SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1850 | Price Threepence. Stamped Edition 4d. |
CONTENTS
| NOTES:— | Page |
| A Note on "Small Words" | 305 |
| Gray's Elegy, by Bolton Corney | 306 |
| Gray's Elegy in Portuguese | 306 |
| Further Notes on the Authorship of Henry VIII. | 306 |
| Queen Elizabeth and Sir Henry Nevill, by Lord Braybrooke | 307 |
| Minor Notes:—Whales—Bookbinding—Scott's Waverley—Satyayrata | 307 |
| QUERIES:— | |
| The Black Rood of Scotland | 308 |
| Minor Queries:—Trogus Pompeius—Mortuary Stanzas—Laird of Grant—Bastille, Records of,—Orkney under Norwegians—Swift's Works—Pride of the Morning—Bishop Durdent and the Staffordshire Historians—Pope and Bishop Burgess—Daniel's Irish New Testament—Ale Draper—Eugene Aram—Latin Epigram—Couplet in Defoe—Books wanted to refer to—Watermarks in Writing-paper—Puzzling Epitaph—Cornish MSS.—Bilderdijk the Poet—Egyptian MSS.—Scandinavian Priesthood—Thomas Volusemus | 309 |
| REPLIES:— | |
| Curfew | 311 |
| Engelmann's Bibliotheca Scriptorum Classicorum | 312 |
| Crozier and Pastoral Staff, by Rev. M. Walcott | 313 |
| Parsons, the Staffordshire Giant, by E.F. Rimbault, L.L.D. | 314 |
| Wormwood Wine, by S.W. Singer, &c. | 315 |
| Replies to Minor Queries:—Feltham's Works—Harefinder—Fool or a Physician—Papers of Perjury—Pilgrim's Road—Capture of Henry VI.—Andrew Beckett—Passage in Vida—Quem Deus—Countess of Desmond—Confession—Cayell, Meaning of,—Lord Kingsborough's Mexico—Aërostation—Concolinel—Andrewes's Tortura Torti, &c. | 315 |
| MISCELLANEOUS:— | |
| Notes on Books, Sales, Catalogues, &c. | 319 |
| Books and Odd Volumes Wanted | 319 |
| Notices to Correspondents | 319 |
| Advertisements | 320 |
NOTES.
A NOTE ON "SMALL WORDS."
"And ten small words creep on in one dull line."
Most ingenious! most felicitous! but let no man despise little words, despite of the little man of Twickenham. He himself knew better, but there was no resisting the temptation of such a line as that. Small words he says, in plain prosaic criticism, are generally "stiff and languishing, but they may be beautiful to express melancholy."
The English language is a language of small words. It is, says Swift, "overstocked with monosyllables." It cuts down all its words to the shortest possible dimensions: a sort of half-Procrustes, which lops but never stretches. In one of the most magnificent passages in Holy Writ, that, namely, which describes the death of Sisera:—
"At her feet he bowed, he fell: at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: where he bowed, there he fell down dead."
There are twenty-two monosyllables to three of greater length, or rather to the same dissyllable thrice repeated; and that too in common parlance proncounced as a monosyllable. The passage in the Book of Ezekiel, which Coleride is said to have considered the most sublime in the whole Bible,—
"And He said unto me, son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, though knowest,"—
contains seventeen monosyllables to three others. And in the most grand passage which commences the Gospel of St. John, from the first to the fourteenth verses, inclusive, there are polysyllables twenty-eight, monosyllables two hundred and one. This it may be said is poetry, but not verse, and therefore makes but little against the critic. Well then, out of his own mouth shall he be confuted. In the fourth epistle of his Essay on Man, a specimen selected purely at random from his works, and extending altogether to three hundred and ninety-eight lines, there are no less than twenty-seven (that is, a trifle