North is at his Lest in the dialogues and soliloquies which are scattered so frequently through the book, and it is there too that he departs most freely from the Italian version, which as a rule he follows closely. The flexibility of his style comes out in these speeches: contrast, for example, the vigour of the exulting speech of "the Moyle" (Dimna) when he has entrapped the Bull (p. 177) with the courtier-like gravity with which he has just approached King Lion (p. 129), and the friendly persuasion with which he has won over the Bull (p. 147).
Another mark of the fine instinct which North displays as a literary artist is the fact that so few of his words have become obsolete. There are scarcely a dozen passages in the book which fail to yield their meaning on a first reading owing to this cause.[1] And yet with all this the book is full of those racy quaintnesses which give to Elizabethan English something of the charm of the pretty prattlings of early childhood: the
- ↑ Some readers may be glad to have the following equivalents:—flight (p. 55)=fled; draffe (82)=dregs; bucke (95)=lye (?); girned (103)=mocked; dole (127)=share. Few will care to know that 'cockle' (113)=Angrostemna githago, Linn., and I should like to know what 'coccomber' (178) means.
