'ladder of cords,' Katherine the Shrew's well-fashioned gown, and he applies it to elegancy of speech, writing and fashion. Spenser tells of quaint Bellona,' and produces the word in a new sense of 'fastidious' in company with 'disdainful.' In Howell (1625) we find an approach to the modern meaning of 'curious' in the quaint difference the ancients did put betwixt a letter and an oration, that one should be attired like a woman, the other like a man.' Milton returns to the older sense in describing the 'quaint enamell'd eyes' of flowers; Wood writes of a 'quaint preacher'; Prior of the 'quaint arguments of logic'; and Akenside of the 'quaint-eyed visage of ridicule.' The history of the word is thus brought down to modern times, in which its meaning is altogether changed to that of grotesque and old-fashioned. It may perhaps be owing to the realistic and utilitarian tendencies of the present day that many works of art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which abounding in exuberant fancy would then have been described as beautiful, are now thought worthy only of the almost contemptuous epithet of ‘quaint'—that is, possessing merely the artistic qualities of a bygone and antiquated style.

Then we find that men and women alike were once described as 'shrews,' 'termagants,' and 'witches'; Vandyck is an 'artisan'; Archimedes, Catiline, and Galileo are artists'; Calliope is 'sly'; Ovid is a 'clerk'; a sword is a 'bodkin'; an unsafe harbour is 'brittle'; St. Dunstan's pincers are 'trinkets'; Troy is 'amiable'; drinkables are 'viands'; a fountain is a 'well'; a knight is a 'child' or 'infant'; a youth is a 'damsel'; manners are 'airs'; tumblers are 'antics.'

'Nephews' meant grand-children; an 'imp,' a prince; 'pittance,' a decent allowance; 'to deprave,' to vilify or slander; 'bickering,' open fighting; 'restive,' stubborn; 'unvalued,' invaluable; inhabitable,' uninhabitable; niggard' and 'miser,' miserable; 'miserable,' miserly; 'usury,' lawful interest; interest,' usury; 'demerits,' merits; uncouth,' unknown; 'amorous,' worthy of love; 'fastidious,' disgusting.

These examples may be sufficient to illustrate the interest as well as the importance of the study of words in their past and present use, whether it be undertaken for the purpose of fully understanding our early writers, or with the view of more surely appreciating the true value and bearing of modern expressions, which can only be ascertained by a knowledge of their former history.