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Maid, would have put into his mouth. But a 'miscreant' in Shakespeare's time had nothing of the meaning which now it has. It was simply, in agreement with its etymology, a misbeliever, one who did not believe rightly the Articles of the Catholic Faith. And I need not remind you that this was the constant charge which the English brought against Joan,--namely, that she was a dealer in hidden magical arts, a witch, and as such had fallen from the faith. On this plea they burnt her, and it is this which York means when he calls her a 'miscreant', and not what we should intend by the name. In reading of poetry above all what beauties are often missed, what forces lost, through this assumption that the present of a word is always equivalent to its past. How often the poet is wronged in our estimation; that seeming to us now flat and pointless, which at once would lose this character, did we know how to read into some word the emphasis which it once had, but which now has departed from it. For example, Milton ascribes in _Comus_ the "_tinsel-slippered_ feet" to Thetis, the goddess of the sea. How comparatively poor an epithet this 'tinsel-slippered' sounds for those who know of 'tinsel' only in its modern acceptation of mean and tawdry finery, affecting a splendour which it does not really possess. But learn its earlier use by learning its derivation, bring it back to the French 'etincelle', and the Latin 'scintillula'; see in it, as Milton and the writers of his time saw, 'the sparkling', and how exquisitely beautiful a title does this become applied to a goddess of the sea; how vividly does it call up before our mind's eye the quick glitter and sparkle of the waves under the light of sun or moon{200}. It is Homer's 'silver-footed' ({Greek: argyropeza}), not servilely transferred, but reproduced and made his own by the English poet, dealing as one great poet will do with another; who will not disdain to borrow, but to what he borrows will add often a further grace of his own. {Sidenote: '_Influence_'} Or, again, do we keep in mind, or are we even aware, that whenever the word 'influence' occurs in our English poetry, down to comparatively a modern date, there is always more or less remote allusions to invisible illapses of power, skyey, planetary effects, supposed to be exercised by the heavenly luminaries upon the lives of men{201}? How many a passage starts into new life and beauty and fulness of allusion, when this
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