RER'S POPULAR PHRASES AND NURSERY RHYME S. EVERY one knows
PETER PINDAR'S story of the Jew and his razors, " made to sell, not shave." There are a good man :y Jew
manufacturers in the literary market, whose ware* are in like manner intended for buyers rather than readers : and we have noticed that works made for sale and not for criticism find their way slowly to the Spectator. Mr. BELLENDEN KER seems to have had some instinctive misgiving of the kind indicated, and we never received the first edition of his Archavlogy of Popular Phrases and Nursery Rhymes. Having met with little save buffets in other directions, be has now sent the second edition of his work, probably as an experiment upon our excessive good.nature. At any time of day it would have been lost labour to have gone into the details of the Archsecdogy, unless in the way of a joke; for more groundless assumptions, and cruder, wilder, or flimsier specu- lations, we never met with. The scheme of the work is to explain the meaning of our proverbs by a mere jingling resemblance in sound. Mr. KER holds, that our popular phrases by habit sug- gest a meaning, but none is conveyed by the words themselves. He accordingly sets himself to work to discover the origin of this fancied contradiction; and having made out to his own satisfac- tion that the Saxon is the original both of English and Dutch, he composes—for surely no native ever used such barbarisms—cer- tam Dutch sentences, which he maintains were the prototypes of our proverbs, and that when the mother tongue ceased to be spoken in England, these phrases were still retained, and were trans- muted into the existing proverbs by similarity of sound alone. In support of this strange theory, the author does not advance a particle of evidence. He does not prove, or attempt to prove, that the phrases from which lie derives our proverbs were current, or even used, in any time, place, or language. He does not attempt to show that the Anglo-Saxon and the Low Saxon were the same, or that modern Dutch bears any greater resem- blance to the latter in spelling and pronunciation than modern English does to the former ; nor does he pause to fix a conjectural date when Dutch ceased to be spoken in England. Yet all these general points must be established before reason could entertain. his individual cases. Had he only ventured to fix the time when. the wisdom of our ancestors left off Low Dutch, it would have been decisive as to the whole argument : for all his discoveries rest upon the assumption, that, at a period certainly as remote as the Conquest, some jargon, not then understood, was suddenly fixed in numberless phrases of the happiest meaning, in the sound and genius of the language of the present day, and has so been pre- served for nearly eight hundred years, notwithstanding all the changes of the English tongue. He runs equally counter to reason throughout. Nothing is truer than Lord CHESTERFIELD'S joke, "that every thing suffers by translation except a bishop." The archasology of popular signs would have taught our author, that the repetition of words to which no ideas are annexed ends in gross absurdity. Yet Mr. KER would not only make translation, but even this blind translation, turn the harshest, clumsiest, and most matterless stuff, into sen- tences pregnant with meaning and rich in illustrative wisdom. But clear away all these insuperable objections, and the author is incapable of his task : he cannot comprehend the meaning of the phrases which form his subject-matter, or he designedly perverts it. Thus, he tells us that " To take the bull by the horns,' means-
" To begin an attack by the best way to succeed in it ; to take the surest means to carry the point; to 410 all that could be done, so that, if failure follows, it is because the attempt was impracticable by the best means within the chief's power."
Whereas, the secondary interpretation is, to meet a difficulty ; tha primary one, clearly, to brave a danger which cannot be avoided; as Mr. KER might find in practice, if he ever encountered the reality of the image. This, however, -might be sheer incom- petency: what can be said of the honest pretensions of a critic and philologer who tells us that " It makes my blood run cold" means "It puts me in a passion; it exasperates me !" Our notice would not be complete without a specimen ; so we must e'en give one; and we may as well take the first, for though part of it has been copied already, it is rich enough to bear repo. tion.
"ICE TOOK TIIE BULL BY TUE HORNS.
" To begin an attack by the best way to succeed in it ; to take the sores means to carry the point ; to do all that could be done, so that, if failure fol- lows, it is because the attempt was impracticable by the best means within the chief's power. Hie tuck tije bol by, die hooren's ; q. e. here head calls con- trivance in ; that is, as it ought to be ; here the head invokes to its aid the skill of others, that is giving the case all the chance fur success it admits of; ia the attempt in question the chief (the head) summons to his side ingenuity itself (all that can be had) this is what suits the occasion; thus implying wis- dom at the bead summoning all the skill within its reach to its assistance. A pigheaded chief trusts to himself, and fails from self-conceit and incapacity. A wise one knows that to combine all the ingenuity and skill within his command is the best way to succeed, and at all events secures him from reproach of neglect, if failure takes place. Bic, bier, here, in this case. Tuck, Ink, artifice, contrivance, machination, machinery of mind, cunning, device, decep- tion. Tye the subjunctive form of tifen in the sense of to invoke, to summon, to call upon, to cite appearance. By, beside, near, to. Hooren, to belong to, to become, to be fitting, to be proper, to be all that is right; and here used substantively ; if in the original the word was not liocrend, and then it !mild
be as the participle present of the verb, and probably it was so. as, as. Tuck sounds precisely as we pronounce took. Tije as the. liooren's or hoorend's sounds horns. But, head."
It may be said that there is ingenuity in some of Mr. BELLEH• DEN KER'S attempts; but when troth,. reason, and probability, are disregarded, it is not difficult to be ingenious. Put a hold rider on his hobby-horses and, like the cow in one of the rhymes Mr. Ka& undertakes to interpret, he will easily jump over the mu.
Previous page
