8 



NOTES AND QUEEIES. 



[No. 166. 



with me in the cart,' was his answer ; to which she 

 somewhat indignantly replied, ' That you'll not ; don't 

 you know the sun has gone down ? You are welcome 

 to the eggs at a proper hour of the day ; but I would 

 not let them go out of the house after the sun is set on 

 any consideration whatever !' " 



DRAUriBLB. 



Old Song. — 



My father gave me an acre of land, 



Sing ivy, sing ivy. 

 My father gave me an acre of land, 



Sing green bush, hollj, and ivy. 

 I plough'd it with a ram's horn, 



Sing ivy, &c. 

 I harrow'd it with a bramble. 



Sing ivy, &c. 

 I sow'd it with a peppercorn. 



Sing ivy, &c. 

 I reap'd it with my penknife. 



Sing ivy, &c. 

 I carried it to the mill upon the cat's back, 



Sing ivy, &c. 

 Then follows some more which I forget, but I 

 think it ends thus : 



I made a cake for all the king's men. 



Sing ivy, sing ivy.^ 

 I made a cake for all the king's men. 



Sing green bush, holly, and ivy. 



Nursery Tale. — I saddled my sow with a sieve 

 full of buttermilk, put my foot into the stirrup, 

 and leaped nine miles beyond the moon into the 

 land of temperance, where there was nothing but 

 hammers and hatchets and candlesticks, and there 

 lay bleeding Old Noles. I let him lie, and sent 

 for Old Hippernoles, and asked him if he could 

 grind green steel nine times finer than wheat 

 flour. He said he could not. Gregory's wife was 

 up in the pear-tree gathering nine corns of but- 

 tered peas to pay Saint James' rent. Saint James 

 was in the meadow mowing oat cakes ; he heard a 

 noise, hung his scythe at his heels, stumbled at 

 the battledore, tumbled over the barn-door ridge, 

 and broke his shins against a bag of moonshine 

 that stood behind the stairsfoot door, and if that 

 isn't true you know as well as I. D. 



Legend of Change. — In one of the Magazines for 

 November, a legend, stated to be of oriental origin, 

 is given, in which an immortal, visiting at distant 

 intervals the same spot, finds it occupied by a city, 

 an ocean, a forest and a city again : the mortals 

 whom he found there, on each occasion, believing 

 that the present state had existed for ever. I have 

 seen in the newspapers, at different times, a poem 

 (or I rather think two poems) founded on this 

 legend ; and I should like to know the author or 

 authors, and whether it, or either of them, is to be 

 found in any collection of poems. D. X. 



PASSAGE IN HAMLET. 



" Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, 

 Unhousell'd, disappointed, unanel'd." 



Hamlet, Act I. Sc. 5. 



Boucher, in his Glossary of Ai-chaic and Pro- 

 vincial Words (art. Anteal), has a note on this 

 passage which seems to me to give so much better 

 an idea of the word disappointed than any I have 

 met with, that I am induced to send it you as a 

 Note : — 



" The last two words have occasioned considerable 

 difficulty to the critics. The old copies, it is said, 

 concur in giving disappointed, which Dr. Johnson is 

 willing to understand as meaning unprepared; a sense 

 that might very well suit the context, but will not 

 be easily confirmed by any other instance of the use of 

 the word disappointed. Dissatisfied, therefore, with 

 this interpretation, some have read unanointed, and 

 some unappointed. Not approving of either of these 

 words, as connected with unanealed, Pope, no timid 

 corrector of texts, reads unaneld, which he supposes to 

 signify unknelled, or the having no knell rung. To these 

 emendations and interpretations Mr. Theobald, whose 

 merit as a commentator on Shakspeare Mr. Pope, with 

 all his wit and all his poetry, could not bring into dis- 

 pute, urged many strong objections. Skinner rightly 

 explains anealed as meaning vnctus ; from the Teu- 

 tonic preposition an, and ele, oil. As correction of the 

 second word is admitted by all the commentators to 

 be necessary, it is suggested that a clear and consistent 

 meaning, consonant with Shakspeare's manner, will be 

 given to the passage, if, instead of disappointed, unas- 

 soiled, which signifies ' without absolution,* be sub- 

 stituted. 



" The line — 



' Unhousell'd, unassoil'd, unaneal'd,' 



will then signify ' without receiving the sacrament: 

 without confession and absolution: and without ex- 

 treme unction.' 



" That unassoiled was no less proper, will appear 

 from due attention to the word assoile, which of course 

 is derived from ahsolvo ; and the transition from absolve 

 into assoyle is demonstrated in the following passage 

 from Piers Plowman, Vision, p. 3. : 

 ' There preached a pardoner, as he a priest were. 

 Brought forth a bul, with many a bishop's scales, 

 And saide, that himself might absoyle hem alle, 

 Of falshode, of fasting, and of vowes broken.' 

 As a further confirmation of the propriety of substi- 

 tuting a word signifying absolution, which pre-supposes 

 confession, the following sentence from Prince Arthur 

 may be adduced : ' She was confessed and houselled, 

 and then she died,' part ii. p. 108. 



" It must be allowed that no instance can be given of 

 the word unassoiled: but neither does any other instance 

 occur to me of the word unhouseled except the line in 

 Hamlet." 



B. J. S. 



