LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 263 



the inaccuracy and carelessness of his predecessors. The long 

 and useful career of Mr. Wright, who, if he had given us nothing 

 more than his excellent edition of Piers Ploughman and the 

 volume of Ancient Vocabularies, would have deserved the 

 gratitude of all lovers of our literature or students of our lan 

 guage, does not save him from the severe justice of Mr. Hazlitt, 

 nor is the name of Warton too venerable to be coupled with a 

 derogatory innuendo. Mr. Wright needs no plea in abatement 

 from us, and a mischance of Mr. Hazlitt s own has comically 

 avenged Warton. The word prayer, it seems, had somehow 

 substituted itself for prayse in a citation by Warton of the title 

 of the * Schole-House of Women. Mr. Hazlitt thereupon takes 

 occasion to charge him with often speaking at random/ and 

 after suggesting that it might have been the blunder of a copyist, 

 adds, or it is by no means impossible that Warton himself, 

 having been allowed to inspect the production, was guilty of this 

 oversight. (Vol. IV. p. 98.) Now, on the three hundred and 

 eighteenth page of the same volume, Mr. Hazlitt has allowed 

 the following couplet to escape his conscientious attention: 



Next, that no gallant should not ought suppose 

 That prayers and glory doth consist in cloathes. 



Lege, nostro periculo, PRAYSE ! Were dear old Tom still on 

 earth, he might light his pipe cheerfully with any one of Mr. 

 Hazlitt s pages, secure that in so doing he was consuming a 

 brace of blunders at the least. The word prayer is an unlucky 

 one for Mr. Hazlitt. In the Knyght and his Wyfe (Vol. II. 

 p. 18) he prints: 



And sayd, Syre, I rede we make 

 In this chapel oure prayers, 

 That God us kepe both in ferrus. 



Why did not Mr. Hazlitt, who explains so many things that 

 everybody knows, give us a note upon in ferrus ? It would 

 have matched his admirable elucidation of waygose, which we 

 shall notice presently. Is it not barely possible that the MS. 

 may have read pray ere and in fere ? Pray ere occurs two verses 

 further on, and not as a rhyme. 



Mr. Hazlitt even sets Sir Frederick Madden right on a 

 question of Old English grammar, telling him superciliously 

 that can, with an infinitive, in such phrases as he can go, is used 

 not to denote a past tense, but an imperfect tense. By past 

 we suppose him to mean /?/&amp;lt;?&amp;lt;:/. But even if an imperfect tens^ 

 were not a past one, we can show by a passage in one of the 

 poems in this very collection that can, in the phrases referred to 

 sometimes not only denotes a past but a perfect tense: 



