Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851

[The anecdote told by Lord Campbell (but much better by Lord Eldon himself in Twiss's Life of the great Chancellor), does not refer to the late Duke of Norfolk, but to his predecessor Charles (the eleventh duke), who was a Protestant. The late duke never sat in parliament till after the Relief Bill passed. In 1824 a Bill was passed to enable him to exercise the office of Earl Marshal without taking certain oaths, but gave him no seat in the House. We may as well add, that Lord Eldon's joke must have been perpetrated—not on the bringing up of the Bill, when the duke was not in the House—but on the occasion of the Great Snoring Bill being reported (April 2, 1811), when the duke appears to have been present.]

The Beggar's Petition.—I shall feel obliged by your informing me who the author is of the lines—

"Pity the sorrows of a poor old man,
Whose trembling limbs have borne him to your door."

    S.

[The authorship of this little poem has at times excited a good deal of attention. It has been attributed, on no very sufficient grounds, to Dr. Joshua Webster, M.D.; but from the Gentleman's Magazine, vol. lxx., p. 41., it appears that it is the entire production of the Rev. Thomas Moss, minister of Brierly Hill and Trentham, in Staffordshire, who wrote it at about the age of twenty-three. He sold the manuscript of that, and of several others, to Mr. Smart, printer, in Wolverhampton, who, from the dread which Mr. Moss had of criticism, was to publish them on this condition, that only twenty copies should have his name annexed to them, for the purpose of being presented to his relations and friends.]

"Tiring-irons never to be untied."—To what does Lightfoot (vol. vii. p. 214.) refer when, in speaking of the Scriptures, he says—

"They are not unriddleable riddles, and tiring-irons never to be untied"?

    J. Eastwood.

Ecclesfield.

[The allusion is to a puzzle for children—often used by grown children—which consists of a series of iron rings, on to or off which a loop of iron wire may be got with some labour by those who know the way, and which is very correctly designated a tiring-iron.]

Replies

THE MEANING OF EISELL

[This controversy is becoming a little too warm for our pages. But Mr. Causton is entitled to have some portion of the letter he has sent to us inserted. He writes with reference to the communications from Mr. Hickson and Mr. Singer in our 68th number, p. 119., in reply to Mr. C.'s Article, which, although it had been in our hands a considerable time, was not inserted until out 65th Number, p. 66.; a delay which gave to that article the appearance of an attempt to revive a discussion, whereas it really was written only in continuance of one.]

To Mr. Hickson I suggest, that whether the notion of "drinking up a river," or "eating a crocodile," be the more "unmeaning" or "out of place," must after all be a mere matter of opinion, as the latter must remain a question of taste; since it seems to be his settled conviction that it is not "impossible," but only "extravagant." Archdeacon Nares thought it quite the reverse; and I beg to remind your readers that Shakspearian crocodiles are never served à la Soyer, but swallowed au naturel and entire.

Mr. Hickson is dissatisfied with my terms "mere verbiage" and "extravagant rant." I recommend a careful consideration of the scene over the grave of Ophelia; and then let any one say whether or not the "wag" of tongue between Laertes and Hamlet be not fairly described by the expressions I have used,—a paraphrase indeed, of Hamlet's concluding lines:

"Nay, an thou'lt mouth,
I'll rant as well as thou."

Doubtless Shakspeare had a purpose in everything he wrote, and his purpose at this time was to work up the scene to the most effective conclusion, and to display the excitement of Hamlet in a series of beautiful images, which, nevertheless, the queen his mother immediately pronounced to be "mere madness," and which one must be as mad as Hamlet himself to adopt as feats literally to be performed.

The offence is rank in the eyes of Mr. Singer that I should have styled Mr. Hickson his friend. The amenities of literature, I now perceive, do not extend to the case, and a new canon is required, to the effect that "when one gentleman is found bolstering up the argument of another, he is not, ever for the nonce, to be taken for his friend." I think the denial to be expressed in rather strong language; but I hasten to make the amende suitable to the occasion, by withdrawing the "falsehood and unfounded insinuation."

Mr. Singer has further charged me with "want of truth," in stating that the question remains "substantially where Steevens and Malone had left it." Wherein, I ask, substantially consists the difference?

Mr. Singer has merely substituted his "wormwood wine" for Malone's vinegar; and before he can make it as palatable to common sense, and Shakspeare's "logical correctness and nicety of expression," as it was to Creed and Shepley, he must get over the "stalking-horse," the drink UP, which stands in his way precisely as it did in that of Malone's more legitimate proposition. Mr. Singer overleaps the difficulty by a bare assertion that "to drink UP was commonly used for simply to drink." He has not produced any parallel case of proof, with the exception of one from Mr. Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes. I adopt his citation, and shall employ it against him.

Drink UP can only be grammatically applied to a determinate total, whether it be the river Yssell or Mr. Hickson's dose of physic. Shakespeare seems to have been well acquainted with, and to have observed, the grammatical rule which Mr. Singer professes not to comprehend. Thus:

"I will drink,
Potions of eysell."

    Shaksp. Sonnet cxi.
and

"Give me to drink mandragora,"

    Ant. and Cleop., Act I. Sc. 5.
are parallel passages, and imply quantity indeterminate, inasmuch as they admit of more or less.

