294 Contributions towards a Wiltshire Glossary. 
which he drew some portion of his 1825 glossary, the very peculiar 
wording and spelling of some of the paragraphs having been trans- 
ferred direct to his pages. It must, however, have been in his 
hands at a much earlier date than 1825, and one or two of the notes 
appear to have been made at the time he was collecting materials 
for the 1814 volume on Wilts. Not only has it afforded us several 
hitherto un-noted words, which Mr. Britton himself had passed 
over, possibly because even in his own time they were already grown 
obsolete, but it has also enabled us to clear up several doubtful 
points, and especially to show how, by a very simple misreading of 
the MS., from the forgotten sprawny (sprunny) was evolved that 
mysterious ‘‘ ghost-word” sprawing, which has so long misled our 
glossary-makers, The Vocabulary consists of ten quarto pages, two 
of which are covered with notes in pencil and ink, partly archeo- 
logical or topographical, and partly relating to dialect words in 
Wilts and elsewhere. It is written in an extremely legible old 
hand, with a few additions and interlineations in a different hand, 
and contains about ninety words, a list of which is appended. 
A few Wiltshire books which we omitted to refer to in the 
last number may here be mentioned. Taking them in chronological 
order, the first of them is Wright’s Dictionary of Obsolete and Pro- 
vincial English, 1859, which is mainly a condensation of Halliwell’s 
work, but has here afforded us a few additional Wiltshire words. 
Next in order comes the rarely-seen Song of Solomon in North Wilts 
Dialect, by Edward Kite, published for Prince Lucien Bonaparte 
about 1860, a work of the highest value as regards the preservation 
of local pronunciation and modes of expression, but containing very 
few words that are not ordinary English. In the same year appeared 
Content; or the Day Labourer’s Tale of his Life, by Mrs. Penruddocke, 
about which we know nothing more than that it is said to contain 
some dialect. The notes to Canon Jackson’s valuable reprint of 
Aubrey in 1862 will repay search, as here and there a curious local 
word or phrase may be found amongst them. ‘The scene of Glory, 
a novel by Mrs. G. L. Banks, is laid in and about Marlborough, 
but from a dialect point of view it is of little real value. In Old 
Country and Farming Words, by Mr. James Britten, 1880, a good 
