on the dangerous outskirts of the fire of the enemy-nay, not seldom, within its true and deadly range-operations which tax the powers of the most skilful and the nerves of the most unflinching, when performed in the quiet and stillness of an admirablydisposed and perfectly-provided ward, within the walls of the civil hospital? Carelessness of danger, indeed, resulting from absorption in a matter of urgent importance! We all know how to admire it in the case of a commanding officer, and Marshal St. Arnaud's eulogy of Lord Raglan's "antique" bravery is readily justified by all who have heard the answer made by that noble soldier to his staff, when, on the day of the Alma, they remonstrated with him for exposing himself to the hottest of the fire, "Bye and bye, gentlemen, bye and bye; I am busy just now, and can speak to nobody." Now we will hazard an anecdote of one who was at the time a simple assistant surgeon of cavalry, which, without any tinge of the "antique" or "heroic," in the epic sense, will yet serve to illustrate our meaning. We will vouch for its authenticity: "Doctor, dear," quoth a wounded light-bob, with pure Milesian accentuation, in whose arm-his horse's bridle over his own--a dismounted compatriot of the medical order, was repairing as best he might, a gash from a cuirassier's sword, by the side of a chaussée in Flanders: "Doctor, dear! make haste! there is French skrimmagers in the wood." Ping! ping! ping! in undoubted confirmation. "Ah, steady, Pat! steady, we'll make a neat thing of it before they debouch now." "Mount! doctor, dear, mount! and stick in yer spurs. I can see bagnets above the bushes, and, faix! thim chassoors is on us in a crack." And the man of the musket jumps up, and runs for the dear life-small blame to him!-in the direction of a patch of tall standing rye "convaynient," for a hiding place. The discomfited doctor sweeps his instruments into the case, drops the case into the sabretash, mounts his active little rat-tail, and spurs-not up the chaussée, but after the fugitive lightbob, in magnificent contempt of the rattling invitations to stop from the firelocks of the Chasseurs de la Garde. "Here! you sir, Murphy! Patrick! what's your name? Stop, sir! stop, scoundrel! stop, THIEF!" roars the pursuing medico "For, gentlemen," said he, afterwards, "would you believe it? that rascal was running into the rye with my best surgical needle sticking in his right arm!" But the field and the trench are not the only ground whereon the army medical man faces death and danger. Nothing can be more just and true than the following words of the Commissioners:— "We are informed that by the statutes of the Order of the Bath no one can receive its honours unless he shall have been mentioned in a public despatch for services rendered before the enemy. But the most arduous and the most dangerous services of medical officers are not always, even in war, rendered before the enemy. They have to strive with an enemy more dangerous than man. In the almost pestilential wards of Scutari the exertions required were more continuous, the danger was greater, and the honours and rewards to be obtained were fewer than at the front before Sebastopol. The mortality of the medical officers at Scutari was not much exceeded by that of the combatant officers with the army in the Crimea; but the survivors are debarred from receiving those honours which, fortunately for the country, are prized more than either rank or emoluments." If endurance, if courage, if selfpossession, if energy, if devotedness, be specially soldierlike, then indeed the bravest and the loftiest spirit among the combatant officers of our army need not affect to look down upon the character of the medical officer, or fail to recognize in him, non-combatant as he may be, a brother soldier in every sense of the noble word. But, we believe and these remarks we tender particularly to the "youngsters" of the military medical profession-that to secure this hearty recognition, it is above all things necessary that the medical officer himself should frankly accept his anomalous position. Amidst many friendly, there is one severe sentence to be found in the report before us. We should fail in our duty by not calling attention to it. It is this: "As regards uniform, we are informed that some medical officers wish for an alteration, obliterating the peculiarities, such as the black plume and sash, which distinguish the medical from the combatant officer. It must be obvious that in and after an action it is of the utmost importance that a medical officer shall be known by some easily-recognized distinction of costume; and we must add, that medical officers who wish thus to be made undistinguishable from combatant officers can have but little appreciation of the dignity of their own profession." That dignity should never be lost sight of by the very youngest assistant, from the day of his first entrance into the ranks; and it is to lose sight of it when he forgets that this dignity is peculiar. It is not simply as an "officer and a gentleman," but, distinctively, as a "medical officer and a gentleman," that he should shape his course, if he would win that real and lasting esteem which his