me way by a whole nation, and not, as _lady_ among
us, by the uncultivated only. It perhaps grew into use in the
half-democratic republics of Italy in the same way and for the same
reasons as with us. But I admit that our abuse of the word is
villainous. I know of an orator who once said in a public meeting where
bonnets preponderated, that 'the ladies were last at the cross and first
at the tomb'! But similar sins were committed before our day and in the
mother country. In the 'Harleian Miscellany' (vol. v. p. 455) I find
'this _lady_ is my servant; the hedger's daughter Ioan.' in the 'State
Trials' I learn of 'a _gentlewoman_ that lives cook with' such a one,
and I hear the Lord High Steward speaking of the wife of a waiter at a
bagnio as a _gentlewoman_! From the same authority, by the way, I can
state that our vile habit of chewing tobacco had the somewhat unsavory
example of Titus Oates, and I know by tradition from an eye-witness that
the elegant General Burgoyne partook of the same vice. Howell, in one of
his letters (dated 26 August, 1623), speaks thus of another
'institution' which many have thought American: 'They speak much of that
boisterous Bishop of Halverstadt (for so they term him here), that,
having taken a place where ther were two Monasteries of Nuns and Friers,
he caus'd divers feather-beds to be rip'd, and all the feathers to be
thrown in a great Hall, whither the Nuns and Friers were thrust naked
with their bodies oil'd and pitch'd, and to tumble among the feathers.'
Howell speaks as if the thing were new to him, and I know not if the
'boisterous' Bishop was the inventor of it, but I find it practised in
England before our Revolution.

Before leaving the subject, I will add a few comments made from time to
time on the margin of Mr. Bartlett's excellent 'Dictionary,' to which I
am glad thus publicly to acknowledge my many obligations. 'Avails' is
good old English, and the _vails_ of Sir Joshua Reynolds's porter are
famous. Averse _from_, averse _to_, and in connection with them the
English vulgarism 'different _to_;' the corrupt use of _to_ in these
cases, as well as in the Yankee 'he lives to Salem,' 'to home,' and
others, must be a very old one, for in the one case it plainly arose
from confounding the two French prepositions _a_, (from Latin _ad_ and
_ab_), and in the other from translating the first of them. I once
thought 'different to' a modern vulgarism, and Mr. Thackeray, on my
pointing it o