138
NOTES AND QUERIES. [11 s. vm. AUG. ie,
would be giving "the Little Englanders" of those days a false idea on which to feed. Uniform in those days was generally styled "regimentals." C. J. Durand, Colonel.
NAMES TERRIBLE TO CHILDREN (10 S. x.
509 ; xi. 53. 218, 356, 454 ; xii. 53 ; 11 S. ii.
133, 194, 258; v. 517; vi. 172). Here,
methinks, is another to be added to the
interesting list :
" Denmark's greatest hero, Peder Vessel, called Tordenskjold (Thundershield), who from being a simple cabin boy raised himself to the rank of Admiral, and whose name to this day is a terror to all naughty little Danish boys and girls." ' Denmark, Past and Present,' by Margaret Thomas (1902), p. 16. g T>
The, Works of Thomax Deloney. Edited from the
Earliest Extant Editions and Broadsides, with an
Introduction and Notes, by Francis Oscar Main.
(Oxford, Clarendon Press. )
EVERY now and then a wholly admirable book appears fresh in subject, scholarly arid complete in treatment, pleasant in form, interesting in itself. Mr. Main's edition of Deloney is one of these. Deloney is the chief representative of a host of writers (mostly nameless) who catered for the Elizabethan crowd, eager for entertainment either in prose or in verse, and his writings have to be collected from broadsides and badly-printed pam- phlets, the popularity of which is attested by their rarity, while many of them must have perished with the fragile sheets on which they were issued. The greater part of this volume is taken up by four stories : ' Jacke of Newberie,' the two parts of 'The Gentle Craft,' and 'Thomas of Reading.' These are, in the editor's opinion, the highest achievements of the Elizabethan novel, and we are not disposed to quarrel with his judgment, if " the novel" be restricted to its proper sense. In his Introduction Mr. Main surveys the whole ground of Elizabethan fiction, and distinguishes the new elements which coloured it and differen- tiated it from the mediseval stories still current. The difference was, in the writer, one of method, not of matter, while the audience was a wider and a less educated one. In Deloney we have the ad- ditional diiference that he was a writer of great natural ability and a keen and accurate observer, but almost entirely uneducated, and easily in- fluenced by such tricks of literary fashion as drifted within his' ken.
But the chief influence on Deloney's style was one which the editor hardly takes into account : it was the stage. With the' Elizabethan the stage took the place which the daily newspaper and the novel hold in our own time ; everything outside the experiences of the work-a-day world reached him in this way and passion, sentiment, and romince expressed themselves inevitably in the language of the theatre. In any of his works Deloney is excellent as long as he is dealing with commonplace everyday human life. No one can ever better his accounts of the Elizabethan workshop or
alehouse, written with a spirit and a wealth of
detail which make them invaluable pictures of
their time. His conversations preserve all the
point and humour of the market-place, and one of
his tragic scenes has been considered a source of
inspiration for Shakespeare. But when he attempts
to deal with romance he can only echo the well-
worn catchwords of the drama an honest English
jackdaw decked out with the bedraggled cast-off
plumage of a shrieking peacock. The editor's notes
are a mine of information, and nothing has been
left undone that could help to elucidate the text.
We are personally grateful to Mr. Main for intro-
ducing us to several unknown editions of some of
Deloney's works, and for the opportunity of renew-
ing our acquaintance with others, and we commend
this edition to our readers with every confidence.
Africanderisms : a Glossary of South African Colloquial Words and Phrases, and of Place and Other Names. Compiled by the Rev. Charles Pettman. (Longmans & Co.)
THIS is just such a compilation as every scholar must wish could have been handed down to us- from one or other of the centuries during which a hundred different languages were simmering together and struggling for existence within the far-stretching frontiers of the Roman Empire. It is the work of nearly forty years, begun, the author tells us, when, on the day of his landing at Cape Town, he jotted down in his note-book the first outlandish words he heard. He has con- sulted a large number of books, of the more important of which he gives a list, and has had the advantage of the co-operation of friends who- were experts in this or that branch of South African activity.
Naturally, a great proportion of the words entered here belong to the fauna and flora and physiography of the country. Most are Dutch names given by the Boers more or less haphazard,, now directly descriptive and newly invented f now adapted from home names and applied because of some real, or, as often, imaginary resemblance. Many of the former are lively and amusing as " voetgangers," applied to the destructive larvae of locusts ; or " biscop," for a variety of Chrysophrys, distinguished by a peculiarly solemn physiognomy ; or " klimop," for clematis; or the well-known " wacht -en-beet je " ("wait-a-bit"), used for more than one species of plant having arresting thorns. The " Ringhals kraai," curious to relate, has a legend attached to it, as if it were a mediaeval bird. The Boers say these ravens were the birds which fed Elijah,- and that of the meat they brought him a little patch of fat remained on their necks, whence their descendants to this day bear a white patch in that place. And another quaint, anomalous reminder of the Middle Ages is the use alike of the name and the practice of ringing the Curfew BelL
The fairly numerous words connected with rogues and roguery, if unpleasant, are vigorous, and drawn from various sources : as " goniv " or " gonoph" (an " I.D.B."), from the Hebrew cf.. 9 S. iii. 426 ; " schlenter," and " snyde." It seems that the familiar slang expressions "fed up with," " hard lines," and " so long " can be claimed as Africanderisms. The best instance of poetry in naming is perhaps Weenen weinen, weeping in Natal, the place where, in 1838, an encampment of Voortrekkers with their women.