position gives him such rare and golden opportunities of earning both from his brother officers and his brother soldiers in the ranks. Ensigns Green and Beardless, Lieutenants Rattle and Racket, may sometimes in the plenitude of their folly affect to consider contemptuously the "doctor's" position, and to utter the distasteful cognomen of "Pills;" but their folly is comparative wisdom to that of the rawest medical recruit who should thereby be moved to slight his vocation, and attempt to carry off his uneasiness by aping in things great or small what he may fancy to be the marks and character of the combatant officer. We are far from wishing to see the medical officer assume an hypocritical scientific priggishness; but even that we prefer to an assumed military swagger. Machaon and Podalirius had abundant honour in the camp of the Greeks before the Sebastopol of the Homeric age; but, we take it, that honour was paid to something better than a fac simile of the cut of Ajax's cnemides, or an approach to the cock of the helmet of Achilles. And having ventured thus a word of advice to the "youngsters," exhorting them to respect the special dignity of their own profession in themselves, we shall conclude by an admonitory paragraph addressed to the "oldsters," exhorting them, in turn, to show their respect for it in the persons of others. The matter upon which we would touch is one which has also not 66 Among combatant officers, where the duty of one rank is to decide and command, and that of the others is solely to obey, and that immediately and implicitly, without any exercise of discretion in the matter, the necessity of an instantaneous obedience has naturally generated, and justifies a peremptory tone of command. But there is no analogy between their relative position and that of the higher and lower ranks of the medical department as regards either the division of duties between them, or the character of the duties themselves. In the army medical department the inspector and inspected are both men of science, and the latter is actually engaged in treating, at his own discretion, and on his own responsibility, the patients who have been entrusted to him on the presumption of his competency. The assumption on the part of a superior medical officer of a peremptory tone in addressing his junior, shows a want of appreciation of the dignity of the profession to which both belong. A rebuke addressed, or a doubt thrown on the treatment, in the dence of the latter in the medical officer presence of a patient, shakes the confiin whose hands, without any choice of his own, he is placed, and may even mar his chance of recovery. We are satisfied that such departures from propriety, meriting, as they do, the severest reprobation, can be but of rare occurrence, and we have made these remarks in the belief that they will strengthen the hands of the Director-General in checking them when they do occur.” We wish that we could participate the confidence of the Commissioners upon this point. We are not, indeed, prepared to deny that the department of the Director-General will gladly avail itself of such authority in its endeavours to check an evil so common, and, we must add, so inveterate; but we must confess, at the same time, that should this be so, that department itself must have undergone in late years a very salutary change, its reputation for perfect fairness, or for perfect amenity, in the treatment of its dependents having been, within our recollection, by no means of the highest. We shall not soon lose all remembrance of an interview, at which it was our chance to be present, between a late director-general and one who had been at one time a member of the body over which that officer bears sway. Our friend had found occasion to render some trifling obligation to the great man, beyond the reach and beyond the patronage of whose department he had long since risen. His son, a lad verging upon the age when the choice of a profession may fairly come under notice, chancing to enter the room as the director was expressing his sense of the obligation in question, that officer seized the opportunity of offering his interest to start him in life should the army branch of the medical calling attract him to its ranks. We should be at a loss to transfer intelligibly to paper, the contrast between the freezing politeness with which the offer was declined, and the explosion of high-pressure wrath against the department, which burst forth so soon as its kindly-intentioned chief had been bowed out. If that lad be an army surgeon now, his sense of filial obedience can have had but little influence in deciding his career. Truly did we call inveterate the evil of which the Commissioners have complained. Once more only will we now tax, in proof, our own recollections, and, what is more important, the patience of our readers. We have enjoyed these many years the intimate acquaintance of one who, in his short course of training as an alumnus of our venerable Trinity, was, in times long past, a distinguished and favourite pupil of the elder Todd. Family circumstances having interrupted the intended course of his medical studies, a few weeks sufficed to transfer him from the streets