I thought a corruption of our own, till I found it in the Chester Plays.  I am now inclined to suspect it no corruption at all, but only an erratic and obsolete superlative at onest. To progress was flung in our teeth till Mr. Pickering retorted with Shakespeare’s ’doth progress down thy cheeks.’  I confess that I was never satisfied with this answer, because the accent was different, and because the word might here be reckoned a substantive quite as well as a verb.  Mr. Bartlett (in his dictionary above cited) adds a surrebutter in a verse from Ford’s ‘Broken Heart.’  Here the word is clearly a verb, but with the accent unhappily still on the first syllable.  Mr. Bartlett says that he ‘cannot say whether the word was used in Bacon’s time or not.’  It certainly was, and with the accent we give to it.  Ben Jonson, in the ‘Alchemist,’ had this verse,

  ‘Progress so from extreme unto extreme,’

and Sir Philip Sidney,

  ‘Progressing then from fair Turias’ golden place.’

Surely we may now sleep in peace, and our English cousins will forgive us, since we have cleared ourselves from any suspicion of originality in the matter!  Even after I had convinced myself that the chances were desperately against our having invented any of the Americanisms with which we are faulted and which we are in the habit of voicing, there were one or two which had so prevailingly indigenous an accent as to stagger me a little.  One of these was ‘the biggest thing out.’  Alas, even this slender comfort is denied me.  Old Gower has

  ‘So harde an herte was none oute,’

and

  ‘That such merveile was none oute.’

He also, by the way, says ‘a sighte of flowres’ as naturally as our up-country folk would say it. Poor for lean, thirds for dower, and dry for thirsty I find in Middleton’s plays. Dry is also in Skelton and in the ‘World’ (1754).  In a note on Middleton, Mr. Dyce thinks it needful to explain the phrase I can’t tell (universal in America) by the gloss I could not say.  Middleton also uses sneeked, which I had believed an Americanism till I saw it there.  It is, of course, only another form of snatch, analogous to theek and thatch (cf. the proper names Dekker and Thacher), break (brack) and breach, make (still common with us) and match. ’Long on for occasioned by (’who is this ‘long on?’) occurs constantly in Gower and likewise in Middleton. ’Cause why is in Chaucer. Raising (an English version of the French leaven) for yeast is employed by Gayton in his ‘Festivous Notes on Don Quixote.’  I have never seen an instance of our New England word emptins in the same sense, nor can I divine its original.  Gayton has limekill; also shuts for shutters,