’His [Chaucer’s] Englysh well alowed,
  So as it is emprowed
  For as it is employd,
  There is no English voyd.’

Here the meaning is to profit by.  In Fuller’s ‘Holy Warre’ (1647), we have ’The Egyptians standing on the firm ground, were thereby enabled to improve and enforce their darts to the utmost.’  Here the word might certainly mean to make use of.  Mrs. Hutchison (Life of Colonel H.) uses the word in the same way:  ’And therefore did not emproove his interest to engage the country in the quarrel.’  Swift in one of his letters says:  ’There is not an acre of land in Ireland turned to half its advantage; yet it is better improved than the people.’  I find it also in ‘Strength out of Weakness’ (1652), and Plutarch’s ’Morals’(1714), but I know of only one example of its use in the purely American sense, and that is ‘a very good improvement for a mill’ in the ‘State Trials’ (Speech of the Attorney.  General in the Lady Ivy’s case, 1864).  In the sense of employ, I could cite a dozen old English authorities.

In running over the fly-leaves of those delightful folios for this reference, I find a note which reminds me of another word, for our abuse of which we have been deservedly ridiculed.  I mean lady, It is true I might cite the example of the Italian donna[30] (domina), which has been treated in the same way by a whole nation, and not, as lady among us, by the uncultivated only.  It perhaps grew into use in the half-democratic republics of Italy in the same way and for the same reasons as with us.  But I admit that our abuse of the word is villainous.  I know of an orator who once said in a public meeting where bonnets preponderated, that ’the ladies were last at the cross and first at the tomb’!  But similar sins were committed before our day and in the mother country.  In the ‘Harleian Miscellany’ (vol. v. p. 455) I find ‘this lady is my servant; the hedger’s daughter Ioan.’ in the ’State Trials’ I learn of ‘a gentlewoman that lives cook with’ such a one, and I hear the Lord High Steward speaking of the wife of a waiter at a bagnio as a gentlewoman!  From the same authority, by the way, I can state that our vile habit of chewing tobacco had the somewhat unsavory example of Titus Oates, and I know by tradition from an eye-witness that the elegant General Burgoyne partook of the same vice.  Howell, in one of his letters (dated 26 August, 1623), speaks thus of another ‘institution’ which many have thought American:  ’They speak much of that boisterous Bishop of Halverstadt (for so they term him here), that, having taken a place where ther were two Monasteries of Nuns and Friers, he caus’d divers feather-beds to be rip’d, and all the feathers to be thrown in a great Hall, whither the Nuns and Friers were thrust naked with their bodies oil’d and pitch’d, and to tumble among the feathers.’  Howell speaks as if the thing were new to him, and I know not if the ‘boisterous’ Bishop was the inventor of it, but I find it practised in England before our Revolution.