It

known the best to Europeans, and Lokoja, at the confluence of the Niger and Benue, is the first Moslem town. holds the gates to much of the Western Soudan. Men of many shades of color and languages throng its streets, from the white and blue clad merchant of the semi-civilized north to the half-naked heathen trader of the deltaic swamps. Also a great military depot has been established there, and in any future troubles along the frontier the name of Lokoja will be prominent. Indigo is largely grown in the upper portions of Nigeria, and a beautiful native cotton cloth dyed with it is spun which commands a higher price than the Manchester product. Wide tracts are cultivated with high skill and method, and many other industries, including leather-work and metal forging, are practised. There is much rubber in it, and also ivory, though the latter sometimes travels south by a circuitous route to the French Gaboon. Besides others of lesser note, there are Kuka, Kano, Socoto, whose names are known over northern Africa, which, though partly ruinous, still show what they have been, but it may yet be said that few Europeans have much acquaintance with them. One result of a monopoly is, that the holders of it do not encourage their servants to talk freely of the things they have seen. Now, however, when the door may be opened wide to every comer, there will probably be a sudden development of this part of Africa.

The first necessity is the building of light railroads, such as that which is started from Lagos towards the Yoru

The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review.

ba country, for the great obstacle in the way of West African commerce is the lack of transport. Every pound of produce that goes in or out is carried on slaves' heads along foot-wide trails, sometimes ambushed by spear-armed marauders, or, at least, only safely passable on the payment of a heavy toll, or very slowly in dug-out canoes down muddy rivers, with the chance that some of the craft will never come out at all. And it would be interesting, even close down to the coast, to figure exactly how many stockades have been blown up and how much blood of white officer and black soldier is poured out every year in the Niger delta to keep these trade-routes open.

There are sanguine traders who compare the northern Sultanates to a new India, while others predict we shall have both hands full before we break the power and check the depredations of every mutinous Emir, and then be saddled with a profitless burden after all. The former at least can point to what this land has been twice before, and they have tangible grounds to hope that with the building of steamers and railways, the maintenance of order, and equal justice, a still greater British Province may be built up upon the ruins of its fallen power.

Many Englishmen, some with full knowledge, and others with but dim glances into futurity, have died working for this, or have dragged out weary lives in sufferings manifold. What the full result of their toil will be no man as yet can say,-that only the future can show. But part, at least, will ere long be made clearly manifest.

"With his legs horizontalized on his lodging-house sofa." This is almost the first quotation in the new part of Volume V. of the "New English Dictionary." It occurs to us that a great many of our readers who are now horizontalizing their legs on rural and seaside sofas could wish for no more ententaining reading than Dr. Murray's great dictionary affords. We are quite serious. Before now we have shown how easily enjoyment may be sucked from its pages. And although the size and make of the parts in which the dictionary is issued do not precisely recommend it for the shingle, or a nest in the heather, yet if entertainingness is the important quality of holiday reading, then you have it here without stint or doubt. Besides which, the work affords to the resting man the spectacle of an industry so colossal that his sense of idle anchorage and of release from the hurly-burly must be deepened as he runs his eye down these wonderful columns, ranging through abstruse philological inquiry to gay quotation and curious analogy.

We have just used the word hurlyburly. It is one of the words dealt with in the present instalment, and its history is curious enough. In all reasonableness it ought to be nothing more than a sort of "initially-varied reduplication" of the word "hurly," meaning a commotion, an uproar. The odd thing is that "hurly-burly" is found in English literature more than half a century earlier than "hurly." Thus "hurly" first starts up in 1596, in "The Taming of the Shrew." Petruchio says:

A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Edited by Dr. James A. H. Murray. Vol. V.: Horizontality-Hywe. (Clarendon Press. 5s.)

Ay, and amid this hurly I intend That all is done in reverent care of her.

Whereas "hurly-burly" occurs as early as 1539 and 1545. Hall (1548) writes in his Chronicle: "In this time of insurrection and in the rage of horley-borley." As a verb the word is found in a political ballad of 1678:

This hurly-burlies all the town

Makes Smith and Harris prattle.

Lindley Murray admonished his young grammarians to avoid "low expressions, such as topsy-turvy, hurly-burly, and pell-mell," forgetting, perhaps, that Shakespeare had written:

When the hurly-burly's done, When the battle's lost and won,

and not foreseeing that De Quincey, that verbal epicurean, would write six years later: "In the very uttermost hurlyburly of the storm."