Now Mr. Singer's obliging quotation from the Nursery Rhymes,—

"Eat UP your cake, Jenny,
Drink UP YOUR wine"—

certainly implies quite the reverse; for it can be taken to mean neither more nor less than the identical glass of wine that Jenny had standing before her. A parallel passage will be found in Shakspeare's sonnet (CXIV.):

"Drink up the monarch's plague, this flattery:"

and in this category, on the rule exponed, since it cannot positively appertain to the other, must, I think, be placed the line of Hamlet,—

"Woo't drink up eisell?"

as a noun implying absolute entirety; which might be a river, but could not be grammatically applied to any unexpressed quantity.

Now what is the amount and value of Mr. Singer's proposition? He says:

"In Thomas's Italian Dictionary, 1562, we have 'Assenzio, Eysell'[4 - This deduction is not warranted by the Vocab. della Crusca, or any other Ital. Dic. to which I have had the opportunity of reference: and Somner and Lye are quite distinct on the A.-Sax. words, Wermod and Eisell.]; and Florio renders that word [Assenzio, not Eysell?] by 'wormwood.' What is meant, however, is wormwood wine, a nauseously bitter medicament then much in use."

When pressed by Lord Braybrooke ("Notes and Queries," Vol. ii., p. 286.), who proved, by an extract from Pepys's Diary, that wormwood wine, so far from bearing out Mr. Singer's description, was, in fact, a fashionable luxury, probably not more nauseous than the pale ale so much in repute at the present day, Mr. Singer very adroitly produced a "corroborative note" from "old Langham" ("Notes and Queries," Vol. ii., p. 315.), which, curiously enough, is castrated of all that Langham wrote pertaining to the question in issue. Treating of the many virtues of the prevailing tonic as an appetiser, and restorer "of a good color" to them that be "leane and evil colored," Langham says:

["Make wormwood wine thus: take aqua vitæ and malmsey, of each like much, put it in a glasse or bottell with a few leaves of dried wormwood, and let it stand certain days,] and strein out a little spoonfull, and drink it with a draught of ale or wine: [it may be long preserved.]"[5 - Garden of Health, 4to. London, 1633. The portions within the brackets were omitted by Mr. Singer.]

Thus it will be seen that the reason for "streining out a little spoonfull" as a restorative for a weak stomach was less on account of the infusion being so "atrociously unpalatable," than of the alcohol used in its preparation.

Dr. Venner also recommends as an excellent stomachic,

"To drink mornings fasting, and sometimes also before dinner, a draught of wormwood-wine or beer:"

and we may gather the "atrocious bitterness" of the restorative, by the substitute he proposes: "or, for want of them," he continues:

"white wine or stale beer, wherein a few branches of wormwood have, for certain hours, been infused."[6 - Via Recta ad Vitam Longam, by Thomas Venner, M.D. 4to. London, 1660.]

Dr. Parr, quoting Bergius, describes Absinthium as "a grateful stomachic;" and Absinthites as "a pleasant form of the wormwood."[7 - Med. Dict.]

Is this therefore the article that Hamlet proposed to drink UP with his crocodile? So far from thinking so, I have ventured to coincide with Archdeacon Nares in favour of Steevens; for whether it be Malone's vinegar, or Mr. Singer's more comfortable stomachic, the challenge to drink either "in such a rant, is so inconsistent, and even ridiculous, that we must decide for the river, whether its name be exactly found or not."[8 - A description of the rivers Yssel will be found in Dict. Géograph. de la Martinière, v. ix. fo. 1739.]

I am quite unconscious of any purport in my remarks, other than they appear on paper; and I should be sorry indeed to accuse Mr. Singer of being "ignorant" of anything; but I venture to suggest that those young gentlemen of surpassing spirit, who ate crocodiles, drank UP eisell, and committed other anomalies against nature in honor of their mistresses, belonged decidedly to a period of time anterior to that of Shakspeare, and went quite out with the age of chivalry, of which Shakspeare saw scarcely even the fag end. Your lover of Shakspeare's time was quite another animal. He had begun to take beer. He had become much more subtle and self-satisfied. He did sometimes pen sonnets to his mistress's eye-brow, and sing soft nothings to the gentle sighing of his "Lewte." He sometimes indeed looked "pale and wan;" but, rather than for love, it was more than probably from his immoderate indulgence in the "newe weede," which he drank[9 - As the verb "to drink" was not limited to the act of bibition, but for Mr. Hickson's decision against drinking up the "sea-serpent," it might yet become a question whether Hamlet's eisell had not been a misprint for eosol (asinus).], though I never discovered that it was drank up by him. He generally wore a doublet and breeches of satin, slashed and lined with coloured taffata; and walked about with a gilliflower in one hand, and his gloves in the other. His veritable portrait is extant, and is engraved in Mr. Knight's Pictorial Shakspeare.[10 - Merchant of Venice, Introduction.]

It will be time enough to decide which of us has run his head against "a stumbling-block of his own making," when Mr. Singer shall have found a probable solution of his difficulty "by a parallelism in the poet's pages."

    H. K. Staple Causton.

Vassall Road, Brixton, Feb. 21. 1851.