too, when his object was not to confound me, as may be seen
by his own practice in bloc concluding paragraph of his
communication:--"The _newes_ WAS of the victory," &c. The word "means,"
on the other hand, is beyond all dispute plural. What says Shakspeare?

"Yet nature is made letter by no mean
But nature makes that mean."

The plural was formed by the addition of "_s_:" yet from the infrequent
use of the word except in the plural, the singular form has become
obsolete, and the same form applies now to both numbers. Those who would
apply this reasoning to "News," forget that there is the slight
difficulty of the absence of the _noun_ "new" to start from.

I do not feel bound to furnish proof of so obvious a fact, that many of
the most striking similarities in language are mere coincidences. Words
derived from the same root, and retaining the same meaning, frequently
present the most dissimilar appearance, as "eveque" and "bishop;" and
the most distant roots frequently meet in the same word. When your
correspondents, therefore, remind me that there is a French word,
_noise_, I must remind them that it contains not one element of our
English word. Richardson gives the French word, but evidently discards
it, preferring the immediate derivation from "_noy_, that which noies or
annoys." I confess I do not understand his argument; but it was
referring to this that I said that our only known process would make a
plural noun of it. I have an impression that I have met with "annoys"
used by poetical license for "annoyances."

"Noise" has never been used in the sense of the French word in this
country. If derived immediately from the French, it is hardly probable
that it should so entirely have lost every particle of its original
meaning. With us it is either _a loud sound_, or _fame, report, rumour_,
being in this sense rendered in the Latin by the same two words, _fama,
rumor_, as News. The former sense is strictly consequential to the
latter, which I believe to be the original signification, as shown in
its use in the following passages:--

"At the same time it was noised abroad in the realme"

_Holinshed_.

Cleopatra, catching but the least noise of this, dies
instantly.

_Ant. and Cleo._, Act i. Sc. 2.

_Cre_. What was his cause of anger?
_Ser_. The noise goes, this.

_Troil. and Cres._, Act. i. Sc. 2.

Whether I or your correspondents be right, will remain perhaps for ever
doubtful; but the fl