imperative _reveillez_, wake up, but in the French army it is called the
_diane_. The _gist_ of a matter is the point in which its importance
really "lies." _Ci-git_, for Old Fr. _ci-gist_, Lat. _jacet_, here lies,
is seen on old tombstones. _Tennis_, says Minsheu, is so called from Fr.
_tenez_, hold, "which word the Frenchmen, the onely tennis-players, use
to speake when they strike the ball." This etymology, for a long time
regarded as a wild guess, has been shewn by recent research to be most
probably correct. The game is of French origin, and it was played by
French knights in Italy a century before we find it alluded to by Gower
(c. 1400). Erasmus tells us that the server called out _accipe_, to
which his opponent replied _mitte_, and as French, and not Latin, was
certainly the language of the earliest tennis-players, we may infer that
the spectators named the game from the foreign word with which each
service began. In French the game is called _paume_, palm of the hand;
cf. _fives_, also a slang name for the hand. The archaic _assoil_--

"And the holy man he _assoil'd_ us, and sadly we sail'd away."
(TENNYSON, _Voyage of Maeldune_, xi. 12.)

is the present subjunctive of the Old Fr. _asoldre_ (_absoudre_), to
absolve, used in the stereotyped phrase _Dieus asoile_, may God absolve.

A linguistic invasion such as that of English by Old French is almost
unparalleled. We have instances of the expulsion of one tongue by
another, _e.g._, of the Celtic dialects of Gaul by Latin and of those of
Britain by Anglo-Saxon. But a real blending of two languages can only
occur when a large section of the population is bilingual for centuries.
This, as we know, was the case in England. The Norman dialect, already
familiar through inevitable intercourse, was transplanted to England in
1066. It developed further on its own lines into Anglo-Norman, and then,
mixed with other French dialects, for not all the invaders were Normans,
and political events brought various French provinces into relation with
England, it produced Anglo-French, a somewhat barbarous tongue which was
the official language till 1362, and with which our legal jargon is
saturated. We find in Anglo-French many words which are unrecorded in
continental Old French, among them one which we like to think of as
essentially English, viz., _duete_, duty, an abstract formed from the
past participle of Fr. _devoir_. This verb has also giv