May 18. 1850. | NOTES AND QUERIES. 467 
But could Parr mean to rank Shrewsbury 
School among the “ private schools?” I am not 
old enough to recollect what it was in the times 
of Taylor, J., the civilian, and the editor of De- 
mosthenes. Its celebrity, however, in our own 
day, and through a long term of preceding years, 
is confessed. Dr. Parr’s judgment in this case 
might be somewhat influenced by his preposses- 
sions as an Harrovian. 
April, 1850. 
PROVINCIAL WORDS. 
In Twelfth Night, Act ii. Scene 3., occur the 
words “Sneck up,” m C. Knight’s edition, or 
“ Snick up,” Mr. Collier’s edition. These words 
appear most unaccountably to have puzzled the 
commentators. Sir Toby Belch uses them in reply 
to Maivolio, as, — 
Enter Matvotto. 
“ Mal. My masters, are you mad? or whatare you? 
Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty, but to gabble 
like tinkers at this time of night? Do you make an 
alehouse of my lady’s house, that you squeak out your 
coziers’ catches without any mitigation or remorse of 
voice? Is there no respect of place, person, nor time, 
in you? : 
“ Sir To. We did keep time, Sir, in our catches. 
Sneck up!” 
“Sneck up,” according to Mr. C. Knight, is 
explained thus :— 
“ A passage in Taylor, the Water Poet, would show 
that this phrase means ‘hang yourself.’ A verse from 
his ‘ Praise of Hempseed’ is given in illustration.” 
“ Snick up,” according to Mr. Collier, is said 
to be “a term of contempt,” of which the precise 
meaning seems to have been lost. Various illus- 
trations are given, as see his Note; but all are 
wide of the meaning. 
Turn to Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and 
Provincial Words, 2d edition, and there is this 
explanation : — 
“ Sneck, that part of the iron fastening of a door 
which is raised by moving the latch. To sneck a door, 
is to latch it.” 
See also Burns’ Poems: The Vision, Duan First, 
7th verse, which is as follows : — 
“ When dick! the string the snick did draw, — 
And jee! the door gaed to the wa’; 
An’ by my ingle-lowe I saw, 
Now bliezin’ bright, 
A tight, outlandish Hizzie, braw, 
Come full in sight.” 
These quotations will clearly show that “ sneck” 
or “snick” applies to a door ; and that to sneck a 
door is to shut it. I think, therefore, that Sir 
Toby meant to say in the following reply : — 
“ We did keep time, Sir, in our catches. Sneck up!” 
That is, close up, shut up, or, as is said now, 
“ bung up,”— emphatically, “We kept true time ;” 
and the probability is, that in saying this, Sir Toby 
would accompany the words with the action of 
pushing an imaginary door to; or sneck up. 
In the country parts of Lancashire, and indeed 
throughout the North of England, and it appears 
Scotland also, the term “sneck the door” is 
used indiscriminately with “shut the door” or 
“toin’t dur.’ And there can be little doubt but 
that this provincialism was known to Shakspeare, 
as his works are full of such; many of which 
have either been passed over by his commentators, 
or have been wrongly noted, as the one now under 
consideration. 
Shakspeare was essentially a man of the people ; 
his learning was from within, not from colleges 
or schools, but from the universe and himself. 
He wrote the language of the people; that is, the 
common every-day language of his time: and 
hence mere classical scholars have more than once 
mistaken him, and most egregiously misinterpreted 
him, as I propose to show in some future Notes. 
R. R. 
FOLK LORE. 
Death-bed Superstition (No. 20. p. 315.). — The 
practice of opening doors and boxes when a per- 
son dies, is founded on the idea that the ministers 
of purgatorial pains took the soul as it escaped 
from the body, and flattening it against some 
closed door (which alone would serve the pur- 
pose), crammed it into the hinges and hinge open- 
ings; thus the soul in torment was likely to be 
miserably pinched and squeezed by the movement 
on casual occasion of such door or lid: an open or 
swinging door frustrated this, and the fiends had 
to try some other locality. The friends of the 
departed were at least assured that they were not 
made the unconscious instruments of torturing the 
departed in their daily occupations. The super- 
stition prevails in the North as well as in the West 
of England; and a similar one exists in the South 
of Spain, where I have seen it practised. 
Among the Jews at Gibraltar, at which place I 
have for many years been a resident, there is also 
a strange custom when a death occurs in a house ; 
and this consists in pouring away all the water 
contained in any vessel, the superstition being that 
the angel of death may have washed his sword 
therein. TREBOR. 
May Marriages.—It so happened that yester- 
day I had both a Colonial Bishop and a Home 
Archdeacon taking part in the services of my 
church, and visiting at my house; and, by a singular 
coincidence, both had been solicited by friends to 
perform the marriage ceremony not later than to- 
morrow, because in neither case would the bride- 
elect submit to be married in the month of May. 
