370 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



from the prose Morte Arthure, " A ! said Sir Launcelot, 

 comfort yourselfe, for it shall bee uuto ua as a great 

 honour, and much more then if we died in any other 

 places : for of death wee be sicker." Now in the text 

 the word means safe, and in the note it means sure. 

 Indeed sure, which is only a shorter form of secure, is its 

 ordinary meaning. " I mak sicker," said Kirkpatrick, a 

 not unfitting motto for certain editors, if they explained 

 it in their usual phonetic way. 



In the " Frere and the Boye," when the old Aian has 

 given the boy a bow, he says : 



" Shote therin, whan thou good thynke; 

 For yf thou shote and wynke, 

 The prycke thow shalte hytte." 



Mr. Hazlitt's explanation of wynke is "to close one eye 

 in taking aim," and he quotes a passage from Gascoigne 

 in support of it. Whatever Gascoigne meant by the 

 word (which is veiy doubtful), it means nothing of the 

 kind here, and is another proof that Mr. Hazlitt does 

 not think it so important to understand what he reads 

 as St. Philip did. What the old man said was, " even 

 if you shut both your eyes, you can't help hitting the 

 mark." So in " Piers Ploughman " (Whitaker's text), 



" Wynkyng, as it were, wytterly ich saw hyt." 



Again, for our editor's blunders are as endless as the 

 heads of an old-fashioned sermon, in the " Schole-House 

 of Women" (Vol. IV. p. 130), Mr. Hazlitt has a note on 

 the phrase " make it nice," 



(" And yet alwates they biblo bable 

 Of euery matter and make it nice,") 



which reads thus : " To make it pleasant or snug. I do 

 not remember to have seen the word used in this sense 

 very frequently. But Gascoigne has it in a precisely 

 similar way : 



