the "sweet stench" of a
flower; but in the later Middle Ages these words came to have their
present meaning of "smelling most disagreeably."

We saw how the taking of the word _fol_ from the French, meaning
"foolish," caused the meaning of several English words which before
had this meaning to be changed. The coming in of foreign words has
been a very common cause for such changes of meaning. The word _fiend_
in English has now a quite different meaning from its original meaning
in English, when it simply meant "enemy," the opposite to "friend."
When the word "enemy" itself was borrowed from the French, the word
_fiend_ came to be less and less often used in this sense. In time
_fiend_ came to be another word for _devil_, the chief enemy of
mankind. But in modern times we do not use the word much in this
sense. It is most often now applied to persons. It sounds rather
milder than calling a person a "devil," but it means exactly the same
thing.

The word _stool_ came to have its present special meaning through the
coming into English from the French of the word _chair_. Before the
Norman Conquest any kind of seat for one person was a "stool," even
sometimes a royal throne. The word _deer_ also had in Old English the
meaning of "beast" in general, but the coming in of the word _beast_
from the French led to its falling into disuse, and by degrees it
became the special name of the chief beast of chase.

Again, the Latin word _spirit_ led to the less frequent use of the
word _ghost_, which was previously the general word for _spirit_. When
spirit came to be generally used, _ghost_ came to have the special
meaning which it has for us now--that of the apparition of a dead
person.

A great many words have changed their meaning even since the time of
Shakespeare through being transferred from the subject of the feeling
they describe to the object, or from the object to the subject. Thus
one example of this is the word _grievous_. We speak now of a
"grievous wrong," or a "grievous sin," or a "grievous mistake," and
all these phrases suggest a certain sorrow in ourselves for the fact
described. But this was not the case in the time of Queen Elizabeth,
when it was decreed that a "sturdy beggar," a man who could work but
begged instead, should be "grievously whipped." In this case
_grievously_ merely meant "severely." On the other hand, the word
_pitiful_, which used to mean "compassionate," is no longer applied to
what we fe