regarded as pure English to say, I sung a song.
Nobody would say that a song had been sang;
and so forth. Now there has never been a rule
to settle this; possibly the fact, tacitly admitted
by all writers, is here for the first time
recognised in formal words. Simply the fact shows
how, through the minds of all the speakers,
language seems to work as its own artist.

An artist meant a cultivated scholar once,
especially a scholar in the classics, which were
commonly known as the chief liberal arts. What
we still call at the universities being a Master of
Arts, used to entitle men to rank as artists. He
whom we now call an artist was then called an
artisan. Shakespeare writes of

        The wise and fool, the artist and unread.

Waller admires in a painter, the

            Rare artisan, whose pencil moves
            Not our delights alone, but loves.

But it needs much study to ascertain the way
in which society has acted upon language to
produce these transfers of name from one class
to another.

There is the word ascertain. It now means
only to acquire certain knowledge of a thing;
once it meant to give certainty to the thing
itself; to ascertain, to assure it. Then
assurance very commonly was an affiance or
betrothal. So easy a transition causes no
astonishment.

Our tendency to use exaggerated words has
made it possible to speak even of being
astonished at a curiosity in etymology, although that
word is but the Latin form for thunderstruck.
Once it was used more strictly. It was even
chosen by the old translator of Pliny to
represent the effect of an electric shock, when he
wrote that "The cramp-fish (torpedo) knoweth
her own force and power, and being herself not
benumbed, is able to astonish others." Cannon
astonished men, and though we now call nothing
but guns artillery, it is to be observed that bows
or any engines for projecting missiles used to be
so called. " And Jonathan gave his artillery
unto his lad, and said unto him, Go carry them
to the city."

There may be deadly shots fired from the
barrel of a pen. Nobody knows this more
clearly than your attorney, who declines now to
be known as your attorney, and accounts
himself solicitor. Yet an attorney meant so
generally one who is put in the place, stead, or
"turn" of another, that the man who would
serve your turn at the law courts had especially
to be defined as your attorney-at-law, while
teachers in the Church did not shrink from
applying in the very highest sense that word for
substitute, in preaching " Our only attorney,
only mediator, only peacemaker between God
and men." The word solicitor has at its root
the meaning of a tempter or enticer, one who
pulls at us by hope or fear. Judged by the
etymology alone, the change of phrase is
awkwardly significant.

The word awkward has not yet come to mean
only clumsy or maladroit. It retains, though
Dr. Trench does not allow it credit for so doing,
in very many cases the old sense of untoward.
Thus, an awkward question does not usually
mean a question clumsily put, but cunningly put
and untoward for the person who must answer it.
When a man says that he finds himself placed in
an awkward position, he means that he is pulled
in contrary directions by the circumstances to
which he refers. Indeed, he will commonly
complete the train of thought by going on to
explain: If I stay here, there's my difficulty; and
if I go there, here's my difficulty. Awkward
and wayward represent only two modifications
of the same old word, aweg, for away. The awk
end used to be the name for the end of a rod
away from the hand that held it:

She sprinkled us with bitter juice of uncouth herbs,
And strake the awk end of her charmed rod upon our
        heads.

There is a study of old manners in the present
meaning of such words as base, villain, caitiff,
and the like. Base formerly meant only low in
birth, and Our Lord was said to be " equal to
them of greatest baseness;" but the pride of the
aristocracy (who by that very word declare
themselves to be morally the best) assumed that
lowest birth meant lowest worth. A knave once
meant only a boy. The patient Grisel bore " a
knave child" to the cruel marquis who had
robbed her of her daughter. In German the old
word (with only a b for a v, knabe for knave)
still means boy simply, and is no term of
reproach. Among us it was borne by the boys
in great lords' kitchens. These were reviled and
beaten by the great lords who, when they called
Knave! turned up their high and mighty noses.
Caitiff, again, is only the Norman French form
of the word captive. Dr. Trench observes that
captivity tends to degrade; but the later sense
of the word caitiff must have arisen in no small
degree out of the bluster of the conqueror. The
black guards were the scullions and kitchen
people who, in old English days, when great
families migrated from one residence to another,
had charge of the sooty pots and pans, and other
kitchen utensils. We read in Webster of a fellow
"that within this twenty years rode with the
black guard in the duke's carriage, mongst spits
and dripping-pans;" whilst an old treatise on
Divinity speaks of " dukes, earls, and lords,
great commanders in war, common soldiers and
kitchen boys, glad to trudge it on foot in the
mire, hand in hand, a duke or earl not disdaining
to support or help up one of the black guard
ready to fall, lest he himself might fall into the
mire, and have none to help him."

There is another sort of social truth illustrated
by the passage of the large word with its large
meaning, charity, into a word that means a mere
giving of alms, and of a word bounty, that
meant goodness once, into the mere sense of
free giving. Men fighting about for hard-won
gains, have seen all charity or goodness in the
neighbour, who will throw what they want into
their lap and ask for nothing in return.

Bombast was the Elizabethan crinoline, being
the old name for the cotton which supplied a