of much later origin, and prevailed chiefly in our northern dialects.-Writers, however, who paid much attention to their style generally used these terms with greater precision. The assertion of will or of duty seems to have been considered by them as implying to a certain extent the power to will or to impose a duty. As a man has power to will for himself only, it was only in the first person that the verb will could be used with this signification; and in the other persons it was left free to take that latitude of meaning which popular usage had given to it. Again, the power which overrides the will to impose a duty must proceed from some external agency; and consequently shall could not be employed to denote such power in the first person. In the first person, therefore, it was left free to follow the popular meaning, but in the other two was tied to its original and more precise signification. These distinctions still continue a shibboleth for the natives of the two sister kingdoms. Walter Scott, as is well known to his readers, could never thoroughly master the difficulty."

In the Third Edition of Dr. Latham's English Language, pp. 470-474, may be found two other explanations; the first by the late Archdeacon Julius Charles Hare (from the Cambridge Philological Museum, II. 203), the second by Professor De Morgan (from the Proceedings of the Philological Society, iv. 185; No. 90, read 25th Jan. 1850).

The manner of using shall and will which is now so completely established in England, and which throughout the greater part of the country is so perfectly uniform among all classes, was as yet only growing up in the early part of the seventeenth century. This

was very clearly shown some years ago by a writer in Blackwood's Magazine, by comparing many passages of the authorized version of the Scriptures, published in 1611, with the same passages in the preceding translation, called the Bishops' Bible, which had appeared in 1568. The old use of shall, instead of will, to indicate simple futurity, with the 2nd and 3rd persons, as well as with the 1st, is still not uncommon with Shakespeare. Here, in this and the next line, are two instances—“ It shall be said,” “ shall no whit appear.” So afterwards we have, in 187, “This shall mark our purpose necessary;" in 238, “ Cæsar should be a beast without a heart;" in 351, “The enemies of Cæsar shall say this;" in 620, “The enemy, marching along by them, By them shall make a fuller number up."

181. Shall no whit appear.-Whit is the A. Saxon wiht, any thing that exists, a creature. It is the same word with wight, which we now use only for a man, in the same manner as we have come in the language of the present day to understand creature almost exclusively in the sense of a living creature, although it was formerly used freely for every thing created, -as when Bacon says (Advance. of Learning, B. 1.), “The wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of God, worketh according to the stuff, and is limited thereby;" or as it is written in our authorized version of the Scriptures (1 Tim. iv. 4), “Every creature of God (Tây ktioua coû) is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving.” No whit is not anything, nowhat, not at all.

182. Let us not break with him.--That is, Let us

not break the matter to him. This is the sense in which the idiom to break with is most frequently found in Shakespeare. Thus, in Much Ado About Nothing (i. 1), the Prince, Don Pedro, says to his favourite Don Claudio, “If thou dost love fair Hero, cherish it; and I will break with her;" that is, I will open the matter to her. And again, in the same scene; Then after to her father will I break.” So in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (iri. 1), "I am to break with thee of some affairs." But when in The Merry Wives of Windsor (iii. 2), Slender says to Ford, in answer to his invitation to dinner,“ We have appointed to dine with Mistress Anne, and I would not break with her for more money than I'll speak of,” he means he would not break his engagement with her. The phrase is nowhere, I believe, used by Shakespeare in the only sense which it now bears, namely, to quarrel with.

186. A shrewd contriver. The adjective shrewd is generally admitted to be connected with the substantive shrew; and according to Horne Tooke (Div. of Purley, 457-9), both are formations from the A.S. verb syrwan, syrewan, or syrewian, meaning to vex, to molest, to cause mischief to, from which he also deduces sorrow, sorry, sore, and sour. Bosworth (who gives the additional forms syrwian, syrwyan, searwian, searwan, searian, serian), interprets the A.S. verb as meaning to prepare, endeavour, strive, arm, to lay snares, entrap, take, bruise. A shrew, according to this notion, might be inferred to be one who vexes or molests; and shrewd will mean endowed with the

qualities or disposition of a shrew. Shrew, as Tooke remarks, was formerly applied to a male as well as to a female. So, on the other hand, paramour and lover,

now only used of males, were formerly also applied to females; and in some of the provincial dialects villain is still a common term of reproach for both sexes alike.

Both to shrew and to beshrew are used by our old writers in the sense of to curse, which latter verb, again, also primarily and properly ( om the A.S. cursan or cursian) signifies to vex or torment. Now, it is a strong confirmation of the derivation of shrewd from the verb to shrew that we find shrewd and curst applied to the disposition and temper by our old writers in almost, or rather in precisely, the same sense. Shakespeare himself affords us several instances. Thus, in Much Ado About Nothing (ii. 1), Leonato having remarked to Beatrice, “By my troth, niece, thou wilt never get a husband if thou be so shrewd of thy tongue,” his brother Antonio adds, assentingly, “In faith, she's too curst.” So, in A Midsummer Night's Dream (ii. 2), Helena, declining to reply to a torrent of abuse from Hermia, says, “I was never curst; I have no gift at all in shrewishness.” And in The Taming of the Shrew (i. 2), first we have Hortensio describing Katharine to his friend Petrucio as “intolerable curst, and shrewd, and froward,” and then we have Katharine, the shrew, repeatedly designated “Katharine the curst.” At the end of the Play she is called “ a curst shrew," that is, as we might otherwise express it, an ill-tempered shrew.

Shrew, by the way, whether the substantive or the verb, always, I believe, and also shrewd very frequently, appear throughout the First Folio with ow as the diphthong, instead of ew; and in The Taming of the Shrew the word shrew is in various places made to

rhyme with the sound of 0; so that there can be little doubt that its common pronunciation in Shakespeare's day was shrow, and also that the same vowel sound was given to shrewd or shrowd in at least some of its applications. It is the reverse of what appears to have happened in the case of the word which probably was formerly pronounced shew (as it is still often spelled), but now always show. Thus Milton, in his 7th Sonnet:

“How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,

Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,

But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.” In the case, again, of strew, or strow, neither mode either of spelling or of pronunciation can perhaps be said to have quite gone out, although the dictionaries, I believe, enjoin us to write the word with an e, but to give it the sound of an 0. In the passage before us the First Folio has“ a shrew'd contriver."

As it is in words that ill-temper finds the readiest and most frequent vent, the terms curst, and shrew, and shrewd, and shrewish are often used with a special reference to the tongue. But sharpness of tongue, again, always implies some sharpness of understanding as well as of temper. The terms shrewd and shrewdly, accordingly, have come to convey usually something of both of these qualities,-at one time, perhaps, most of the one, at another of the other. The sort of ability that we call shrewdness never suggests the notion of anything very high : the word has always a touch in it of the sarcastic or disparaging. But, on the other hand, the disparagement which it expresses is never without an admission of something