In the same column "Hurrah" catches the eye. It is a later substitute for "Huzza." We are told that "hurrah" was the battle-cry of the Prussian soldiers in the War of Liberation (1812-13), from which time it became a cry of exultation, though in practice "hooray" is the word that is shouted. Yet "hurrah" is found in Addison's "Drummer" (1716) as "whurra!" and in "She Stoops to Conquer," some one shouts "Hurrea, hurrea, bravo!" Earlier than this, "hurrah" was used to denote a cry of joy, but the actual exclamation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was "Huzza!" Thus, in Farquhar's "Recruiting Officer:" "Huzza then! huzza for the queen and the honor of Shropshire!" "Huzza!" is thought to have been originally a seaman's

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word. In a London Gazette of 1679 we may read: "At his passing over the Bridge the Castle saluted him with . . . three Hussaws, Seamen like," and various early writers connect the word with the sea. Dr. Murray suggests a connection with "heisau!" "hissa!" which were hauling or hoisting cries. One is only surprised that the sibilant in "Huzza" was tolerated so long. a short-lived allusive sense "huzza” stood for a riotous young fellow and a gallant. Thus Wycherley's Dancing Master says: "We are for the brisk huzzas of seventeen or eighteen." And the party politics of Defoe's time crystallized one of its phases in "huzzamen," men paid to shout "huzza." An entry in a Flying Post of 1715 says: "For scores of huzza-men, £40."

Less jubilant, though not less eager, kinds of shouting are those connected with the word "hue" in hue-and-cry. "Hue" stood alone once. As late as 1779 we read in the Gentleman's Magazine: "As soon as M. Lally appeared, a hue was set up by the whole assembly, hisses, pointing threats and every abusive name." Poor M. Lally! Drayton wrote:

And

Like as a Heard of over-heated Deere With Hues and Hounds recov❜red every where.

Dr. Murray says there is some reason to believe that hue, as distinct from cry, originally meant inarticulate sound, including that of a horn or trumpet, as well as of the voice. This seems to be borne out by Blackstone, who, in his "Commentaries," says: "An hue. . . and cry, hutesium et clamor, is the old common law process of pursuing, with horn and with voice, all felons." And until 1839 the English Police Gazette used the phrase in its sub-title, which still survives in the Police Gazette; or, Hue-and-Cry, published every Tuesday and Friday for Ireland. Dickens often

used the phrase, and every one knows how "six gentlemen upon the road" raised the hue-and-cry against poor Gilpin. In 1734 a critic of the Northern Examiner said he had made "hue-andcry" all over some unlucky author's book, and found not what he sought. Reviewers might note the phrase.

"Humbug" is an instance of a word which sprang no one knows whence, and has survived by its own vitality. It dates from about 1750, when, in a paper of the time, it was noted:

There is a word very much in vogue with the people of taste and fashion, which though it has not even the "penumbra" of a meaning, yet makes up the sum total of the wit, sense, and judgment of the aforesaid people of taste and fashion! . . . I will venture to affirm that this Humbug is neither an English word, nor a derivative from any other language. It is indeed a blackguard sound, made use of by most people of distinction! It is a fine make-weight in conversation, and some great men deceive themselves so egregiously as to think they mean something by it!

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Three years later in the Connoisseur, Earl Orrery wrote: "Single words, indeed, now and then broke forth-such as odious, horrible, detestable, shocking, Humbug. The last new-coined expression, which is only to be found in the nonsensical vocabulary, sounds surd and disagreeable whenever it is pronounced." Evidently the new word hit hard. It was jeered at as belonging only to the pretenders to wit. And for a time the word was used to denote witticism. Killigrew's Universal Jester (1754) contained "a choice collection of . . . bonmots and humbugs." and elsewhere we read of "sprightly humbugs and practical jokes." And in the north, and in Gloucestershire, 24 humbug was a sweetmeat.

