and so many more) may be the older one, and at least gives some hint at its ancestor salsa. Warn, in the sense of notify, is, I believe, now peculiar to us, but Pecock so employs it.  I find primmer (primer, as we pronounce it) in Beaumont and Fletcher, and a ‘square eater’ too (compare our ’square meal’), heft for weight, and ‘muchness’ in the ‘Mirror for Magistrates,’ bankbill in Swift and Fielding, and as for that I might say passim. To cotton to is, I rather think, an Americanism.  The nearest approach to it I have found is cotton together, in Congreve’s ‘Love for Love.’  To cotton or cotten, in another sense, is old and common.  Our word means to cling, and its origin, possibly, is to be sought in another direction, perhaps in A.S. cvead, which means mud, clay (both proverbially clinging), or better yet, in the Icelandic qvoda (otherwise kod), meaning resin and glue, which are [Greek:  kat’ exochaen], sticky substances.  To spit cotton is, I think, American, and also, perhaps, to flax for to beat. To the halves still survives among us, though apparently obsolete in England.  It means either to let or to hire a piece of land, receiving half the profit in money or in kind (partibus locare).  I mention it because in a note by some English editor, to which I have lost my reference, I have seen it wrongly explained.  The editors of Nares cite Burton. To put, in the sense of to go, as Put! for Begone! would seem our own, and yet it is strictly analogous to the French se mettre a la voie, and the Italian mettersi in via.  Indeed, Dante has a verse,

  ‘Io sarei [for mi sarei] gia messo per lo sentiero,’

which, but for the indignity, might be translated,

  ‘I should, ere this, have put along the way,’

I deprecate in advance any share in General Banks’s notions of international law, but we may all take a just pride in his exuberant eloquence as something distinctively American.  When he spoke a few years ago of ‘letting the Union slide,’ even those who, for political purposes, reproached him with the sentiment, admired the indigenous virtue of his phrase.  Yet I find ‘let the world slide’ in Heywood’s Edward IV.;’ and in Beaumont and Fletcher’s ‘Wit without Money,’ Valentine says,

          ’Will you go drink,
  And let the world slide?’

So also in Sidney’s ‘Arcadia,’

  ‘Let his dominion slide.’

In the one case it is put into the mouth of a clown, in the other, of a gentleman, and was evidently proverbial.  It has even higher sanction, for Chaucer writes,

  ‘Well nigh all other cures let he slide.’

Mr. Bartlett gives ‘above one’s bend’ as an Americanism; but compare Hamlet’s ‘to the top of my bent.’ In his tracks for immediately has acquired an American accent, and passes where he can for a native, but is an importation nevertheless; for what is he but the Latin e vestigio, or at best the Norman French eneslespas, both which have the same meaning? Hotfoot (provincial also in England), I find in the old romance of ‘Tristan,’