of Dublin to medical duty upon the outposts of Wellington's army in the Peninsula. In its ranks he shared whatever dangers, labours, hardships, and privations, may befall the campaigning surgeon, amongst which may be mentioned a terrific struggle for life with a most deadly fever, caught in the wards of hospitals, so ill-formed and ill-furnished as even the experience of Scutari has not made known to the men of these latter sanitary days. But in his case, as in that of all men, the old anticipation has, in course of time, come true "Forsan et hæc olim meminisse juvabit." The long nights spent after weary days' marching, not upon camp-bed, nor round the cheerful bivouac fire with combatant brother officers, but in straggling and tumbling through pitch darkness over rocky roads and by-paths, with much toil and peril both of man and beast, under guidance of loutish Iberian peasant, or surly muleteer, in search of men wounded and sick, detached and scattered over hill and down dale. These live in his old dragooning reminiscences, as highly cherished, and as dearly prized, as the pleasanter rides, in double-file, beneath the gnarled branches of the olives, or the gold-laden boughs of the orange trees, when the moonlight skimmered upon their polished sharp cut leaves, in the safe and joyous hours when the welcome word would pass down the ranks, "Singers to the front!" and the merry military glees of British soldiers would ring out clear under the Spanish heaven. Nay more, the remembrance of a rebuke well-timed, hard as any rebuke seems always to a young and ardent spirit, could continue without pain or bitterness present to his mind, for we have heard him tell of, and dwell upon, the justice of the "tremendous wigging," in military parlance, drawn down upon him from the dashing colonel, when martial ardour had betrayed him to forget for a moment the call of medical duty, and to mingle in a charge upon the sly. CURIOSITIES OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. CHAPTER III. EXTENT AND CONSTITUENT PARTS OF THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY. A PAMPHLET of great curiosity and interest has just appeared from the pen of the Dean of Westminster (Dr. Trench), consisting of the substance of two papers lately read before the Philological Society on "Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries.' It forms one of the most important contributions that have been made to English Lexicography in our day, and one of the most remarkable ever made by an individual. The number of distinct vocables whose history it elucidates, or which are recovered from complete oblivion, appears, from the index, to be nearly two hundred. No future dictionary of our language can be compiled without drawing largely both upon the new or hitherto unnoticed facts, and the ingenious and happy illustrations, which are here brought forward. Nevertheless, Dr. Trench has scarcely addressed himself to a complete scientific exposition of what an English Dictionary ought to be. What he professes to do is merely to call attention to what he conceives to be the deficiencies of our existing dictionaries, which he arranges under seven heads:-Obsolete words incompletely registered-Words omitted belonging to groups or families of which other members are inserted-Incorrect or imperfect statements in regard to the time when particular words were introduced or fell out of use-Omissions of important meanings and uses of words-The comparatively little attention paid to the distinguishing of synonymous words-The omission of many passages in our literature by which the introduction, etymology, and meaning of words might be illustrated-and, finally, The insertion of more or less of what has properly no claim to a place in such a work as a dictionary. But of what does the English language really consist? This may seem to be a question very easily answered. Let us see. 1. First of all, we must settle what it is that entitles any thing calling itself a Word to be accepted as truly VOL. LI.-NO. CCCII. such. With regard to the great mass of words this point presents no difficulty, But take a term which can only be discovered to have been once or twice used, will that constitute it an element of the language, whatsoever it may be, to which it claims to belong? If so, then the power and right of adding to a language to any extent must be held to belong to every individual. The maker of the dictionary himself, or his friends and acquaintances, may introduce as many new words into it as they please, of their own contrivance. Many of them might be in all respects as deserving of adoption, tried by any test you will, as some of those that all the dictionaries have admitted on the strength of their occurrence, it may be, in a single passage. Many of the additional ones collected by Dr. Trench have, probably, no better claim-such, for instance, as Henry More's hispidity and speciosity, Fuller's floweretry and fashionists, and a whole crop of hideous break-jaw monstrosities, schleragogy, hecatontarchy, consciuncle, solertiousness, &c., &c., in Bishop Hacket. If all formations similarly circumstanced with these, that is to say, wanting altogether the authorization of general