Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 | Page 2

no doubt of the high value and utility of such a work, especially if accompanied by a well-arranged index of names; and I have no doubt MR. PEACOCK, and indeed many others of your valued correspondents, will be induced to {218} assist in the good cause, by sending memoranda of inscriptions to Mr. Dunkin.
L. J.
Plymouth.
The following letter from the REV. E. S. TAYLOR proposes a Society for the purpose:--
I for one shall be happy to co-operate with MR. PEACOCK in this useful work; and I trust that, through the valuable medium of "NOTES AND QUERIES," many will be induced to offer their assistance. Could not a Society be formed for the purpose, so that mutual correspondence might take place?
E. S. TAYLOR.
Martham, Norfolk.
We doubt the necessity, and indeed the advisability, of the formation of any such Society.
MR. PEACOCK (antè., p. 117.) has already wisely suggested, that "in time a copy of every inscription in every church in England might be ready for reference in our National Library," and we have as little doubt that the MS. department of the British Museum is the proper place of deposit for such records, as that the trustees would willingly accept the charge of them on the recommendation of their present able and active Keeper of the Manuscripts. What he, and what the trustees would require, would be some security that the documents were what they professed to be; and this might very properly be accomplished through the agency of such a Society as MR. TAYLOR proposes, if there did not already exist a Society upon whom such a duty might very safely be devolved:--and have we not, in the greater energy which that Society has lately displayed, evidence that it would undertake a duty for which it seems pre-eminently fitted? We allude to the Society of Antiquaries. The anxiety of Lord Mahon, its president, to promote the efficiency of that Society, has recently been made evident in many ways; and we cannot doubt that he would sanction the formation of a sub-committee for the purpose of assisting in collecting and preserving a record of all existing monuments, or that he would find a lack of able men to serve on such a committee, when he numbers among the official or active Fellows of the Society gentlemen so peculiarly fitted to carry out this important national object, as Mr. Hunter, Sir Charles Young, Mr. J. Payne Collier, and Mr. Bruce.
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Notes.
ON THE WORD "RACK" IN SHAKSPEARE'S TEMPEST.
As another illustration of the careless or superficial manner in which the meaning of Shakspeare has been sought, allow me to call attention to the celebrated passage in the Tempest in which the word "rack" occurs. The passage really presents no difficulty; and the meaning of the word, as it appears to me, might as well be settled at once and for ever. I make this assertion, not dogmatically, but with the view of testing the correctness of my opinion, that this is not at all a question of etymology, but entirely one of construction. The passage reads as follows:--
"These, our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabrick of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; And, like this insubstantial pageant, faded, Leave not a rack behind."--Tempest, Act IV. Sc. 1.
As I have expressed my opinion that this is not at all a question of etymology, I shall not say more in reference to this view of the case than that "rack," spelt as in Shakspeare, is a word in popular and every-day use in the phrase "rack and ruin;" that we have it in the term "rack off," as applied to wine, meaning to take from the rack, or, in other words, "to leave a rack" or refuse "behind," racked wine being wine drawn from the lees; and that it is, I believe, still in use in parts of England, meaning remains or refuse, as, in the low German, "der Wraek" means the same thing. Misled, however, by an unusual mode of spelling, and unacquainted with the literature of Shakspeare's age, certain of the commentators suggested the readings of track and trace; whereupon Horne Tooke remarks:--
"The ignorance and presumption of his commentators have shamefully disfigured Shakspeare's text. The first folio, notwithstanding some few palpable misprints, requires none of their alterations. Had they understood English as well as he did, they would not have quarrelled with his language."--Diversions of Purley, p. 595.
He proceeds to show that rack "is merely the past tense, and therefore past participle, [reac] or [rec], of the Anglo-Saxon verb Recan, exhalare, to reek;" and although the advocates of its being a particular description