and the latter is used by Mrs. Hutchinson in her ‘Life of Colonel Hutchinson.’  Bishop Hall, and Purchas in his ‘Pilgrims,’ have chist for chest, and it is certainly nearer cista, as well as to its form in the Teutonic languages, whence probably we got it.  We retain the old sound from cist, but chest is as old as Chaucer.  Lovelace says wropt for wrapt.  ‘Musicianer’ I had always associated with the militia-musters of my boyhood, and too hastily concluded it an abomination of our own, but Mr. Wright calls it a Norfolk word, and I find it to be as old as 1642 by an extract in Collier.  ‘Not worth the time of day,’ had passed with me for native till I saw it in Shakespeare’s ‘Pericles.’  For slick (which is only a shorter sound of sleek, like crick and the now universal britches for breeches) I will only call Chapman and Jonson.  ‘That’s a sure card!’ and ‘That’s a stinger!’ both sound like modern slang, but you will find the one in the old interlude of ‘Thersytes’ (1537), and the other in Middleton.  ‘Right here,’ a favorite phrase with our orators and with a certain class of our editors, turns up passim in the Chester and Coventry plays.  Mr. Dickens found something very ludicrous in what he considered our neologism right away.  But I find a phrase very like it, and which I would gladly suspect to be a misprint for it, in ’Gammer Gurton:’—­

  ‘Lyght it and bring it tite away.’

But tite is the true word in this case.  After all, what is it but another form of straightway? Cussedness, meaning wickedness, malignity, and cuss, a sneaking, ill-natured fellow, in such phrases as ‘He done it out o’ pure cussedness,’ and ‘He is a nateral cuss,’ have been commonly thought Yankeeisms.  To vent certain contemptuously indignant moods they are admirable in their rough-and-ready way.  But neither is our own. Cursydnesse, in the same sense of malignant wickedness, occurs in the Coventry Plays, and cuss may perhaps claim to have come in with the Conqueror.  At least the term is also French.  Saint Simon uses it and confesses its usefulness.  Speaking of the Abbe Dubois, he says, ’Qui etoit en plein ce qu’un mauvais francois appelle un sacre, mais qui ne se peut guere exprimer autrement.’  ’Not worth a cuss,’ though supported by ‘not worth a damn,’ may be a mere corruption, since ‘not worth a cress’ is in ‘Piers Ploughman.’  ‘I don’t see it,’ was the popular slang a year or two ago, and seemed to spring from the soil; but no, it is in Cibber’s ‘Careless Husband.’ Green sauce for vegetables I meet in Beaumont and Fletcher, Gayton, and elsewhere.  Our rustic pronunciation sahce (for either the diphthong au was anciently pronounced ah, or else we have followed abundant analogy in changing it to the latter sound, as we have in chance, dance,