Middleton
plays upon the word: 'May'st thou have a reasonable good _spring_, for
thou art like to have many dangerous foul _falls_.' Daniel does the
same, and Coleridge uses it as we do. Gray uses the archaism _picked_
for _peaked_, and the word _smudge_ (as our backwoodsmen do) for a
smothered fire. Lord Herbert of Cherbury (more properly perhaps than
even Sidney, the last _preux chevalier_) has 'the Emperor's folks' just
as a Yankee would say it. _Loan_ for _lend_, with which we have hitherto
been blackened, I must retort upon the mother island, for it appears so
long ago as in 'Albion's England.' _Fleshy_, in the sense of _stout_,
may claim Ben Jonson's warrant, and I find it also so lately as in
Francklin's 'Lucian.' _Chore_ is also Jonson's word, and I am inclined
to prefer it to _chare_ and _char_, because I think that I see a more
natural origin for it in the French _jour_--whence it might come to mean
a day's work, and thence a job--than anywhere else.[29] _At onst_ for _at
once_ I thought a corruption of our own, till I found it in the Chester
Plays.
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