Words used by Shakspeare now Provincialisms. 189 



in such cases, let us take the word "bumble," which not only 



in the New Forest means, in its onomatopoetic sense, to buzz, 



hum, or boom, as in the common proverb, " to bumble like a 



bee in a tar-tub," and as Chaucer says, in The Wife of Bath's 



Tale— 



" A bytoure bumbleth in the myre," 



but is also used of people stumbling or halting. Probably, in 

 The JMernj Wives of Windsor (Act iii., sc. 3), in the passage 

 which has been of such difficulty to the commentators, where 

 Mrs. Ford says to the servants, who are carrying Falstaffe in 

 the buck-basket — "Look, how you drumble," which has no 

 meaning at all, we should, instead, read this word. It, at all 

 events, not only conveys good sense, but is the exact land of 

 word which the passage seems to expect. 



Again, the compound " thiller-horse," from the Old-English 

 "pill," a beam or shaft, and so, literally, the shaft-horse, 

 which we find in Shakspeare under the form of " thill-horse " 

 {Merchant of Venice, Act ii., sc. 2), is here commonly used. 



Then there are other forms among provincialisms which give 

 such an insight into the formation of language, and show the 

 common mind of the human race. Thus, take the word " three- 

 cunning,"* to be heard every day in the Forest, where three has 

 the signification of intensity, just as the Greek r^iq in compo- 

 sition in the compounds rpi'a^ta/ca/a, r^iaaQiXioq, and other forms. 

 So, too, the missel-thrush is called the " bull-thrush," with the 

 meaning of size attached to the word, as it is more commonly 

 to our own " horse," and the Greek 'iinrog, and the Old-English 

 hrefen, raven, in composition. 



* Cunning, I need scarcely add, is here used in its original sense of 

 knowing, from the Old-English cumian, as we find in Psalm cxxxAii. v. 5. 



18t» 