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Disraeli wrote in Coningsby: "A gov

ernment of statesmen or of clerks? Of Humbug or of Humdrum?" The words are subtly antithetical, humdrum being always allied to respectability and lack of enterprise. It is doubtful, says Dr. Murray, whether the "drum" has any connection with "hum" except by a very usual reduplicating process. "Humtrum" occurs as early as 1553; but the word begins to be frequent only in the eighteenth century. Its meaning is admirably suggested by Addison in his ninth Spectator: "The Hum-Drum Club. . . was made up of very honest Gentlemen, of peaceable Dispositions, that used to sit together, smoak their Pipes, and say nothing till Mid-night." As a noun, denoting a dull person, the word occurs in Jonson's "Every Man in His Humour," and Mr. Blackmore says in "Perlycross:" "There are none but hum-drums and jog-trots." "Humdrum" seems to have been suggested by the humming and sleeping of a top, and by low buzzing sounds conducive to slumber. The odd thing is that the same associations of rapid, indistinct sound have caused the word "hum" to carry the opposite sense of activity. Mr. Kipling writes in "Many Inventions:" "The whole country was humming with Dacoits," and in America, and now in England, the significance of the word has been so forced up that to "make things hum" is to make them very lively indeed. Thus a new meaning becomes hostile to an older one. To "hum and ha," to hem and stroke one's beard, is to provoke the antagonist who wants to "make things hum." The question arises, did this intensification of the word hum take place in America? As in so many cases the answer is no! It is but a return to an old English sense. For while "hum" kept its associations of sleepiness and hesitation, or, at the most, a suppressed activity, the participle "humming" quite early detached itself for other duty. Thus, "caught in

a humming lie" occurs in Gayton's "Notes" (1654), and a century later Horace Walpole notes that "Humming is a cant word for vast. A person meaning to describe a very large bird, said, 'It was a Humming Bird.'' "Could there be a quainter instance of the quarrels and divergences of words of the same family? Humming, as applied to liquor, meant effervescing and hence strong, intoxicating. “The wine was humming strong," says Sir Harry Wildair. But here the child had been forestalled by the parent. "Hum" meant strong, or double ale, long before Sir Harry Wildair's days. It is so used in Ben Jonson's "The Devil an Ass," and Cotton writes, in 1670: "The best Cheshire hum e'er drank in his life." Hence, "hum-cap," a cant word for old mellow beer and-possibly-humptydumpty in its old meaning of ale boiled with brandy.

A phrase with a curious history is "humble-pie." Why humble pie? Pies are not humble dishes, nor do most people feel humble when they are helped to pie. Eating the leek is quite another matter. We may not all be, like Pistol, "qualmish" at the smell of that wholesome vegetable, but his swallowing it under the blows of Fluellen is a picture which will forever elucidate and consecrate the phrase. The explanation of "humble pie" may still be new to many. "Umbles" are the heart, liver and other inward parts of the deer, and were the huntsman's perquisites. Dr. Brewer says: "When the lord and his household dined, the venison party was served on the daïs, but the humbles were made into a pie for the huntsman and his fellows." It seems reasonable, and Dr. Murray suggests that "humble pie" combines the two notions in a jocular way. According to Peacock, in "Maid Marion," Robin Hood helped the sheriff to "numble pie . . . and other dainties of his table," but our impression has always

been that the sheriff received on his platter the choicest cuts, and was made to eat "humble pie" only when his stomach was rejoiced and full.

It is interesting to find that "hush” as a substantive, meaning silence, was rarely used before this century. Dr. Murray suggests that Byron popularized this poetic use of the word. Thus, in "Childe Harold:"

It is the hush of night, and all between

Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear.

Mellow'd and mingling, yet distinctly

seen,

The Academy.

Miss Amy Finch and her new friend, Mrs. Bagnall, sat in the window making the most of the fading daylight. The matron, personally conducted by the spinster (whose local knowledge was naturally of great value), had just purchased at the annual cheap sale two dozen best pocket-handkerchiefs. was obviously desirable to get them marked at once, and as Amy was justly celebrated for her ornamental letters, and had lately evolved a very prepossessing B, they turned into the spinster's room, and proceeded one to mark, and one to learn.

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holm's one lady of title, who naturally expected some concession to her rank. At sevenpence three-farthings, therefore, with full allowance for the stain on one outside (which might be due to Lady Butson's gloves, or fingers) the hankeys were an unusual bargain. Nor had diplomacy denied Miss Finch a personal satisfaction. Even from the emporium door, whither she had advanced, not angry but surprised, Amy had been entreated back. "Compliments from the Fancies," said Cash, "and three-halfpence sha'n't part you." So she had got the Rhine Violets at her own price, though ready, if need must, to give the three-and-three. She had even dropped an empty envelope that she might return to the counter with self-respect, and yield in an afterthought.

The ladies had suffered some extremity from elbows and baskets, and Amy's back was so bad that at the substantial tea that would honor her friend's departure, she meant to fly to potted