Maid, would have put
into his mouth. But a 'miscreant' in Shakespeare's time had nothing of
the meaning which now it has. It was simply, in agreement with its
etymology, a misbeliever, one who did not believe rightly the Articles
of the Catholic Faith. And I need not remind you that this was the
constant charge which the English brought against Joan,--namely, that
she was a dealer in hidden magical arts, a witch, and as such had fallen
from the faith. On this plea they burnt her, and it is this which York
means when he calls her a 'miscreant', and not what we should intend by
the name.

In reading of poetry above all what beauties are often missed, what
forces lost, through this assumption that the present of a word is
always equivalent to its past. How often the poet is wronged in our
estimation; that seeming to us now flat and pointless, which at once
would lose this character, did we know how to read into some word the
emphasis which it once had, but which now has departed from it. For
example, Milton ascribes in _Comus_ the "_tinsel-slippered_ feet" to
Thetis, the goddess of the sea. How comparatively poor an epithet this
'tinsel-slippered' sounds for those who know of 'tinsel' only in its
modern acceptation of mean and tawdry finery, affecting a splendour
which it does not really possess. But learn its earlier use by learning
its derivation, bring it back to the French 'etincelle', and the Latin
'scintillula'; see in it, as Milton and the writers of his time saw,
'the sparkling', and how exquisitely beautiful a title does this become
applied to a goddess of the sea; how vividly does it call up before our
mind's eye the quick glitter and sparkle of the waves under the light of
sun or moon{200}. It is Homer's 'silver-footed' ({Greek: argyropeza}),
not servilely transferred, but reproduced and made his own by the
English poet, dealing as one great poet will do with another; who will
not disdain to borrow, but to what he borrows will add often a further
grace of his own.

{Sidenote: '_Influence_'}

Or, again, do we keep in mind, or are we even aware, that whenever the
word 'influence' occurs in our English poetry, down to comparatively a
modern date, there is always more or less remote allusions to invisible
illapses of power, skyey, planetary effects, supposed to be exercised by
the heavenly luminaries upon the lives of men{201}? How many a passage
starts into new life and beauty and fulness of allusion, when this