acceptance and currency, are to be recognised as English words, then there is no innovation that any person chooses or chances to devise that is not entitled to be so recognised. Even if a legitimate extraction, according to the rules or principles of etymology, should be exacted in every case, there would still be no end of the private fabrications that would thus be continually imported into the language. The mere fact of any of them being to be found in a printed book could count for nothing. A word is not made such either by being printed or by being written down. It is a word, if at all, as soon as it is uttered. On the other hand, are all such ăπaž λeyóμeva to be rejected? Surely not. Many of them may have been words at one time in familiar use, although a single passage may now be the only record 15 of their existence. That is not only possible, but, in regard to some of them, in the highest degree probable. And is a word that is found only once really much more dubious than one that is found only twice or three times? Or, is the recognition of the word, as properly belonging to the language, to depend upon the character of the one writer, or the two or three writers, in whose works it is found? If so, what description of writer is to have the right of authorizing a term which has no other claim to advance? Some might demur to Bishop Hacket, others to Sir Thomas Urquhart. We should all, of course, be ready to acknowledge any word found, although once only, in any one of our greatest writers, in Spenser, or Bacon, or Milton, or Shakespeare; but what is to be said to the peculiar vocabulary of a Sir Roger L'Estrange, or a Tom Brown? Probably very few, if any, of the strange terms found in either of these two last-named worthies are pure inventions of his own; they are only words that have not elsewhere been employed in writing. Several such words might probably be found in Shakespeare words which he borrowed from the patois of his native Warwick, as they found theirs in the street language of London. If Shakespeare's bleaded and boltered are to be received as good English, what are we to say to the hoiking of Sir Francis Palgrave.* 2. The standard form of a cultivated language is, for very nearly its entire mass, sufficiently distinguishable from the various local dialects, mostly unwritten, in the midst of which it rises, like an oak from among its underwood; still there is, of course, some little tendency in the two contiguous vegetations to intermingle at their common margin. Even from the Scotch, which has a literature of its own, and is rather an independent language than a dialect, a few words have occasionally found their way into writing which is English in its general texture. Not to mention such words as plaid, tartan, trews, philabeg, heather, significant of things exclusively or chiefly belonging to Scotland, there are gloamin, mavis, ingle, eery, bonny, and others, which by force of their mere beauty or expressiveness, seem to be fast forcing their way into the literary language of the country. Are they, or are they not, to be accounted English words? Or, if not English yet, how much more of appropriation will suffice to make them so? The tendency of words belonging to the purely English provincial dialects to intrude into the standard form of the national speech must be much greater. All our literary English, accordingly, down to the latter part of the seventeenth century, abounds with words which the writers appear to have found, not in books, but each only in the rustic speech of his native district. There is no difference, no opposition of accent and general character and form, to be got over here; the dialectic word may be unknown to the standard language, but, in most cases, it has nothing about it of a foreign air, nothing that would continue to mark it out as an importation after its adoption. A Scotch word, on the contrary, can hardly be completely anglicized; either it will remain conspicuously of alien physiognomy, or it must be subjected to a certain modification. If the Scotch gloamin, for instance, is ever to become really English, it must be changed into gloaming. It will no more be able to escape from that transformation, demanded by what is the very soul of the languageits musical spirit-than the French nature was able, after it became an English word, to retain its original accentuation, and to prevent itself from becoming náture. There is one way, indeed, by which the whole difficulty connected with dialect might be got over all dialectic words might be regarded as, equally with the words of the standard form, belonging to the language of which the several dialects were recognized variations. This may be said to be the principle of the dictionary compiled by the late Mr. Boucher. Our provincial dialects were with him not only of the substance of the English language, but of its very marrow. And it is not easy, in truth, to deny that dialectic words are at least as much English : "The precepts, no less than the examples, of Him and Those who became poor, or blessed the poor, forbade their hoiking away the unsavoury crowd, encumbering the Church door," &c.-The History of Normandy and of England, ii., 824. |