ording to its
proper meaning, a prophesying by aid of the dead, or that it rests on
the presumed power of raising up by potent spells the dead, and
compelling them to give answers about things to come. We all know that
it was supposed possible to exercise such power; we have a very awful
example of it in the story of the witch of Endor, and a very horrid one
in Lucan{272}. But the Latin medieval writers, whose Greek was either
little or none, spelt the word, 'nigromantia', as if its first syllables
had been Latin: at the same time, not wholly forgetting the original
meaning, but in fact getting round to it though by a wrong process, they
understood the dead by these 'nigri', or blacks, whom they had brought
into the word{273}. Down to a rather late period we find the forms,
'_negro_mancer' and '_negro_mancy' frequent in English.

{Sidenote: _Words Misspelt_}

'Pleurisy' used often to be spelt, (I do not think it is so now,)
without an 'e' in the first syllable, evidently on the tacit assumption
that it was from _plus pluris_{274}. When Shakespeare falls into an
error, he "makes the offence gracious"; yet, I think, he would scarcely
have written,

"For goodness growing to a _plurisy_
Dies of his own _too much_",

but that _he_ too derived 'plurisy' from _pluris_. This, even with the
"small Latin and less Greek", which Ben Jonson allows him, he scarcely
would have done, had the word presented itself in that form, which by
right of its descent from {Greek: pleura} (being a pain, stitch, or
sickness _in the side_) it ought to have possessed. Those who for
'crucible' wrote 'chrysoble' (Jeremy Taylor does so) must evidently have
done this under the assumption that the Greek for _gold_, and not the
Latin for _cross_, lay at the foundation of this word. 'Anthymn' instead
of 'anthem' (Barrow so spells the word), rests plainly on a wrong
etymology, even as this spelling clearly betrays what that wrong
etymology is. 'Rhyme' with a 'y' is a modern misspelling; and would
never have been but for the undue influence which the Greek 'rhythm' has
exercised upon it. Spenser and his cotemporaries spell it 'rime'.
'Abominable' was by some etymologists of the seventeenth century spelt
'abhominable', as though it were that which departed from the human (ab
homine) into the bestial or devilish.

In all these words which I have adduced last, the correct spelling has
in the end resumed its sway. It is not so with 'frontisp_ie_ce',