printer for the Anglo-Saxon sign for th, which, as many contractions certainly did, may have survived in writing long after it was banished from print, and which would be easily confounded with d.  Can Mr. White find an example of dod for doth, where the word could not be doubtful to the compositor?  The inability of foreigners to pronounce the th was often made a source of fun on the stage.  Puttenham speaks of dousand for thousand as a vulgarism.  Shakspeare himself makes Caius say dat, and “by my trot”; and in Marston’s “Dutch Courtezan,” (Act ii.  Sc. 1,) we find Francischina, (a Dutch woman,) saying, “You have brought mine love, mine honor, mine body, all to noting!”—­to which her interlocutrix answers, “To nothing!” It is plain that Marston did not harden his ths into ts, nor suppose that his audience were in the habit of doing so.  How did Ben Jonson pronounce the word?  He shall answer for himself (Vision of Delight).—­

  “Some that are proper find signify o’thing,
  And some another, and some that are nothing.”

But perhaps he pronounced thing, ting?  If he did, Herrick as surely did not, for he has

  “Maides should say, or virgins sing,
  Herrick keeps, as holds, nothing,”

where the accent divides the word into its original elements, and where it is out of the question that he should lay the emphasis on a bit of broken English.  As to the hs which Mr. White adduces in such names as Anthony and such words as authority, they have no bearing on the question, for those words are not English, and the h in them is perhaps only a trace of that tendency in t to soften itself before certain vowels and before r, as d also does, with a slight sound of theta, especially on the thick tongues of foreigners.  Shakspeare makes Fluellen say athversary; and the Latin t was corrupted first to d and then to dth in Spanish.  The h here has not so much meaning as the h which has crept into Bosporus, for that is only the common change of p to f, corresponding to v for b.  So when Mr. White reads annotanize rather than anatomize, because the Folio has annothanize, we might point him to Minsheu’s “Spanish Dictionary,” where, in the earlier editions, we find anathomia.  In lanthorn, another word adduced by Mr. White, the h is a vulgarism of spelling introduced to give meaning to a foreign word, the termination being supposed to be derived from the material (horn) of which lanterns were formerly made,—­like Bully Ruffian for Bellerophon in our time, and Sir Piers Morgan for Primaguet three centuries ago.  As for t’one and t’other, they should be ’tone and ’tother, being elisions for that one and that other, relics of the Anglo-Saxon declinable definite article, still used in Frisic.