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Nor are these isolated examples of the contemptuous use which words expressive of goodness gradually acquire. Such meet us on every side. Our 'silly' is the Old-English 'saelig' or blessed. We see it in a transition state in our early poets, with whom 'silly' is an affectionate epithet which sheep obtain for their harmlessness.
Bracing my feet against the cross-beam of my little oaken table, I opposed to the mahogany partition behind me the vigorous dorsal resistance that must have expressed the old-English idea of repose. The sturdy screen refused even to creak, but my poor Yankee joints made up the deficiency.
It was in an old-English looking, red brick mansion, encircled by plantations of thriving firs warmly welcomed by relations whom I had never seen, for the sake of those who had been my long-tried friends surrounded by hearts rejoicing in the blessings of unexpected re-union, and by faces radiant with affection and happiness that I spent my first evening in the "Garden of British America."
Old and new are just enough blended to produce comfort, and the stately, old-English look of the drawing-room, with its dark panelling and tapestry, is a reproach to the pink-and-white, plaster-of-Paris style of too many remodelled houses.
The next year, 1901, the talks were about stories connected with English history, the Old-English, the Normans, the Plantagenet times, King Henry V., the Wars of the Roses, King Henry VII, and King Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots, the Stuarts, and the English Revolution and eighteenth- century England.
A tall and slim figure, not yet shortened from its five feet ten or eleven by the habitual stoop, which ten years later brought him down to less than middle height; a stiff, blue frock-coat; prominent, half-starched wristbands, and tall collars of the Gladstonian type; and the bright blue stock which every one knows for his heraldic bearing: no rings or gewgaws, but a long thin gold chain to his watch: plain old-English gentleman, neither fashionable bourgeois nor artistic mountebank.
The term is sufficiently absurd and misleading as applied in England to the Old-English speech of our forefathers, or to that portion of English history which is included between the fifth and the eleventh centuries. But in America it is frequently used, not indeed by scholars, but by popular writers and speakers, in a still more loose and slovenly way.
With a view to the work of my classes this session, I took old Abraham Woodhead's two black-letter quartos with me to the Engadine last July. And I spent every rainy morning and every tired evening of that memorable holiday month in the society of Santa Teresa and her excellent old-English translator.
A fire burning low in the grate was the sole light of the apartment; its beams flashed mockingly on the somewhat showy Versaillese furniture and gilding here, in style as unlike that of the structural parts of the building as it was possible to be, and probably introduced by Felice to counteract the fine old-English gloom of the place.
He loved our own tongue, and was especially fond of the Old-English songs, and all that he wrote he wrote in English that all his people might understand. His works were chiefly translations from Latin books; what we should have valued most of all, his notebook or handbook, containing his remarks on various matters, is lost.
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