eway cloth," and causeway is still pronounced (as it should be)
_karsey_ by the homely people who are not tied to the tail of the dogmatic
dictionary man, whose unnecessary ingenuity (in place of a small knowledge
of "country matters") has in this case set up a phantom phalanx of busy
looms in the harmless little village of Kersey in Suffolk. The Scotch have
the full phrase still. The French _causie_ is nearer to carsie than to
book-made _causeway_.--W.

[65] This etymology of a much-disputed word is doubtless accurate. Thus
Piers Plowman's

"Thoruh ziftes haven _zemen_ to rennen and to ride."

The peculiar "z" stood the Saxon "ge." In fact Geo, old Mother Earth,
stares us in the face. A yeoman is an "earth-man." We may literally say
our modern English sabremen of the shires, at a periodical muster on
caracoling steeds, are "racy of the soil."--W.

[66] Harrison was quick to catch a true idea of the authors he delights
in, and his weakness for displaying his fund of classical lore is
therefore generally a pleasure instead of a bore. The phrase from the
distinguished Roman youth, Aulus Persius Flaccus, occurs in the Prologue
to his poems:

"Heliconidas pallidamque Pirenen
Illis remitto quorum imagines lambunt
Hederae sequaces: ipse _semipaganus_
Ad sacra vatum carmen adfero nostrum;"

which may be thus Englished:

"Those Helicon-births and pallor-breeding Pirenes
Must remit I to them o'er whose countenance traileth
The ivy up-clinging: myself, _half-breed of the soil_,
To the shrine of our prophets my song I deliver."

Almost every annotator of Persius has handled this passage as though the
poet simply prosaically alluded to his being half of _rustic_ birth. As a
fact, he was of the bluest blood of the Augustine age. Harrison makes a
happy hit in understanding the passage as alluding to a semi-connection
with the territory of the Muses, as I have treated it.--W.

[67] Capite censi, or Proletarii.--H.

[68] The Ceylonese. The Greek name for the island of Ceylon was Taprobane,
which Harrison used merely as a classical scholar.--W.

[69] The wise and learned Secretary of State in the dangerous days of
Edward VI., who under Elizabeth had the task of furnishing Burleigh with
brains (thus heaping "coals of fire" on the man who had stolen his place
when Reform was triumphant and danger past), was himself born within a
gunshot of Harrison's Radwinter rectory, at Saffron