Notes Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 | Page 3

Taylor, Mr. Toup, and several eminent scholars now living, who were brought up in private schools."
But could Parr mean to rank Shrewsbury School among the "private schools?" I am not old enough to recollect what it was in the times of Taylor, J., the civilian, and the editor of Demosthenes. Its celebrity, however, in our own day, and through a long term of preceding years, is confessed. Dr. Parr's judgement in this case might be somewhat influenced by his prepossessions as an Harrovian.
N.
April, 1850.
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PROVINCIAL WORDS.
In _Twelfth Night_, Act ii. Scene 3., occur the words "Sneck up," in C. Knight's edition, or "Snick up," Mr. Collier's edition. These words appear most unaccountably to have puzzled the commentators. Sir Toby Belch uses them in reply to Malvolio, as,--
Enter MALVOLIO.
"_Mal._ My masters, are you mad? or what are you? Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty, but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night? Do you make an alehouse of my lady's house, that you squeak out your cozier's catches without any mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, person, nor time, in you?
"_Sir To._ We did keep time, Sir, in our catches. Sneck up!"
"Sneck up," according to Mr. C. Knight, is explained thus:--
"A passage in Taylor, the Water Poet, would show that this means 'hang yourself.' A verse from his 'Praise of Hempseed' is given in illustration."
"Snick up," according to Mr. Collier, is said to be "a term of contempt," of which the precise meaning seems to have been lost. Various illustrations are given, as see his Note; but all are wide of the meaning.
Turn to Halliwell's _Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words_, 2d edition, and there is this explanation:--
"SNECK, that part of the iron fastening of a door which is raised by moving the latch. To sneck a door, is to latch it."
See also Burn's Poems: _The Vision, Duan First_, 7th verse, which is as follows:--
"When dick! the string the snick did draw,-- And jee! the door gaed to the wa'; An' by my ingle-lowe I saw, Now bliezin' bright, A tight, outlandish Hizzie, braw, Come full in sight."
These quotations will clearly show that "sneck" or "snick" applies to a door; and that to sneck a door is to shut it. I think, therefore, that Sir Toby meant to say in the following reply:--
"We did keep time, Sir, in our catches. Sneck up!"
That is, close up, shut up, or, as is said now, "bung up,"--emphatically, "We kept true time;" and the probability is, that in saying this, Sir Toby would accompany the words with the action of pushing an imaginary door; or sneck up.
In the country parts of Lancashire, and indeed throughout the North of England, and it appears Scotland also, the term "sneck the door" is used indiscriminately with "shut the door" or "toin't dur." And there can be little doubt but that this provincialism was known to Shakspeare, as his works are full of such; many of which have either been passed over by his commentators, or have been wrongly noted, as the one now under consideration.
Shakspeare was essentially a man of the people; his learning was from within, not from colleges or schools, but from the universe and himself. He wrote the language of the people; that is, the common every-day language of his time: and hence mere classical scholars have more than once mistaken him, and most egregiously misinterpreted him, as I propose to show in some future Notes.
R.R.
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FOLK LORE.
_Death-bed Superstition_. (No. 20. p. 315.).--The practice of opening doors and boxes when a person dies, is founded on the idea that the ministers of purgatorial pains took the soul as it escaped from the body, and flattening it against some closed door (which alone would serve the purpose), crammed it into the hinges and hinge openings; thus the soul in torment was likely to be miserably pinched and squeezed by the movement on casual occasion of such door or lid: an open or swinging door frustrated this, and the fiends had to try some other locality. The friends of the departed were at least assured that they were not made the unconscious instruments of torturing the departed in their daily occupations. The superstition prevails in the North as well as in the West of England; and a similar one exists in the South of Spain, where I have seen it practised.
Among the Jews at Gibraltar, at which place I have for many years been a resident, there is also a strange custom when a death occurs in the house; and this consists in pouring away all the water contained in any vessel, the superstition being that the angel of death may have washed his sword therein.
TREBOR.
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May Marriages.--It so happened