310
NOTES AND QUERIES.
[12 8. V. DEC., 1919.
their bills for $500 and $5. The use of
" century " for 100 never properly caught
on, although it is found occasionally, as in
this sentence taken from The Sportinq Times :
" A little cheque for a century is the pri^e we
offer this week for the successful accomj>lish-
rnent of the task of naming the first three."
' Whitaker's Almanac ' gives two slang words which the present writer has failed to trace elsewhere. These are " caw " as equivalent for 1,000, and "marigold" for 1,000,000. No dictionary, however, mentions these terms, not even the great ' Slang Dictionary ' of Barrere and Leland. The 'N.E.D.,' incomparably the finest and most complete in our language, states, indeed, that "marigold" was once the slang for a sovereign, and it quotes a sentence from one of Cowley's plays written in the seventeenth century. The words are : " I'll presently go put five hundred marygolds in a purse for you." No mention is made at all of the word ever signifying 1,000,000. The same has to be said of " caw," which is not even referred to in any shape or form. The last term which requires mention here stands in no such uncertainty, however, and its use is well authenticated, as it is freely found in the chief writers of the eighteenth century, when it was evidently employed much as our term millionaire is nowadays. This is the slang term "plum," which stood for 100,000. It has been suggested that the word is derived from the Latin pluma, a feather, the idea being that a man who had accumulated that sum had feathered his nest, It is certainly rather curious to note that the Italian and Spanish words for feather have also in these languages the slang meaning of money. The following quotation from an early number of Punch illustrates the use of the word even in quite recent times : " The next day they disposed of their swag for a plum and invested the proceeds in Spaniards and Turks."
The word, as a matter of fact, had a double use, for it stood both for the actual sum of money and then, by transference, it was often applied to the happy possessor of such a sum, who appears to have figured as the ancestor of our modern millionaire. Addison uses it in this latter sense when he wrote of : " Several who were Plumbs, or very near it, became men of moderate fortunes." Fielding also, in his 'True Patriot,' when advocating a certain course of action, speaks of it as : "A thing highly eligible by every good man, i.e., every
CHARLES MENMUIB, M.A. 25 Garscube Lane, Glasgow.
' FAPvEWEL FOLLY ' AND ' THE
AMOROUS MISER.'
SOME short time ago (ante, p. 254), I remarked upon a strange confusion which had arisen between two seventeenth-century plays : Lee's 'The Tragedy of Nero ' and the anonymous ' Piso's Conspiracy.' Something like the same confusion appears to exist also in the case of two later comedies, the error having arisen no doubt from the fact that both are comparatively rare,* and that both have been given by their respective authors the same sub -title.
' The Amorous Miser : or, The Younger the Wiser ' is chronicled in Genest (' Some Account of the English Stage,' 1820, ii. 318) as acted at Drury Lane Theatre on Jan. 18, 1705, under the name of ' Farewell Folly,' its run being upwards of six nights (ib., ii. 319). Genest follows Whincop and other early historians of the eighteenth - century stage in attributing it to Pierre Antoine Motteux (Thomas Whincop, ' Scan- derbeg : or, Love and Liberty .... To which are added A List of all the Dramatic Authors, with some Account of their Lives ; and of all the Dramatic Pieces ever pub- lished in the English Language, to the Year 1747,' 1747, p. 264). From the fact, how- ever, that ' The Amorous Miser ' was issued anonymously, and that another play, signed by Motteux and styled ' Farewel Folly : or, The Younger the Wiser,' " With a Musical Interlude Call'd The Mountebank : or, The Humours of the Fair," was published in 1707, it would seem that the two plays must be reversed, and ' The Amorous Miser ' struck off Motteux's already lengthy list of dramatic productions. The editors of the ' Biographia Dramatica ' realised that the two comedies were separate, but confused the matter still further by declaring that ' The Amorous Miser ' was " reprinted " in 1707 ('Biographia Dramatica,' 1812, ii. 25), and that ' Farewel Folly ' was " little more than an alteration and enlargement " of the former play (ib., ii. 222). Neither of the two productions are mentioned either in Sir A. W. Ward's 'History of English Dramatic Literature ' or in ' The Cam- bridge History of English Literature ' (where the Motteux bibliography in viii. 438 omits both plays).
Pierre Antoine Motteux is a familiar figure in early eighteenth-century dramatic
- Of the two, ' The Amorous Miser ' is in the
Bodleian Library, 'Farewel Folly' in the British Museum.
