Americanisms. To 'pheese' is 'to irritate,' 'to worry.'" We fancy the same usage of the word is not so obsolete in the conservative haunts of racy rural English, as the New Englander supposes. Nevertheless we thank him for this note, and for another on Slender's "two Edward shovel-boards," a game said to be now played in England by Colliers only (so their namesake testifies), but which Mr. White has often seen played at "the Eagle Tavern, under Brooklyn Heights," though now replaced by the less exigeant recreation of ten-pins. The word "placket," too, it seems, is in ordinary currency in the United States in the sense of "petticoat"—and says Mr. White, "Mr. Steevens, Mr. Nares, and Mr. Dyce, might have been saved their labours, and Mr. Halliwell his doubts, by inquiring of the Benedicks among their fellow Shakesperians on this side the water concerning this word. … Mr. Douce, to whose learning and judgment the students of Shakespeare are so much indebted, says, 'a placket is a petticoat.' Had he been writing for Americans he need not have said it." Nor for Britishers, with a common dictionary within reach. But perhaps the most instructive of Mr. White's national illustrations of this kind is the following:
K. Rich.Well! as you guess?
K. Rich. III. Act IV. Sc. 4.
"If there be two words for the use of which, more than any others, our English cousins twit us, they are 'well,' as an interrogative exclamation, and 'guess.' Milton uses both, as Shakespeare also frequently does, and exactly in the way in which they are used in America; and here we have them both in half a line. Like most of those words and phrases which it pleases John Bull to call Americanisms, they are English of the purest and best, which have lived here while they have died out in the mother country." Well! John Bull, I guess after that you're a gone 'coon. But to recur to the Collier controversy. We have testified already to Mr. White 's general taste and judgment in matters of conjectural emendation, and for the most part he carries us with him in his decisions. His exposé of the extravagances of various Shakspearian commentators is full of honest hearty disdain, as well it may be in an admiring lover, loyal to the core, of the myriad-minded One. Of Mr. Becket he finds it difficult to speak with patience or decorum, and calls his "Shakspeare's himself again" sheer "stupidity run mad." Zachary Jackson, for his absurd and atrocious changes in the text, inevitably suggesting the suspicion of all but idiocy, yet uttered with the consummate serenity of "owlish sapience," he styles "the very Bunsby[1] of commentators." And who will not share in his protest against such drivelling as we see spent on, e. g., this fragment:
- ↑ Mr. White is fond of an allusion to the light literature of the day. Thus, in describing the progress of his own volume he says, "The book was not deliberately made; but, like Topsy, it growed. Unlike that young lady, however," he adds, "it was not 'raised on a spec;' for .… were five editions to be sold it would not pay me day-labourer's wages for the mere time I have devoted to the preparation of it." So again he sarcastically refers to "Sir Thomas Hanmer, Baronet (as Inspector Bucket would say),"—to the Mantalini-ism of the tie-wig editors, and to Mr. Singer's making Lear in the climax of his agony talk like "the young man of the name of Guppy."
