were to be explained by Greek etymologies{257}.

'Tartar' is another word, of which it is at least possible that a
wrongly assumed derivation has modified the spelling, and indeed not
the spelling only, but the very shape in which we now possess it. To
many among us it may be known that the people designated by this
appellation are not properly 'Tartars', but 'Tatars'; and you sometimes
perhaps have noted the omission of the 'r' on the part of those who are
curious in their spelling. How, then, it may be asked, did the form
'Tartar' arise? When the terrible hordes of middle Asia burst in upon
civilized Europe in the thirteenth century, many beheld in the ravages
of their innumerable cavalry a fulfilment of that prophetic word in the
Revelation (chap. ix.) concerning the opening of the bottomless pit; and
from this belief ensued the change of their name from 'Tatars' to
'Tartars', which was thus put into closer relation with 'Tartarus' or
hell, out of which their multitudes were supposed to have proceeded{258}.

Another good example in the same kind is the German word 'suendflut',
the Deluge, which is now so spelt as to signify a 'sinflood', the plague
or _flood_ of waters brought on the world by the _sins_ of mankind; and
probably some of us have before this admired the pregnant significance
of the word. Yet the old High German word had originally no such
intention; it was spelt 'sinfluot', that is, the great flood; and as
late as Luther, indeed in Luther's own translation of the Bible, is so
spelt as to make plain that the notion of a '_sin_-flood' had not yet
found its way into, even as it had not affected the spelling of, the
word{259}.

{Sidenote: '_Currants_'}

But to look now nearer home for our examples. The little raisins brought
from Greece, which play so important a part in one of the national
dishes of England, the Christmas plum-pudding, used to be called
'corinths'; and so you would find them in mercantile lists of a hundred
years ago: either that for the most part they were shipped from Corinth,
the principal commercial city in Greece, or because they grew in large
abundance in the immediate district round about it. Their likeness in
shape and size and general appearance to our own currants, working
together with the ignorance of the great majority of English people
about any such place as Corinth, soon brought the name 'corinths' into
'currants', which now with a certain unfitness they bear; being not